Folk songs

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Buy this for Beethoven’s beguiling arrangements of British folk songs

Grade: B+ Beethoven was proud of his Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello, Piano, pointing out that no one else had attempted such an experiment. He was writing at the height of his youthful powers and the work is stuffed with earworms. Yet I can’t think of any later composers who copied that particular model, and you can’t blame them. This is essentially a concerto for piano trio and full orchestra – not an easy combination, because the soloists keep having to pass the baton to each other while bracing themselves for the next orchestral tutti. Nicola Benedetti, Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Benjamin Grosvenor make a really good job of it; Kanneh-Mason’s

Wednesday

Simon Heffer

Vaughan Williams’s genius is now beyond dispute

Classical music plays hell with people’s posthumous reputations, as any admirer of the works of Ralph Vaughan Williams will tell you. In 1972, on the centenary of his birth, ample respects were shown. Not only were there special concerts of his music but the Post Office, which is now more focused on commemorating gay pride, issued a stamp. Since the composer’s death in 1958 he and his works had gone into an eclipse, not least because of the atonalists who controlled the Third Programme and many of our concert halls. These were people who believed the British music-loving public should be fed on a diet of what Kathleen Ferrier called