folk songs

The awful calamity of Stalin being a music lover

18 January 2025 9:00 am

The dictator obsessed over new recordings and was a frequent visitor to the Bolshoi; but he treated even the greatest musicians arbitrarily, consigning many to the Gulag for no reason

Vaughan Williams’s genius is now beyond dispute

24 September 2022 9:00 am

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s towering position in our national life is now beyond dispute – and can only grow, says Simon Heffer

Letters: No, the Church of England is not planning an evangelical takeover

6 January 2018 9:00 am

A church for all people Sir: I enjoyed reading Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s account of debates in the Church of England…

Béla Bartók recording folk songs with villagers in Hungary, 1907

Bartók would have made history even if he’d never composed a note

6 June 2015 9:00 am

‘All my life, always and in every way, I shall have one objective: the good of Hungary and the Hungarian…

Whistling is a bloody nuisance

29 March 2014 9:00 am

Paul McCartney says he can remember the exact moment he knew the Beatles had made it. Early one morning, getting…