BBC Radio 3 is an interesting station for classical music and so much more. It regularly strays into woke territory – every female composer in the history of classical music has been “underrated”, it need hardly be said – but I’ve enjoyed listening to the Leeds International Piano Competition. On the ground of merit we’d reasonably expect 90%+ of the five finalists to be men, but in this age of female advancement, regardless of merit, we’d reliably expect otherwise.

So I take my hat off to the judges for choosing five young men (22-28) as the finalists. I’ve just had to suffer BBC Radio 3 presenting numerous awards to the semi-finalists, so as to pat the women on their arses – “Most Sensitive Interpreter of Piano Music”, that kind of BS – but finally we got to the competition winner, Alim Beisembayev, 23, from Kazakhstan. He’s totally my favourite Kazakhstani pianist, though he doesn’t yet have an entry on Wikipedia. If Alim were a person of vagina rather than a person of penis, a Wiki page would surely have been up well before the awards were announced.

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