Albums

Grade: B+ ‘Cheltenham Symphonies’, they used to call them – a catch-all term for the kind of large-scale, traditionally inclined postwar works that found a natural home at the Cheltenham Music Festival. But it was also a sneer: a dig at the supposedly parochial nature of British music in the 1960s and 1970s. Over in Europe, the avant-garde was doing whizzy things with Marxism and electronics. British music, went the narrative, was suburban, outdated and drab. Now listen to John McCabe’s Third Symphony of 1978. McCabe’s orchestration is as gorgeous as a bird of paradise; it shimmers like the colours on the surface of a bubble. Not that there’s anything fragile about McCabe’s musical engineering.

Grade: B+ There’s a special art in making something difficult appear effortless, and the string trio is a supreme test. It’s the smallest viable unit for string chamber music: with one each of violin, viola and cello, there’s no fat, no redundancy, and nowhere to hide for composer and performer alike. And yet its greatest masters – Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven (Schoenberg is a special case, as he usually is) – make it sound like a trifle, a recreation. They’re on a tightrope, but they can’t stop dancing.

There comes a point in the career of any established artist when looking backwards seems to be the only possible way to move forwards. Madonna was a great pop star until she wasn’t. Confessions on a Dance Floor, released in 2005, was her last really successful record; ‘Hung Up’, from that album, her last truly unforgettable single. Ever since she has been chasing musical trends with increasingly diminishing returns, the heavy-handed concepts and contrived personae – Madame X, anyone? – no longer supported by anything approaching a properly decent song. Ms Ciccone seems to have belatedly remembered that Madonna is, and always has been, the concept So Confessions II is an act of both commercial and creative necessity. Its reclamation of the past is twofold.

Grade: A It’s spring in Vienna; well, OK, it’s early summer but it’s a grey day when Mozart doesn’t make you feel younger and I reckon this new release from Alim Beisembayev will do just that. In a world of infinite entertainment possibilities, Beisembayev has done the hard bit – the choosing – for you. Here we have two late piano concertos (Mozart wrote them between the ages of 30 and 32, as his own solo career wound down) charged with a grandeur, a playfulness and an endless smiling compassion that will come as a glorious corrective to anyone whose last experience of Mozart involved bodily fluids and confectionery in Sky’s hellish remake of Amadeus.

Grade: A– What, more Martinu? It feels like no time since the Pavel Haas Quartet was persuading us that there might, after all, be more than we’d suspected in the chamber music of this patchy but fascinating Czech composer. Now here’s the chief of the Royal Opera, Jakub Hrusa, with a symphony cycle, and it’s starting to look as if Martinu is having a moment. To older record collectors, there’s still something oddly authoritative about seeing the yellow Deutsche Grammophon cartouche above an earnest conductor photo. Stand up straight: it’s on DG. This is serious. Hrusa is certainly serious; very much the thinking man’s maestro, he’s even published a collection of essays on Martinu.

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 Raphael? I can’t honestly tell.’ Don’t be like Kenneth. Brush up on your 18th-century idioms, and rediscover the qualities that make Mozart and Haydn so great – with regular dips into the also-rans of the classical era.

Would you pay a tenner on the door to see the Cockroaches, the Fireman, Patchwork, the Network and Bingo Hand Job play your local pub? This unpromising line-up becomes a little more appealing (perhaps) upon learning that these are pseudonyms used by, respectively, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Pulp, Green Day and R.E.M. over the years. Pop stars spend the first part of their careers trampling over their grandmothers in the unseemly rush to demand the world take notice of who they are, and the second part whining about being pigeonholed. The only thing harder to escape in the music industry than your name is your original haircut. Hence, the pseudonymous offshoot, offering a degree of separation with very little sense of jeopardy.

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 that Chandos is recording the orchestral music of Edward MacDowell (1860-1908) will bring a pleasant flush of blood to the cheeks. MacDowell, in short, is what American classical music sounded like before there was such a thing as American classical music – before Copland, Gershwin and all that jazz. Romantic, in other words; very, very Romantic.

The only thing misery loves more than company is a backbeat. While capturing pure happiness surely remains the Holy Grail of any artistic endeavour, the blues is the bedrock of popular music for a reason. Sure enough, as we ready for the clocks to go forward, two albums arrive which could hardly be said to be full of the joys of spring, although they approach personal crisis – and catharsis – in very different ways. It’s The Long Goodbye, the sixth album by Scottish indie-rock band the Twilight Sad, is their first in seven years. During that hiatus lead singer and lyricist James Graham was dealing with his mother’s decline and eventual demise from early onset dementia, while also becoming a father.

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 plays to his strengths. So what you get is lyrics as fabulously inane as on ‘Watermelon Sugar’ but very little of the pleasant tunes which accompanied that and his many other hits. There are some interesting rhythmic textures for sure, and a surfeit of old-skool playground synths. There is also a surfeit of repetition, a necessity for the oeuvre and a polite nod towards rap.

Whither the protest song in 2026? In January 1970, John Lennon wrote and recorded ‘Instant Karma!’ in a single day and had it in the shops a little over a week later – no mean feat given the mechanics of physical record production at the time. Nowadays, when the practicalities of releasing music are infinitely more streamlined, it has never been easier for artists to react to current events within moments of them occurring. And with the febrile news churn packing a year’s worth of drama into each week, there is certainly no shortage of material.

There would, on the surface, appear to be little common ground between the wife of stuffy old Malcolm Muggeridge and the latest bard of blue-collar America. Yet the unlikely ascendancy of Zach Bryan brings to mind Kitty Muggeridge’s killer putdown of David Frost as the superstar who ‘rose without a trace’. You may be surprised to learn that Bryan, a 29-year-old US Navy veteran from Oklahoma, will headline two concerts later this year at Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium, as well as perform to 60,000 people each night in Edinburgh and Liverpool. He now ranks alongside Bon Jovi and Bruno Mars as a gold-star draw on the 2026 summer show circuit.

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 peasants, throttling a dwarf and entrancing a very pretty blonde woman who looked well up for it. Status Quo, bizarrely, covered ‘Safety Dance’, but the band had no more hits. Why on earth are they still going? Who gave them the advance for a new album? And is it any good? No, of course not. It’s portentous synth pop-by-numbers, with the kind of execrable lyrics you got back then.

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 has been much praised for the depth and ambition of her compositions – and commercially much rewarded when those compositions, sometimes appended to fairly straightforward EDM, get the kind of downloads you would more usually expect from Ariane Grande. Though I find a good few of the compositions comparatively slight, there is no doubting the melodic invention of the arrangements.

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 friend Prokofiev he reinvented himself as Vernon Duke, Broadway songsmith. ‘Autumn in New York’ and ‘Taking a Chance on Love’ are both by Duke; classic Americana by way of Tsarist Ukraine.  Duke’s Violin Concerto (1943) is recorded here alongside the 1941 concerto by Robert Russell Bennett – better known as the king of Broadway orchestrators; the man who clothed Oklahoma! and My Fair Lady in silken strings.

The French lutenist Charles Fleury, Sieur de Blancrocher, is one of those unfortunate historical figures who are chiefly remembered because of how they died. He was climbing the stairs to his apartment near the Louvre after a court dinner in November 1652 when he slipped, fell head over heels and was dead a few hours later. We don’t know, though people have wondered, whether the wine was to blame. Only one piece of music by him survives, and he would probably be forgotten if he hadn’t been memorialised in several tombeaux – slow memorial dances – by royal composers, one of whom was a young harpsichordist whose genius is only now being fully recognised. Louis Couperin (c.1626-1661) will always be overshadowed by his nephew François (1668-1733).

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 song on the new album from this New York indie-ish folk-rock band is called ‘Incomprehensible’, a title which could easily be appended to a good 60 per cent of the lyrics on an album which, given its heralding as the greatest folk album ever, is something of a let-down. It ain’t quite John Prine, let alone Woody Guthrie. Hell, it’s not even Conor Oberst.