The first Moscow show trial

It is 90 years this month since the Trial of the Sixteen, which commenced Stalin’s Great Purge of veteran Bolshevik rivals, among whom Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev were the most prominent. Confessions were tortured out of the defendants, every one of whom was shot on 24 August 1936. More such show trials would follow. But these grotesque legal processes had their harbinger in a trial held in Moscow in 1930, which saw several leading economists and engineers accused, entirely falsely, of conspiring in a coup d’état. The spectacle – and it was very much a public affair – is documented by the Ukrainian film-maker Sergei Loznitsa in his 2018 work, The Trial, a suitably Kafkaesque title. The pristine footage makes for grim but compelling viewing, the joy unconfined on the faces of the mob especially chilling.

Éric Rohmer the novelist

My love of the films of Éric Rohmer is well documented, but his career as a novelist seemed all but a rumour. No longer, for we now have Aaron Kerner’s translation of his 1946 novel – the only one as far as I am aware –  Élisabeth, published under the pseudonym Gilbert Cordier (Éric Rohmer was itself a pseudonym). Set just as the Second World War was about to begin, it ponders familiar themes of summertime and burgeoning sexuality and, in its acute observations, is unsurprisingly cinematic.

Brahms’ astonishing emotional range

Composed over a 10-year period from 1878, Brahms’ three violin sonatas, long considered peaks of the genre, are a melodious fusion of the Romantic and the Classical. The first of them is simply ravishing, its finale inspired in part by the pitter-patter of rain. The composer held back the third from publication, perhaps because he was troubled by the sheer drama of its emotional range. A new recording of all three by US violinist Mark Kaplan and his son David rises to the challenge of these great works.