Kate Molleson speaks to the Canadian soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan about a new scheme to help support young artists share the stage with the world’s leading soloists, and grant young professional conductors opportunities to lead an orchestra during rehearsals. We also hear another instalment from our ‘Musicians in our time’ series, and are joined this week by guitarist Sean Shibe who shares his reflections about the impact of the pandemic on his life plans, the way he plays, and why he’...
Sep 26, 2020•44 min
Tom Service catches up with viola player Lawrence Power to talk about his filmed series of Lockdown Commissions from major composers, and his imaginatively re-worked West Wycombe Chamber Music Festival in Buckinghamshire. The newly installed Artistic Director of English National Opera, Annilese Miskimmon, revels in the return of live opera with ENO's new drive-in production of La boheme from the car park of Alexandra Palace in North London, and reveals her vision for the company's future. To mar...
Sep 19, 2020•44 min
Radio 3’s flagship magazine programme Music Matters returns this Saturday as Tom Service surveys the developments that have occurred in the musical world during an unprecedented summer period blighted by COVID-19. Discussing the significance of local performance, the role cities play in creating cultural energy, how music is serving audiences in both the community and online, and how freelance musicians might continue to support themselves as government support schemes are wound down, Tom is joi...
Sep 05, 2020•44 min
Kate Molleson hosts an online panel discussion on issues relating to race and equality within the classical music industry with contributions from performers, composers, artistic leaders and programmers. The panel considers past histories and looks to the future through the lenses of education, economics and programming and deliberates on the current impact Covid-19 is having on diversity within the arts. Kate Molleson is joined by Founder, Artistic and Executive Director of the Chineke! Foundat...
Jul 11, 2020•45 min
Tom Service talks to Stephen Johnson about his new book, 'The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910', in which he explores the meaning and context of one of the most gigantic and profound symphonies ever written. Music Matters also hears from three UK music institutions, who reveal the financial and artistic challenges they face as they start to plan for life after lockdown. Tom speaks to internet guru Jaron Lenier, too, who explains why COVID-19 is likely to produce profound changes in the way w...
Jun 27, 2020•44 min
Major players in the classical music world congregate online and take part in a debate hosted by Tom Service. With practitioners from around the globe, this landmark programme examines how the classical music industry can rebuild and sustain itself following the Covid-19 lockdown. With contributions from violinist Nicola Benedetti, founder of the Chineke! Foundation Chi-chi Nwanoku, the managing director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York Peter Gelb, the director of music at the Southbank Cen...
Jun 21, 2020•44 min
As composer Mark-Anthony Turnage turns 60, Kate Molleson talks to him about the influences he received from Oliver Knussen, Gunther Schuller and Hans-Werner Henze. He speaks candidly about continuing to want to compose pieces that challenge, and shares his thoughts about how Covid-19 might change the music scene over the coming years. In light of the recent death of George Floyd at the hands of the police in the USA, Kate reflects on the discourses of solidarity we’ve heard from within the music...
Jun 06, 2020•44 min
As Mental Health Awareness Week draws to a close, Kate Molleson surveys the musical world's responses to mental wellbeing. Opera star Renée Fleming talks about her 'Music and Mind Live' webinar series, which explores the impact of music on human health and the brain. Kate is joined, too, by the author, musician and neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin who will also feature in the webinar series. The composer Nigel Osborne introduces his X-System, which examines how the brain and body respond to musi...
May 23, 2020•45 min
Tom Service talks to pianist Jonathan Biss about how Beethoven can help us all through lockdown isolation, and to lutenist Elizabeth Kenny about the far-sighted Italian Renaissance pioneer, composer, lutenist and theorist Vincenzo Galilei - father of astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei. As we celebrate the 75th anniversary of VE Day, Tom talks to author Adrian Wright about his new book Cheer Up! - British Musical Films, 1929-1945. And, from the Music Matters archive, another chance to hear ...
May 09, 2020•44 min
Tom Service talks to author Oliver Craske about his new biography, which marks the 100th anniversary of one of the 20th century's most influential musicians, Ravi Shankar. Composer, Erkki Sven Tuur turned 60 last year. He speaks to Tom, from his home on an island in the Baltic Sea, about his Ninth Symphony and how his orchestral piece Sow the Wind is especially relevant during these times. We continue to mine the Music Matters archive and there is another chance to hear Angela Hewitt talk about ...
Apr 25, 2020•44 min
For many of us, Easter means organs and churches and the sombre tones of Good Friday moving to the joy of Easter Sunday. But this year, Easter is pretty much cancelled, and churches are shut. So organs around the world are silent - but not on Music Matters: Kate Molleson presents a mini organ fest, with contributions from Glasgow-based organist John Butt, who demonstrates his own home digital organ, and Canadian organist Rachel Mahon, who looks forward to when Coventry Cathedral is again unlocke...
Apr 11, 2020•43 min
Music Matters speaks to Mark Pemberton, Director of the Association of British Orchestras, about the impact of Covid-19 on the financial stability of British orchestras and the livelihoods of the musicians who work for them. And we hear from conductor Jessica Cottis who reflects on the digital responses to the pandemic from across the musical world. Tom Service speaks to the French pianist François-Frédéric Guy about life during lockdown, and his recording project with the Sinfonia Varsovia feat...
Apr 04, 2020•44 min
Kate Molleson hears from the author, musician, and researcher Matt Brennan about his new book, ‘Kick It: A Social History of the Drum Kit’. We speak to the Scottish singer, songwriter, and composer, Karine Polwart, as she shares her ideas about music’s power to communicate in today’s world. As she embarks upon a project to share all thirty-six movements of Bach’s six Cello Suites during the coronavirus outbreak, Music Matters revisits a discussion with the cellist Alisia Weilerstein. And as arti...
Mar 21, 2020•44 min
Sara Mohr-Pietsch talks to Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson, whose new CD juxtaposes the music of French composers Rameau and Debussy, author Christina Guillaumier on her new book The Operas of Sergei Prokofiev, as well as Russian music expert Gerard McBurney, and visits English National Opera in London to chat to cast and director Joe Hill-Gibbins of a new production of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro.
Mar 14, 2020•44 min
Kate Molleson heads down to Covent Garden where rehearsals are under way for a new production of Beethoven's Fidelio at the Royal Opera House. She speaks to conductor Sir Antonio Pappano, director Tobias Kratzer and soprano Amanda Forsythe, who sings Marzelline. Fidelio is sometimes considered a problem opera, with its mix of comic and serious, but Kratzer emphasises the deep themes of political revolution and unjust imprisonment, while for Pappano, Beethoven's score opened a new world for Germa...
Feb 29, 2020•44 min
As he returns to his native Scotland to conduct the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Bruckner’s mighty eighth symphony, Kate speaks to the conductor Donald Runnicles about his relationship with the composer’s music and a lifetime spent making music. Kate visits Xenia Pestova Bennett at Queen Mary University of London to hear about her second album which features a new instrument, the Magnetic Resonator Piano. She tells Kate about her creative responses to the effects that electromagnets can in...
Feb 22, 2020•44 min
Music Matters speaks to the violinist Tasmin Little about her involvement in music education, life as a recording artist, and her plans as she prepares to step down from the concert platform after an illustrious career that has spanned more than three decades. Kate Molleson hears from music journalist Philip Clark as he reflects on the time he spent shadowing the Dave Brubeck Quartet during their British tour as well as the epic interview he recorded with the jazz legend – all the subject of his...
Feb 15, 2020•44 min
Image Credit: Chris Christodoulou Another chance to hear a special interview with Sir Roger Norrington, as he speaks to presenter Tom Service about his distinguished career in music, and in particular his relationship with Beethoven in the composer's 250th anniversary year, including his groundbreaking and seminal recordings of the symphonies with the London Classical Players, and his distinctive and influential approach to historically informed performance practice in music from Monteverdi and ...
Feb 04, 2020•44 min
Tom Service speaks to Carlo Rizzi, Sir Mark Elder, and four leading conductors
Jan 25, 2020•44 min
Violinist Nicola Benedetti leads an international career as a violinist but she is also one of the world’s leading advocates for high quality music education and the transformational effect music can have on all young people. She talks to presenter Sara Mohr-Pietsch about her Foundation and her passion to inspire and enrich the lives of children across the UK. And in Beethoven’s 250th anniversary year, the Belcea Quartet marks a quarter century of its own by performing all of the composer’s stri...
Jan 18, 2020•24 min
This week Kate talks a bracing walk along the sea shore in Blyth, Northumberland, and talks to wildlife sound recordist and composer Chris Watson about his life and work. Starting out as a musician at the centre of the Sheffield electronic revolution, making music with tape recorders with his band Cabaret Voltaire, influenced by the sounds of heavy industry, Chris eventually turned his back on the lure of pop-fame to pursue a career in TV and film, providing the sound tracks for nature programme...
Jan 11, 2020•45 min
As the second decade of this century draws to a close Tom Service talks to the composer Steve Reich at his upstate New York home about emotion in music, his love for J.S. Bach and the creative thought process as he writes a new work for the autumn of 2021. With 2020 and a big birthday for Ludwig van Beethoven around the corner, violinist James Ehnes speaks to Tom about how the music of Beethoven continues to surprise. And as we approach the third decade of the new millennium – our 21st century i...
Dec 14, 2019•44 min
Tom Service talks to director Richard Eyre, whose celebrated production of Verdi's La Traviata for the Royal Opera House has clocked up 25 years. Soprano Angela Gheorghiu was its first Violetta, and Tom catches up with her, and with one of the production's more recent Violetta's, Ermonela Jaho. And starting at the site where La Traviata was first performed, just south of Piccadilly, Professor Susan Rutherford takes Tom on a tour of the streets of London to learn more about the city’s historical ...
Dec 07, 2019•44 min
This week Tom talks to composer Jonathan Dove as he celebrates six decades of composing. He also speaks to Lilian Hochhauser about her career promoting great Russian artists in the UK, including the composer Shostakovich, pianist Sviatoslav Richter and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. The percussionist Claire Edwardes and scholar Michael Hooper also join Tom from Sydney to review the Australian music scene and modernism in the 1960s and 1970s; and pianist Philip Thomas shows Tom an app for composi...
Nov 30, 2019•44 min
Tom Service visits conductor Jaap van Zweden in his office at the Lincoln Center in New York as he begins his second season as Music Director of New York Philharmonic. They talk about the orchestra's commitment to commissioning new music and the work he is doing on orchestral sound. Yuja Wang has been resident at the Barbican in London this week. Tom calls in on her there and learns about her love for Schubert and a new work written especially for her by John Adams. Meanwhile on the Southbank, S...
Nov 23, 2019•44 min
Odaline de la Martinez, Alfred Brendel, and a lost work by Vaughan Williams
Nov 02, 2019•44 min
Tom Service talks to Steve Reich, for many one of the most important composers alive today. He visits Carnegie Hall and St George’s Episcopal Church Rutherford Place where Dvorak played a key role in the development of black American classical music. Then to The New School which opened in 1919 as a centre of intellectual and artistic freedom where John Cage studied and taught experimental composition as well as Judson Church where choreographers, artists, and composers met in a socially engaged ...
Oct 19, 2019•44 min
This week Kate Molleson talks to one of the great mezzo-sopranos, Alice Coote as she prepares for her role as Orpheus in Wayne McGregor’s production of Orpheus and Eurydice by Christoph Gluck at English National Opera this season. As the curtain rises on English National Opera's Orpheus season Kate explores how myth of Orpheus has resonated through time with conductor John Butt, classicist Charlotte Higgins, singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell and Netia Jones, director of Philip Glass’s opera Orphé...
Sep 28, 2019•44 min
In the last programme of season, Tom Service is joined by composer Tansy Davies, theatre and opera director Adele Thomas, and the Chief Executive of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Stephen Maddock to revisit some of the big issues that faced music and culture in the last year. They look at the impact that music has had on the environment, education, healthcare and as a beacon for social inclusion. Soprano, Renée Fleming is a champion for the work being done at the intersection of heal...
Jul 13, 2019•44 min
Tom meets the acclaimed Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto (pictured), ahead of performances in the UK with the Aurora Orchestra, to speak not about violins but conducting. Music Matters marks the definitive folk label Topic Records' 80th birthday, the oldest independent record label in the world, with Eliza and Martin Carthy and Shirley Collins. Breath is vital to music - but are we breathing correctly? Tom speaks to saxophonist Amy Dickson about her 'Take a Breath' project and to flautist Carla ...
Jun 01, 2019•44 min
