Covid has narrowed our outlook so severely that we are hardly aware of the world abroad. Brazil has suffered 19 million cases with more than half a million deaths, isolating the country as never before among the community of nations. Villa-Lobos, Its national composer, feted worldwide from the 1930s to the 1950s, has long since faded. His music always sounds fresh when I return to it after an absence, glistening with the swaying hips of a summer’s night on the Copacabana. The three Villa-Lobos violin sonatas, styled for an international audience are steamed with traces of Brahms, Debussy and Saint-Saens,…

The Czech composer Vitezlava Kapralova died in the early weeks of the German occupation of France, at the age of 25. Two months before, she had married Jiri Mucha, son of the fin-de-siècle poster artist. She had everything to live for and yet embraced agonies of death with great dignity. The mystery and tragedy of her existence has been explored in a couple of novels but her psychology remains an enigma and her music is hard to categorise. At first impression it falls midway between Leos Janacek – who was her father’s teacher – and Bohuslav Martinu, who was her lover; yet…