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ANGUS REID urges us to understand the persecution of Jason Arday from a political and historical perspective, and to see the victim in human terms
Album review: Africa for Piano and Orchestra / Symphony #2 'Nottingham' / Fantasia on Soviet Themes by Alan Bush
NICK MATTHEWS recommends a new recording of works by communist composer Alan Bush
Re-releases of the classics Gypsy Rhumba and Buena Vista Social Club, and a stunning album by Palestinian artist Faris Ishaq
Nothing, says ANDY HEDGECOCK, can rescue this undistinguished amalgam of ponderous melodrama and shallow philosophical speculation
JAMIE BRITTON invites readers to visit 3,500 locals as part of a marathon artistic pub crawl
JOHN GREEN welcomes a valuable and incisive analysis of a world become hyperpolitical but without the mass movement institutions to represent it
Just as Britain’s greatest music festival begins comes this release of the very first recording of a piece of music that was first performed at a Prom in July 1945.
It was composed by Alan Bush, later a victim of the cultural cold war, and that may help explain why Fantasia On Soviet Themes has taken so long to be recorded and released.
Bush, who studied under Frederick Corder at the Royal Academy of Music and in the late 1920s was a student of music and philosophy in Germany, joined the Independent Labour Party in 1925 and the Communist Party in 1935. He’s probably best known today as being a founder member of the Workers’ Music Association in 1936.
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