The profound elegance of Haydn’s piano sonatas

Haydn’s piano sonatas should be better known – and more frequently played than they are – elegant trifles they are not. There are some very good complete surveys of these endlessly satisfying, truly classical works, the best probably being Ronald Brautigam’s, performed on the kind of pianoforte the composer would have been familiar with. But nothing, to my mind, beats the extraordinary live performance given by the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter at the Teatro Bibiena in Mantua, recorded in 1987. The second of a two-volume set issued by Decca in the 1990s, it features the most exquisite playing, powerfully restrained, that one could imagine. The opener, Sonata 40, has one hooked on the profound elegance that is Haydn’s hallmark.

Henry Green’s haunting chronicle of the price of war

The protagonist of Back, Henry Green’s masterly novel of 1946, is Charley Summers, a recently liberated prisoner of war, who has returned to London minus a leg and his lover, Rose. She had married James, frequently cuckolded by Charley, though both meet visiting Rose’s grave, where James and Rose’s son, Ridley, is also present, and looks familiar. Green offers one of the most incisive and earliest portraits of both PTSD and dementia, as Charley is encouraged by Rose’s father, Mr Grant, to meet a young widow, Nance; Charley believes her to be Rose when the couple finally make contact. She is in fact Mr Grant’s illegitimate daughter. And so unfolds a riveting tale of repression, lust, mistaken identity and, finally, a humanely flawed redemption.

The unmistakable voice of Van the Man 

Is there a more Van Morrison song than Tupelo Honey? It manages to be almost completely meaningless – ‘You can’t stop us on the road to freedom, You can’t stop us ’cause our eyes can see, Men with insight, men in granite, Knights in armour intent on chivalry’ – while also profoundly affecting. And never more so than in this astonishing performance from the 1980 Montreux Jazz Festival, in which Saxman ‘Pee Wee’ Ellis – stalwart of James Brown’s finest bands – battles for sublimity with the unmistakeable voice of Van the Man.