The TLS Podcast

"The sociable side of nineteenth-century musical life is not acknowledged as often as it should be..." – Laura Tunbridge discusses the interconnected, complicated and often contradictory myths and realities that link Chopin, Schumann and Brahms; the TLS's music editor Lucy Dallas takes us through a selection of other pieces on music in this week's issue, including new histories of the blues and the poetic pop of Kate Bush and the Pet Shop Boys; when Irving Sandler wrote his seminal history of abstract expressionism, he neglected to mention Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan and Elaine de Kooning – Jenni Quilter joins us to put these artists back in the frame

Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler: Five painters and the movement that changed modern art, by Mary Gabriel 

Fryderyk Chopin: A life and times by Alan Walker 

Schumann: The faces and masks by Judith Chernaik

Brahms in Context, edited by Natasha Loges and Katy Hamilton

(with Liebeslieder Walzer, Opus 52, performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra)

Up Jumped the Devil: The real life of Robert Johnson by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow

The Original Blues: The emergence of the Blues in African American vaudeville, by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff

One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem by Neil Tennant

How To Be Invisible by Kate Bush