Lebrecht, Norman, 1948-

Norman Lebrecht (born 11 July 1948) is a British music journalist best known as the owner of the classical music blog Slipped Disc. His writings have been accused of sensationalism and criticized for their inaccuracies and tendency to gossip, while others have praised them as entertaining. Unlike other writers on music, Lebrecht rarely reviews concerts or recordings, preferring to report on the people and organizations who engage in classical music. He was described by Gilbert Kaplan as "surely the most controversial and arguably the most influential journalist covering classical music". He was a columnist for The Daily Telegraph from 1994 to 2002, and assistant editor of the London Evening Standard from 2002 to 2009. On BBC Radio 3, Lebrecht presented lebrecht.live beginning in 2000, and The Lebrecht Interview from 2006 to 2016 and again from 2024 until 2026, when the BBC announced that it would no longer work with him after the pianist Yuja Wang publicly accused him of misogynistic bullying following an exchange over her withdrawal from a planned interview. He has written columns for the magazines Standpoint and The Critic. In additions to writings on the classical music industry, Lebrecht has written 12 books on music and two novels The Song of Names (2001) and The Game of Opposites: A Novel (2009). The former won a 2002 Whitbread Award and was adapted into a film of the same name directed by François Girard. A work of social history, Genius and Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847–1947, was published in 2019.