Norman Lebrecht's Album of the Week - Sibelius Symphonies
/The Minnesota Orchestra’s partnership with the Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä is a treasure of our times, especially when they play music of the frozen north.
Read MoreBook Review: The Castle of Kings
/A strong-willed young woman and a visionary young man navigate a 16th-century Germany in chaos in order to find their destiny
Read MoreBook Review: Pound for Pound
/An emotionally and physically damaged young woman finds healing by helping some of the most unlucky dogs on Earth in Shannon Kopp's touching new book
Read MoreNorman Lebrecht's Album of the Week - F.X. Mozart & Clementi piano concertos
/They're not great (in fact they're often mild and unoriginal), but the concertos of Muzio Clementi and Mozart's son, Frances Xaver, are nonetheless worth your time.
Read MoreBook Review: Frederick Barbarossa
/The legendary life of the great Frederick Barbarossa is grounded in facts and records in a deeply impressive new biography
Read MoreBook Review: Franz Liszt
/A new single-volume biography captures the oversized life of legendary composer and pianist Franz Liszt
Read MoreNorman Lebrecht's Album of the Week - Polish Violin Concertos
/There used to be a truth, universally acknowledged across the record industry, that you could put out unfamiliar music with a famous artist or popular music with an unheralded performer but never attempt what Donald Rumsfeld might have called the unknown unknowns.
Read MoreBook Review: Legible Religion
/How do you manage to have religion without scripture? As a fascinating new book demonstrates, inn this as in so many other seemingly impossible paradoxes, the ancient Romans found a way.
Read MoreBook Review: Hitler's Compromises
/A brilliant new book explores the alternatives to brute force the Nazi regime often employed to get its way
Read MoreNorman Lebrecht's Album of the Week - Songs without Words
/They may grate in other instances, but period instruments are well suited to Mendelssohn's Songs without Words, as this new recording demonstrates.
Read MoreBook Review: Hitler's Soldiers
/A big new history of the German Army during World War II takes a complex and multifaceted look at the men who fought for the Reich
Read MoreBook Review: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
/A new dual biography of poet and translator accompanies a new illustrated edition of the famous Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Read MoreNorman Lebrecht's Album of the Week - Glazunov and Khachaturian violin concertos
/Tchaikovsky's violin concerto towers over all other Russian efforts in the genre, but these two by Glazunov and Khachaturian deserve a wider audience.
Read MoreBook Review: Russia's Path Toward Enlightenment
/Long before Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, Russian thinkers and writers were haltingly, passionately fashioning their own peculiar brand of Enlightment
Read MoreSummer Reading 2016 - Literary Journeys
/This year in our annual Summer Reading feature, our writers recommend favorite books that take us on journeys - through time, around the world, or just out of ourselves.
Read MoreTwilight Cowboys
/Once upon a time, Westerns were a staple of American fiction. Now they've all but disappeared. Zach Rabiroff asks why cowboys rode off into the sunset.
Read MoreFresh Fellow Travelers
/Coyotes have successfully infiltrated almost every niche of the American landscape and folklore. Justin Hickey tours Coyote America by Dan Flores.
Read MoreAt Play with Clay
/Ever since Mary Shelley wrote her weird masterpiece two centuries ago, it's been impossible to keep a good monster down. In the Shadow of Frankenstein gives readers two dozen pastiches that keep the Creature alive.
Read MoreMemory in One
/a poem
Read MoreSo Much Bastard Beauty
/A lovely rural landscape is seen throught urban-trained eyes in Ada Limon's poetry collection Bright Dead Things. David Nilson reviews.
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