Classical For Everyone

I am being a little deliberately opaque with the title of this episode. There is a certain logic to letting people know what they are going to get. But not today. Because I am hoping that for a good …

‘Unfairly neglected’ is a bit of a cliché and pretty subjective but I do think it could describe a mass of great music that a lot of us (us Anglos at least) are missing out on… music from South Ameri…

The name comes from the night of the week when for some of us, the demon of insomnia hits the hardest… and because my preferred antidote is getting lost in some music. Of course this series is for ev…

I get it that for some people opera is just noise that they are not ever going to enjoy but if there are listeners out there with a bit of curiousity and an inquiring mind… and that is how I would de…

The second of a two episode special. His music uniquely blended Western European compositional techniques with distinctly Russian melodic and harmonic elements, creating a style that was both interna…

The first of a two episode special. His music uniquely blended Western European compositional techniques with distinctly Russian melodic and harmonic elements, creating a style that was both internat…

Why New York? Well, mainly because I love the city… and I’m here. I’m recording this episode in a hotel room on West 56th Street in Manhattan around the corner from Carnegie Hall and up the road from…

I’m going to start with a question. If one thinks of musical instruments as tools… as things humans create to perform tasks… other than the violin, is there any other tool you can think of used in an…

The name comes from the night of the week when for some of us, the demon of insomnia hits the hardest… and because my preferred antidote is getting lost in some music. Of course this series is for ev…

Brian Eno’s 1979 LP ‘Music For Airports’ launched the genre of ‘Ambient Music’… an alternative to the dreadful ‘muzak’ inflicted on humans in most public spaces… music that reduced stress rather than…

Instances where composers have hidden something in their works… sometimes for the sheer ingeniousness of being able to do it… sometimes to send a secret message to someone… sometime to create a puzzl…

Can something of a survey of the music of Italy… including music of the city states, republics and kingdoms that became the nation of Italy in the late nineteenth century… be done in a little over an…

From fairy tale romances to dark psychological dramas, discover how ballet music evolved while maintaining its essential power to match the poetry of human movement with unforgettable musical express…

You could take almost any year of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s life, probably from the age of fifteen onwards and be staggered by both the scale of his output… AND the quality… but his final ye…

There are composers who revel in depictions of the unseen… manifestations of the darker aspects of our imaginations… creatures from realms that four centuries of science just can’t seem to eradicate …

Even if you have listened to a fair bit of classical music I’m quietly confident you will not have heard a note of any of what I am going to play you in this episode… unless you happen to hail from o…

Ludwig van Beethoven arrived in Vienna in late 1792 as a 22-year-old from the town of Bonn to study with Josef Haydn who was at the time undeniably Europe's most celebrated living composer. Beethoven…

This episode starts in Paris in 1909 and ends up in Buenos Aires in 1994… and the music includes a healthy dose of the influence of jazz. If you have a small voice inside saying this is going to be a…

There’s no way around the fact that this entire corner of classical music is generally known by the term ‘chamber music’ but please don’t let that stop you from experiencing some incredible music… ev…

No other filmmaker has used classical music to better effect than the American director Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999). Whilst composers did score some of his films, Kubrick frequently used existing cla…