Josh Radnor’s new comedy-drama traces a blossoming campus romance, and proves that listening to Mozart, Massenet and Vivaldi really does make the world seem a better place. Nick Shave finds plenty to enjoy in this gentle, coming-of-age tale.

One of the most memorable episodes in director Josh Radnor’s feature Liberal Arts takes place when Jesse (played by Radnor), a thirtysomething university admissions director, listens to the classical compilation his romantic admirer, Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen), has sent him. Walking the streets of New York, listening on earphones, he smiles as the people around him seem transformed by the music he hears: Mozart’s ‘Soave sia il vento’ makes every passer-by seem like a ‘viable romantic partner’, Vivaldi turns one into ‘a double agent, knee-deep in some kind of sexy espionage’. Read more

We invited the music writer Paul Morley to report on two of classical music’s biggest awards ceremonies, the Classic BRIT Awards and the Gramophone Awards, held a few days apart in London recently. To our mind, each represented very different attitudes to classical music and we were interested to see what an experienced cultural and musical critic and commentator from outside classical music would make of them. We couldn’t have predicted the overwhelming – and largely supportive - response to Morley’s first review of the Classic Brits. And now here’s his second, from the Gramophone Awards. 

Despite being held at The Dorchester the more professionally sedate and carefully modulated Gramophone Awards seemed set on a barely decorated desert island. The gaudy Classic Brits vessel might steam past without having any idea that anything was happening there, give or take a couple of earnest oddballs trying to make fire by rubbing sticks together. This was the quiet, dignified approach to classical music; a modest, almost mute celebration of the music as something ghostly, intense and moving. It was for those in the know with their own refined tastes and knowledge, with standards miraculously unspoiled by commercial pressure, fickle popular culture or temporary music fads and fashions. Read more

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Handing out or receiving awards, or just hanging out, at the 2012 Classic Brit Awards at the The Royal Albert Hall, was ITV’s idea of a dream team – Aled Jones, Andrea Bocelli, Victoria Pendleton, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Russell Watson, Gareth Malone, Gary Barlow, Joe McEllderry, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and John Suchet. I thought I’d died and lost the remote control. Read more

In the last of his four-part survey of the recently released 82-CD box set, Karajan: the Complete 1960s Orchestral Recordings, Philip Clark turns the spotlight on the great conductor’s musical partnerships.

Why did everyone want to record with Herbert von Karajan? Deutsche Grammophon’s new 82-CD box of Karajan’s complete orchestral recordings from the 1960s includes great concerto performances with Mstislav Rostropovich, Sviatoslav Richter, Christian Ferras, Géza Anda, Christoph Eschenbach, while voices of the century like Christa Ludwig, Walter Berry and Fritz Wunderlich pepper Karajan’s recordings of choral masterworks like Mozart’s Requiem, Haydn’s Creation and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. For all his conductorly ego and alleged standoffishness, clearly Karajan commanded loyalty in the extreme.

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In the second of our four-part guide to the new 82-CD box set Karajan: The Complete 1960s Orchestral Recordings Philip Clark turns his attention to the legendary conductor’s recordings of the great symphonies, and picks his top five. Meanwhile, do enter our competition to win your own box set.

Where would Deutsche Grammophon’s new box set be without the symphony? Words like ‘definitive’ and ‘benchmark’ are never far behind any discussion of Karajan’s view of symphonies by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner et al. The conductor’s innate grasp of the architecture and significance of the Western symphonic tradition – from Haydn to its collapse as an self-renewing form somewhere around the mid-20^th century – was, for many, the closest anyone on the planet has ever come to realising an idealised, why-bother-looking-anywhere-else, vision of these bedrock works.

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Each week, over the next four weeks,
Philip Clark reviews the magnificent new 82-CD box set Karajan: The Complete 1960s Orchestral Recordings and picks his top five recordings from the collection.

When I told a friend that I am writing four listening reports on DG’s new Karajan box set, his eyes clouded over. ‘Don’t do it!’ he cautioned. ‘It’ll only encourage them.’

And there, in anecdotal outline, is the Karajan problem – that 23 years after his death, this towering figure of 20th-century conducting is still worshipped and vilified in equal measure.

Only a fool would dismiss Herbert von Karajan, however. For 35 years he led the – or as the orchestra invariably became known ‘his’ – Berlin Philharmonic in recordings that for many represent the apex of recorded music’s golden era. DG’s new box set includes Karajan’s first complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies and other standout moments such as his 1959 record of Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, his 1964 Tchaikovsky Pathétique, and Haydn’s Creation from 1968.

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