Grade: B ‘Is that Haydn or Mozart? One can’t always be sure,’ remarks Kenneth Clark in the 18th-century episode of Civilisation, and there’s the British intelligentsia’s relationship with music, right there. Imagine saying that about any other art form, and still passing as a connoisseur. ‘Rembrandt or Poussin? Not much in it, really.’ ‘Michelangelo or
Grade: C– Kanye? No, I can’t, quite. I will always quietly overlook the idiotic political sensibilities of the conformist millennial legions who comprise our pop charts – the keffiyeh-clad Hamas wannabes, the BLM halfwits, the greenies, the men-can-be-women wankpuffins – in order to let their music be judged on its own merits, free from boomer
Grade: A– For some record collectors, the fun lies in comparing recordings of standard repertoire. For others, it’s more about exploring – discovering works that are extinct in the concert hall, but which the inscrutable economics of recording make viable. If you’ve a habit of forming modest crushes on wallflowers and unfashionable composers, the news
Grade: B In which the foppish Davy Jones figure from the manufactured band One Direction (Zayn Malik being Peter Tork; One Direction didn’t have a Mike Nesmith) sheds the soft-rock pop-lite that has served him so well and goes with what he fondly believes is challengingly funky EDM, a genre which I do not believe
Grade: A You think you know a musical genre; then a new recording comes along and pulls something unexpected out of the bag. Walter Willson Cobbett (1847-1937) was an improbable culture-hero; a belt tycoon from Blackheath who devoted his spare time (and most of his profits) to domestic music-making, commissioning major British composers of his
Grade: B I remember hearing ‘Neat Neat Neat’, the Damned’s second single, and actually falling off a chair laughing. Is that really the future, I wondered, clutching tight hold of my New Riders of the Purple Sage album. Yes, reader, I’m afraid it was, with the Damned pre-eminent, handmaidens to the whole thing. They made
Grade: A It’s a cliché that the best Spanish music was written by Frenchmen but it’s mostly true nonetheless, and here to prove the point is Domingo Hindoyan and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Debussy’s Iberia and Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole form the balmy, orange-scented heart of this Franco-Spanish album, featuring not a single note by
Grade: D A Montreal band led by a Ukrainian/Canadian called Ivan Doruschuk, with a histrionic baritone, famous solely for having had the most ludicrous hit of that ludicrous decade, the 1980s, with ‘Safety Dance’. Perhaps more famous still was the hilarious video that accompanied the song: Mr Doruschuck in medieval gear cavorting in fields with
Grade: A Welcome to the Andalusian cadence, the minor fall and the major lift, the descent from Am through G and F to E. Welcome also to Rosalia Vila Tobella, who is not Andalusian, but Catalan, but uses that cadence an awful lot, much as Status Quo prefer to stick to C, F, G. She
Grade: B+ The 20th century, eh? What a lark that was. Vladimir Dukelsky studied in Kiev under Glière and looked set to be one of the smarter Russian composers of his generation. He even wrote a ballet for Diaghilev. Then communism happened and Dukelsky ended up in the USA where to the bemusement of his
Grade: A Bohuslav Martinu was a patchy composer; worse, he was also a prolific one, meaning that if you dip into his music at random you never quite know if you’re going to have your day made, or just half an hour wasted. Ideally, you need someone to do the choosing for you, and praise
Grade: B- ‘I feel within myself a constant dialogue between my masculinity, my femininity and the part of me that is neither of those things. I’m just trying to talk about it because I feel like I’m something that is very ambiguous,’ explains lead singer and songwriter Adrianne Lenker. This may explain why the first
Grade: B Here’s a blind-listening game for you: spot the difference between proficiency and genius. Kazuki Yamada and his Monte-Carlo orchestra have recorded three first symphonies by three 19th-century French composers. With a few barnstorming exceptions (I’m looking at you, Berlioz), the French never really got the hang of the romantic symphony. Berlioz recounts with
Grade: C In the 1990s the young Italian pianist Giovanni Bellucci gave us a reading of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata whose thrilling athleticism bore comparison with those of Maurizio Pollini and Charles Rosen. A few years later Bellucci began a complete cycle of the piano sonatas – but, rather than include his existing Hammerklavier, he produced
Grade: B Everyone loves the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Rather fewer people love the sound of an unaccompanied organ, so a cottage industry has developed among conductors and composers, retrofitting Bach for full orchestra. From Elgar and Mahler to showman-maestros like Stokowski and Henry Wood, orchestral Bach transcriptions have tended towards the spectacular, and
Grade: B+ There’s quite a lot to dislike about Wet Leg, even aside from their stupid name. The entirety of their lyrical canon, for starters – vapid and petulant millennial inanities, 50 per cent performative braggadocio, 50 per cent adolescent carping. Or there’s the commodification of their sexualities: they’ve traded up to being bi, just
Grade: A– There’s a classic trajectory for British composers: a five-decade evolution from Angry Young Man to Pillar of the Establishment. Right now, you can watch it happening in real time to Thomas Adès and Mark-Anthony Turnage – inevitably, unwittingly, falling unto the pattern established by Sir Arthur Bliss, who shocked critics in the 1920s
Grade: B+ These are gloomy days, so here’s a burst of melody and colour to cheer you up. Back in the LP era it wasn’t unusual for classical recordings to be put together like a concert that you might actually want to hear: a sequence of works by different but complementary composers, offering the possibility
Grade: A+ The kids with their synths and hip producers, dragging the 1980s back: I wish they would stop. It was, in the main, an awful decade for music, the bands trite yet portentous, the stupid burbling bass guitars, hubris-stricken vocals and tinny drums. The kids retread all the dross. Yet if you were actually
Grade: A It’s clearance-sale time for the great classical labels of the 20th century. As streaming platforms drain the remaining value out of once-prestigious recorded catalogues, even B-listers are being pulled up from the vaults and remastered for one last re-release. Eleven-disc Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos edition? Walter Weller’s complete Decca recordings? Now’s your chance:
