Steven Rajam

The Wanderer (Dion) 9/10
Der Wanderer, D493 (Schubert) 10/10

I am unfeasibly proud of the flooring shop in Pontyclun, run by a man called Lee, called FLOORS-DE-LEE

The County Championship is just THE most magnificent thing. If you don't follow it, I have only pity for you.

(COME ON ARRRRRMPSHIRREEEEEEE 🎊🎉🥳🤩)

Favourite 10 TV comedies, in no particular order.

The Day Today
The Simpsons
This Country
Spaced
Bob's Burgers
Look Around You
The Thick Of It
Peep Show
Gavin and Stacey
Nathan Barley

Correction: four bloody names. I think. Need to relisten.

"Reminds me of all the endless de Selby bollocks in that other book I edited. AND the author had three bloody names"

Kaiser! The Greatest Footballer Never to Play Football - AWARD WINNING, CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED THEATRICAL DOC

You gotta check out the fantastic documentary film KAISER: THE GREATEST FOOTBALLER WHO NEVER TO PLAY FOOTBALL by @louismyles.bsky.social.

louismyles.com/portfolio/ka...

(Louis is a properly brilliant football storyteller. Despite being a Brighton fan 🙃)

Green party leadership race exposes tensions as electoral ambitions grow Frontrunner Zack Polanski has dismissed claims of a ‘hostile takeover’ but contest has been unusually fractious

Green Party co-leader candidate Ellie Chowns, claims it won't be enough to have "isolated Green and Lib Dem MPs" if Jenrick or Farage unites the right.

There are SEVENTY TWO Lib Dem MPs. Four Greens.

(The wider issue is fair but for goodness sake, play nice)

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

For the avoidance of doubt: this is good

Gerhard sounds like Manuel de Falla got drunk listening to Berg and sobered up against a loudspeaker playing Jonathan Harvey

Bamert recording, I'm not an animal

I know this is a VERY cool take but the Roberto Gerhard 3rd Symphony is really quite good isn't it

Jake Bugg is short for Jacopo Bugliardi

"Helluva lotta work building a motte and bailey castle"
"Keep on top of it?"
"That's the standard design, yes"

Accurate diagram of a wasp

The French composer Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) wrote two string quartets, no.14 and no.15, that can be performed individually, or AT THE SAME TIME as an octet 🤯

youtu.be/2b89IdsdEBA?...

Oh good you do FPL do you? That's great fellow football fan let me never speak to you ever again

Concerned Putin and Trump will rip off each other's clothes on the runway and engage in full coitus before the world's horrified media

I see in Bazball Bantz world, England have given the captaincy to a promising haircut

He's been great!

A shy young American singer songwriter called Greg Mendez has just commenced playing the Walled Garden at Green Man. He nervously tells everyone it's his first festival ever and he's nervous.

At least a dozen people in the crowd then shout "COME ON GREG 🎾" to glorious utter bafflement from the lad

The Sixth doesn't get a lot of love because it's such an odd construction but the opening movement is one of the most beautiful and unsettling slow mvts DSCH ever wrote and the finale I find genuinely TERRIFYING in its rictus grin jollity. Much scarier than e.g. the Scherzo of the Tenth...

I said this was going to be niche. What did you expect, Tubin?

Allan Pettersson's 7th Symphony is a brilliant example of listening recency bias: the first half hour is pretty curate's-eggy, the last ten minutes or so are really good, and the last two minutes are REALLY REALLY good.

And you go away thinking: "cor, we should hear more by that Pettersson guy"

Patient, sobbing: But Doctor, I AM Pagliacci!
ChatGPT: Apologies. I didn't realise when recommending Pagliacci's epic show to cure your depression that you were the genius himself. I'm impressed! With regards to your initial question, I can recommend seeing the Great Clown Pagliacci.

There's something slightly off about Haydn's Cello Concerto no.1 in C. It was rediscovered in the 20th century and every time I hear it I'm hella suspicious of a bit of artful forgery

ROSÉ dammit sorry

I like this a lot. You'd get some composers (Reynaldo Hahn?) extremely effective but niche, like Derek Underwood on a turning wicket, or Kuldeep Yadav.

Joe Root bowls like Rameau. Lots of nondescript stuff to hold up an end - but with an uncanny knack of pulling out a blooter when you need it.

The opening of the finale of Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole is one of the most exhilaratingly charming, naughty and genuinely lean-in first 30 secs of anything ever written. Then big Édouard screws it up.

(In this way it's not unlike the Blackpink song APT before Bruno Mars opens his stupid mouth)

The older I get, the more I have the nagging suspicion that there is only one composer who literally ALWAYS nails it, and that composer is Dvorak.

But we don't pay him enough kudos because we like angst and profundity in an artist rather than them just being *ruddy good at everything*