Music Matters

Looks a good programme today:

Tom Service talks to early music virtuoso Jordi Savall, focuses on the Glyndebourne Opera House as they stage Katie Mitchell's dramatic vision of Bach's St Matthew Passion, and explores the dangers of being a practising musician.

Bach St. Matthew Passion
The opera house at Glyndebourne is this summer's backdrop for Katie Mitchell's staging of Bach's St. Matthew Passion. The St. Matthew Passion was composed as a liturgical work 250 years ago, but this production brings a sacred work to a secular setting. Enthralled by Bach's music, the director Katie Mitchell has been inspired to realise the subtle imagery brought to mind when she hears the Passion. Tom went along to rehearsals at Glyndebourne to talk with Katie about her response to the St. Matthew Passion, and to the General Director of Glyndebourne, David Pickard, about why he's programmed the work this season. The tenor Mark Padmore, who sings the role of the Evangelist, and the conductor Richard Egarr explain their involvement and illustrate with music performed specially for the programme.
The St. Matthew Passion is at Glyndebourne 1st July - 26th August.

Jordi Savall
Performing on the soundtrack to Tous Les Matins du Monde for the character played by Gerard Depardieu helped Jordi Savall to define the sensual sound of the viola da gamba internationally. Spanish-born Savall is renowned not only for his solo playing, but also for the group he founded in 1974, Hesperion XX - now Hesperion XXI. Their repertoire incorporates 700 years of music and it is Savall's passion for music as music, rather than pigeon-holed as 'early music' which brings a unique vibrance to their concert performances. At the centre of his musical life is Savall's instrument, the viola da gamba, and he explains to Tom why this is the driving force.
Jordi Savall will be performing at this summer's Edinburgh Festival.

Tension in Performance
Few musical instruments require a natural posture to play, and the stress of performing in public can create all sorts of tensions which can ultimately cripple the performer. These psychological and physical difficulties and treatments for them were the subject of a recent conference in London. ISSTIP, or the International Society for Study of Tension in Performance, brought together a team of eminent medical specialists, musicians, actors, psychologists and complementary medicine therapists to consider a variety of conditions. The director, Carola Grindea, has developed her own holistic technique for rescuing the careers of suffering concert soloists and her deceptively simple methods have the scientific backing of the world's leading microsurgeon, Professor Earl Owen. To find out exactly how the Grindea technique works, Tom becomes the guinea-pig as his pianistic technique is scrutinised in the studio.

Bridgetower
Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata was premiered in Vienna in1803 by the black violinist George Bridgetower with Beethoven at the piano. In fact, Beethoven loved Bridgetower's playing and had promised to dedicate the Sonata to him, until they had a falling out over a woman following a drunken night out after the performance. Bridgetower eventually returned to England and died in obscurity in Peckham in 1860. However, during his lifetime, he had been a celebrated violinist and composer who had been taught by Haydn and had become one of the Prince of Wales' favourite musicians. His story is the subject of a new opera composed by the jazz pianist Julian Joseph. Tom went over to Peckham to visit the area where Bridgetower spent his last years and to ask Julian Joseph and the director of the opera, Helen Eastman, about this violinist's remarkable life.
Bridgetower: A Fable of 1807 - 5th-7th July at The City of London Festival.

I found the item on 'tension in music' not only informative but helpful - I did the one minute of relaxation exercises recommended,as Carola Grindea spoke - and I would recommend these to any performer, musical or otherwise. My thanks to her!

Ditto! But I don't know if the exercises have helped my violin playing. Perhaps I should ask others!

Music Matters 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long). Petroc Trelawny talks to leading American composer John Adams about his new musical memoir Hallelujah Junction, and how he has been blacklisted by US security for the perceived morality of his political stage works. Authors David Huckvale, Peter Dickinson and Adrian Wright review each other's recent books on the composers Lord Berners and William Alwyn and about the British composers who composed music for Hammer horror films. And as a rare Stradivarius cello, expected to fetch over one million pounds, is about to be auctioned online, Petroc investigates the phenomenal prices such instruments command and asks who is buying them.

Saturday 8th November 2008 (starting in 4 hours and 24 minutes). Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Petroc Trelawny is joined by Alexander Waugh to discuss his new book about the Wittgensteins, one of the most talented and eccentric families in European history, dogged by conflicts but held together by a fanatical love of music. He also hears a new Remembrance Sunday commission from Portsmouth Grammar School by Peter Maxwell Davies and Andrew Motion.

Saturday 22nd November 2008. Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long).

Tom Service discusses the collaborative process with actress Fiona Shaw as she makes her directorial debut in the opera world in charge of a new production of Ralph Vaughan Williams's Riders to the Sea. With the latest Streetwise Opera project, My Secret Heart, bringing together the homeless with professional opera through Allegri's Miserere, and an interview with leading young German composer Jorg Widmann. Plus a look back at the history of the London Sinfonietta, reflecting on the progress made in new music since its establishment 40 years ago.

Saturday 20th December 2008
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

In a special edition to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Puccini, Tom Service visits some of the locations in Tuscany that meant so much to the composer, even when he had achieved international stardom. In the company of musicologist Roger Parker, he assesses Puccini's legacy, the reception of his music a century ago and now, his complicated relationships with women and their impact on the operas, and the importance of his works in the Italian opera scene after Verdi.

Saturday 24th January 2009
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service compares two modern dystopian visions of the world about to hit the London stage: Korngold's Die Tote Stadt at the Royal Opera House and John Adams' Dr Atomic at the ENO. He also speaks to Canadian baritone Gerald Finley on singing the title role in Adams' opera. There is also a survey of The Complete Church Cantatas by JS Bach, a cycle devised by the Royal Academy of Music in London. Tom discusses the project's objectives with RAM's principal Jonathan Freeman-Atwood and Bach scholar Berta Joncus. And Michael Church visits Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to report on efforts to preserve traditional music in Central Asia.

Saturday 7th February 2009
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Petroc Trelawny talks to director Jonathan Miller as his eagerly-awaited production of Puccini's La Boheme opens at English National Opera. Voice coach Christina Shewell talks about her new book, The Mystery and Mending of the Voice, in which she offers solutions to help people with problems in their spoken and singing voices.

This week Music Matters focuses on the music of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. Conductor Jane Glover and musicologist Cliff Eisen join Tom Service in the studio to review a major new book on the three composers, discuss a new Beethoven film, and react to interviews with two renowned interpreters of Classical repertoire.

Saturday 18th April 2009 (starting tomorrow afternoon)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Music Matters.

As part of BBC Radio 3's Handel celebrations, Petroc Trelawny is joined by conductor and harpsichordist Christopher Hogwood, classical music critic of the Sunday Times Hugh Canning, and writer and broadcaster Berta Joncus to assess the composer's reputation and significance 250 years after his death. Directors including Nicholas Hytner and David Alden talk about the challenges and joys of putting Handel on the stage, and soprano Rosemary Joshua talks about the importance of authenticity in singing Handel. Petroc also visits the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge to find out what the Handel manuscripts held there can tell us about the composer's working methods and his concept of the integrity of the musical work.

Chopin's Neighbour
Saturday 25th April 2009 (starting tomorrow afternoon)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Piers Lane explores the mysterious life and music of French pianist and composer Charles Valentin Alkan. The Italian composer Busoni considered him to be one of the five greatest writers for the piano since Beethoven. He was a friend and neighbour of Chopin and possessed what Liszt called the 'greatest technique' he had ever heard. Piers asks why, by the end of his life, this Romantic virtuoso was all but forgotten.

Mendelssohn Weekend

Saturday 9th May 2009
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Music Matters - Mendelssohn's Scotland: In the summer of 1829, Mendelssohn visited Scotland on a walking tour with his friend Karl Klingemann. Tom Service follows in his footsteps on a journey that would provide the inspiration for both the Hebrides Overture and the Scottish Symphony. Accompanied by Scottish historian John Purser, he visits the ruins of Holyrood Abbey in Edinburgh, Oban, Fort William and Mull, and sails to Staffa to see for himself Fingal's Cave.

Saturday 6th June 2009
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service examines our attitudes to the music of Haydn and tries to get to the bottom of why he isn't as popular as Mozart or Beethoven. With the help of some of the leading Haydn aficionados - pianists Alfred Brendel and Robert Levin, leader of the Lindsays Peter Cropper, and pianist and musicologist Charles Rosen - Tom finds out just how Haydn did it, why it is we think of him as 'witty', and what sort of a man really lay behind that intricately constructed, sometimes humorous and always profound music.

Saturday 13th June 2009
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service talks to conductor Colin Davis - as he celebrates 50 years with the London Symphony Orchestra - about the place of orchestral music in the 21st century. At the Royal Opera House, conductor Antonio Pappano and director Christof Loy discuss their new production of Berg's Lulu, an epic tale of moral and social decline. Tom also debates the wider links between music and morality with an expert panel - musicologist John Deathridge, composer Deirdre Gribbin and philosopher Roger Scruton. And record producer-turned-neuroscientist Daniel Levitin talks about his new book The World in Six Songs and the fundamental role music has played in the history of humankind.

Saturday 20th June 2009
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service talks to tenor John Potter about his new book on the history of the tenor voice, from its emergence in the 16th century to the phenomenon of the Three Tenors and beyond. With contributions from fellow tenors Ian Bostridge and Robert Tear. Plus the latest research on the politcal life of Leonard Bernstein against the backdrop of the Cold War, and baritone Thomas Hampson discussing his Song of America project.

Saturday 11th July 2009 (starting tomorrow afternoon)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Petroc Trelawny presents the music magazine, featuring two new books plus the bicentenary of Louis Braille, inventor of the notation system for blind people. In his book on French piano music, pianist and writer Roy Howat focuses on Debussy, Ravel and Faure but also makes a case for the music of Chabrier. Neville Cardus - the first music critic to be knighted and also a formidable writer on cricket - is the subject of a new book by his friend and fellow Lancastrian Robin Daniels. Music critic and writer Michael Kennedy and cricket writer Michael Henderson discuss the Cardus legacy. And 200 years after the birth of Louis Braille, Petroc Trelawny finds out how his raised-dot system is applied to music notation, travelling to Peterborough to visit the largest Braille production facility in Europe.

Saturday 18th July 2009 (starting tomorrow afternoon)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Lowri Blake examines Debussy's work during the summer of 1912, talking to pianists Roy Howat, Peter Hill and Alasdair Beatson as well as musicologist Robert Orledge, and introducing music from that time. It was a very hot summer and Debussy had no time to take his wife and seven-year-old daughter Chouchou on their annual trip to the seaside, much to her displeasure. He had to juggle his time in order to fulfil a Diaghilev commission and compose his last completed orchestral work, the ballet Jeux. He was also trying to finish the second book of the Preludes for piano and was tussling with the dancer Maud Allen, who wanted changes to the ballet Khamma. In addition, he was visited by Igor Stravinsky, during whose stay the two played the score of The Rite of Spring as a piano duet.

Saturday 26th September 2009
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Ivan Hewett explores the enigma of the late conductor Carlos Kleiber. Despite huge demand and praise for his work, he gave few perfomances and never granted an interview. Ivan talks to some of the few who knew Kleiber and attempts to explain his mercurial genius. Why did he give so few performances? Why his insecurities? Did he really only make records 'when the freezer ran out of food'? And what about Kleiber the man - his life, his friends, his loves, his obsessions?

Saturday 10th October 2009
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service travels to Scotland's Orkney Islands to visit composer Peter Maxwell Davies. Born in Salford in 1934, Maxwell Davies has been a figurehead of British classical music since the 1950s. After spells studying and working in the United States and Australia, he moved to the Orkney island of Hoy in 1971, and much of his music since has been infused with Scottish influence. Spending time together on the island of Sanday, where Maxwell Davies has lived for the best part of a decade, he and Tom talk about the importance of his local community, the influence of Scotland and the Orkney landscape on his work, his passion for education and thoughts on politics and the monarchy.

Saturday 14th November 2009
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service talks to composer Richard Rodney Bennett. In a candid interview, he talks about his childhood love of the Great American Songbook, his experience in Paris as Boulez's first pupil and early career as a serialist composer, as well as his movement towards an accessible musical language drawing on his lifelong passion for harmony and song. Ahead of a residency at London's Southbank Centre, Tom meets violinist Leonidas Kavakos. He talks about his concept of 'Source' - the inspiration which lies at the heart of all great music based on folk music, the music of Bach, spirituality and silence.

Saturday 21st November 2009
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Purcell Weekend.

As part of BBC Radio 3's weekend of celebrations of the 350th anniversary of Henry Purcell's birth, Tom Service explores the composer's influence on British musical life from the 20th century to today. Featuring archive material and specially recorded interviews.

Saturday 9th January 2010
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service and his guests discuss a new biography of Tchaikovsky; he also talks to composer George Benjamin, who celebrates his fiftieth birthday in 2010. Pianist Graham Johnson comes into the studio to talk about what makes Faure songs unique.

Saturday 6th February 2010
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Petroc Trelawny explores the world of Prokofiev's The Gambler. Based on Dostoevsky's The Gambler novel about the loss of hope through the addictive power of gambling, the work is now receiving its first staging at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Petroc talks to director Richard Jones and conductor Antonio Pappano. Petroc also looks at a new biography of Sibelius by Glenda Dawn Goss, who has lived and taught in Helsinki for 12 years and now hopes to place the iconic Finnish composer in a new cultural light.

Saturday 13th March 2010 (starting tomorrow afternoon)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Radio 3's flagship classical music programme.

Not one, but two of the world’s greatest pianists on this week’s programme: Maurizio Pollini and Krystian Zimerman on Chopin. It’s a unique privilege of making this show that we have the chance to meet musicians like Zimerman and Pollini, even more so when they’re both so keen to talk so honestly and revealingly about a composer who’s close to both their hearts.

The strength of their different relationships with Chopin starts in the same place – they both won the Warsaw Chopin Competition when they were still teenagers, Pollini 50 years ago in 1960, Zimerman in 1975. Even then, as you can still hear on the recordings they made at that stage of their careers, they had both forged an approach to Chopin that was brilliantly individual – as well as technically and musically astonishing. In our interviews, I find out how their different journeys with Chopin have changed and deepened over the years, and how his music has changed their lives.

For Pollini, it’s a question of ‘revindicating’ – his word, and a neologism I like! – Chopin as a great composer. Instead of imagining Fryderyk as the guy who just (just!) opened up either a world of pianistic virtuosity or simpering melody, Pollini is keen to stress the structural genius of what Chopin is doing, whether on the largest scale of his sonatas, or the smallest of the single page of a prelude. Pollini compares the E minor Prelude to Berg, as you’ll hear. But he doesn’t want to lose sight of the emotional core of the music, its inner life. Pollini’s playing is criticised by some as cold or unemotional, precisely because of its architectural strength. I’ve never understood that, personally, because I hear in all of his Chopin, whether the legendary recordings of the 70s or the discs he’s made in the last few years, a total intensity and commitment that’s completely compelling – and unfailingly idiomatic.

But no-one makes the piano sound like Krystian Zimerman does in Chopin, on the few recordings that this most fastidious of all pianists has allowed to be released. He even formed his own orchestra to play just two pieces, Chopin’s piano concertos, a project that really did ‘revindicate’ those works as among Chopin’s greatest achievements, not the badly orchestrated showpieces they’re sometimes thought of. But Zimerman’s relationship with Chopin is as rich as it is complex: Chopin was forced to live in exile, but Zimerman has chosen to live away from his Polish homeland. He tells me that the question of Chopin’s Polishness never used to engage him – until, like Fryderyk, he began to feel more Polish himself, the longer he lived away from his home country, in Switzerland, America, or Japan. He also talks about the pieces that are, for him, Chopin at his greatest: the 2 nd and 3 rd Sonatas, works he’s been trying to record since 1976, but which have never got to the stage of su!
rpassing studio perfection he’s looking for. But he’s playing the sonatas on a Chopin world tour at the moment – and he talks movingly about how this music is so powerful that it turns its performers and its listeners into victims of its mysterious force.

And to put Zimerman and Pollini in context, pianist and scholar Kenneth Hamilton explains and shows me how traditions of playing Chopin have changed over the last century and a half – listen out for his brilliant pianistic impressions of Paderewski and Pachmann. And I encounter Chopin’s hand in the foyer of the British library. Yes, you did read that right… All of it, as ever, tomorrow at 12.15: Chopin revealed.

Saturday 20th March 2010 (starting tomorrow afternoon)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service marks the centenary of the birth of American composer Samuel Barber and visits the Emerson String Quartet in rehearsal, talking to them about their passion for Czech music. Tom also speaks to the author of a new book which celebrates the collaborative genius in the creation of West Side Story.

A real, genuine, copper-bottomed world exclusive on this week’s show – the first-ever public broadcast of a discussion between four giants of 20th century American culture, the creators of West Side Story: lyricist Stephen Sondheim, creator of the book, Arthur Laurents, director and choreographer Jerome Robbins, and or course, composer Leonard Bernstein. It’s thrilling stuff, hearing how they made the 20th century’s greatest musical (in my humble opinion) – as you’ll hear! And I talk to Nigel Simeone, whose new book on West Side Story is all about the genius of the collaboration between all four of these huge personalities, and how their egos were temporarily laid to one side, to create a show that has now had more than 40 000 productions in the 53 years since its premiere.

And another collaboration between four great American musicians: the Emerson Quartet in rehearsal and discussion at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. This is a rare chance to hear how they put a performance together, of the Czech repertoire they’ve had such success with recently, winning their 9 th Grammy award for a disc of Janacek’s string quartets. Talking to me on stage, they reveal how their internal dynamic drives their performances and their recordings, and how they’ve managed to outlast many marriages, with 32 years together in their current line-up.

And another quartet of American composers (noticing a theme here?... to revert to Sesame Street for a second the numbers ‘4’ and letters ‘US’ are big this week!) on one of their great colleagues, Samuel Barber, who would have been 100 this month. We’ve trawled the archives for some fascinating footage of Virgil Thomson, John Adams, Aaron Copland, and Gian Carlo Menotti, Barber’s partner, librettist, and fellow composer. And I talk to Jennifer Higdon, one of the most successful composers in the States today who now teaches at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, Barber’s alma mater, on the composer who inspired her to compose with her own voice.

All that, and Geoff Smith’s fluid piano, an acoustic piano with a difference: you can change the pitch of each note as you’re playing, meaning the piano is no longer restricted to the equal temperament of the Western scale.

Music Matters
Saturday 3rd April 2010 at 12.15pm on BBC Radio 3

Stephen Kovacevich is a musical risk-taker. His concerts and his recordings bear witness to his no-holds barred approach to the music he loves to play: Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert. But a couple of years ago, it seemed that he would have to curtail his career – a mild stroke affected his hands, and meant that a piece that would have taken him a day to learn now took a few months. In his 70th birthday year, Stephen tells how he managed his return to the concert platform, and about his musical heroes, including the pianist and composer he admires more than any other – Rachmaninov.

If you know the music of Gesualdo at all, you probably know some lurid facts about his life too: that he murdered his first wife and her lover, that he enjoyed bouts of self-flagellation, and that he transmuted his guilt, pain, and shame into some of the most tortuously, exquisitely chromatic music ever written. Glenn Watkin’s new book – with one of the best titles of any book about music, ‘The Gesualdo Hex’ puts both Gesualdo’s life and music into the context of his own time, and lifts the lid on yet more extraordinary facts about his life. Two of his lovers were tried for witchcraft, after trying to poison the composer with emulsions of their effluvia, and Watkins describes Gesualdo as probably bi-polar. But he also reveals that the murder of his wife would have been expected for any self-respecting Italian aristocrat of the late 16 th century. And he shows how his music has catalysed composers in the 20 th century, from Schoenberg and Stravinsky to Boulez and Brett Dean.

All that, and two stories from closer to home: the new organ at Llandaff Cathedral in South Wales – unveiled in public for the first time over Easter – is the biggest cathedral instrument to be built in this country for nearly 50 years. Seeing this new addition to instrumental royalty – the organ is the king of instruments, after all – is impressive enough, but hearing it is something else. From the celestial rumbling of its lowest notes to its sensuous high-register stops is an experience not to forget. And there is news of a report into how a new-found sense of Englishness is expressed by today’s folk musicians: what does it mean to play English music in today’s multi-cultural world? Eliza Carthy, one of the figureheads of today’s folk music scene, talks about her experience of performing an English identity through her music.

Music Matters
Saturday 10th April 2010 at 12.15pm on BBC Radio 3

Tomorrow, Secretary of State for Culture, Ben Bradshaw, his Liberal Democrat counterpart, Don Foster, and Conservative Arts Minister, Ed Vaizey will face their sternest test of the election so far, when their policies, their records, and their visions will by tested by you!

Tomorrow’s live phone-in gives you the chance to grill them all on their ideas for culture in general and music in particular in the next Parliament. We all know that money is going to be tight, and we all know too that historically, arts funding has been a soft target for successive governments. The Tories want more philanthropy, tax breaks for individuals who want to give to arts organisations, they want less bureaucracy at the Arts Council of England – but they also say they can increase arts and music spending over the next few years. A simple question, then, for Ed Vaizey – how are you going to do it?

The other big question for Ed is what happens to music education, should the Tories win on May 6 th. That’s one area where Ben Bradshaw and Labour can really point to sustained investment in recent years. The figures look massive on paper: £332 million for music education, including schemes for classroom singing, for every primary school child to have the chance to learn an instrument for a year, and innovative pilot projects looking at how music can bring about social change, like the El Sistema-modelled In Harmony schemes. But how universal is musical opportunity across the country, from schools to concert halls? Have Labour fostered a culture of instrumentalised anti-‘elitism’, where education and outreach projects have become more important to orchestras or opera houses than the quality of the work they’re paid to present? And despite their investment, what happens after 2011, should they win, when that £332 million is all spent?

Don Foster’s vision is just as ambitious as the other parties’. He promises the Lib Dems would keep funding at the same levels it is now, and find additional money by restructuring the Lottery. Fine in principle, but what would it mean on the ground for our schools, our concert halls? If we get into hung parliament territory, cultural policy probably plays second fiddle to electoral reform, but how would Don argue for culture in a new parliament, and a new political situation?

Well, those are some issues and some questions. But they’re just a start, and what tomorrow is all about is hearing from you. It’s your chance to put the frustrations, or the delights, you feel as a singer, an instrumentalist, a pupil, a parent, a teacher, an administrator, an amateur, an orchestral professional, about where music is in Britain today, and where it should be in the future. And who knows, if our politicians are serious about listening to what the electorate have to say, you might even change their minds, change their policies, and change the country, Don’t let them get away with anything tomorrow! E-mail us at musicmatters@bbc.co.uk, or call us from 9.30 tomorrow morning on 0370 909 33 33. Look forward to talking to you on air tomorrow!

Early music, cutting edge musical radicalism, and British pianos on Music Matters this week.

Ton Koopman: harpsichordist, organist and conductor has been a key player in the early music movement since he launched his first period ensemble in 1969. Then he and his players had long beards, performed in jeans, and tried not to absorb too much of the hashish perfuming their concerts. In our interview Koopman reflects on the moment that early music became mainstream, with players dressing in tails; he addresses how the ‘alternative’ attitude of Dutch music lovers shaped a movement, and considers the influence his jazz musician father had on his own music making.

Edgar Varèse was a maverick in a different way. Taught by D’Indy and Widor, and admired by Strauss, he finally found his musical voice when he left Europe for America. He wanted to create a new musical language, utilising tape and electronics. But he became frustrated and depressed as his thinking sped ahead of available technology. Intensely critical, he destroyed many of his works, and left little more than a dozen completed pieces. His complete works feature in a festival, Var èse 360, in London this weekend. I’ve been talking with Varese disciple and student Chou Wen-Chung and composer Jonathan Harvey, who had a seminal teenage encounter with Varèse’s music. Plus archive of John Cage, and Varese himself.

Steinway dominates the piano world, few artists use any other instrument. But it wasn’t always thus. This article concerns the rise and fall of five British manufacturers. The piano makers were centred around North London, where in Edwardian times as many as 300 companies were involved in the trade. Names like Challen, Danemann, and Brinsmead, which now only live on as a memory. So why has such a venerable British industry almost completely disappeared? There was a time when Challen supplied all the BBC’s pianos, and Danemann built instruments for the Royal Festival Hall, what went wrong?

Plus Norman Lebrecht on why a cello concerto by a leading Armenian composer is about to prompt a collision between high art and politics.

Saturday 24th April 2010 (starting in 4 hours and 51 minutes)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Susan Rutherford uncovers some of the stories from the rich history of provincial opera - where large audiences from all classes flocked to see whatever visiting opera company was performing. Susan discusses the Carl Rosa Company, perhaps the most tenacious presence on the provincial opera scene during the 19th century and beyond, and which travelled around the country on its own steam train. She explores the repertoire which, in spite of limited resources, was glorious - and was based around Verdi, Wagner, Puccini - including La boheme, which like many other works had its first UK performance outside London. Carmen was so popular that special companies were established, which toured for months at a time with only that piece. Martin Pickard, head of music at Opera North, gives the contemporary perspective on an era when English language performance was all the rage, competitions were arranged to encourage British composers and seeds were sown which would flower into ENO and the provincial touring opera companies of today. Susan also reveals the story of Maria Malibran - the most famous opera star of her day - who had agreed to appear at the Manchester Festival in 1836, but suddently died, leaving nobody to take charge of the arrangements.

Saturday 29th May 2010 (starting tomorrow afternoon)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

As part of a Radio 3 Schumann season, marking 200 years since his birth, pianist Lucy Parham discovers how literature inspired the composer to write some of his celebrated piano cycles - Papillons, Carnaval, Fantasiestucke and Kreisleriana. Schumann turned to the novels of Jean Paul and ETA Hoffmann to access a fantasy world of dual personalities, the ordinary becoming extraordinary, and humour and irony. Lucy visits the Robert Schumann museum in Zwickau - his birthplace - exploring his immaculately preserved book collection and playing his music on a piano once played by his wife, Clara. There are also insights into German literature from academics Riccarda Schmidt and Erika Reiman, as well as writer Laura Tonbridge. With Schumann's own words and passages from the books he turned to for inspiration read by actor and music enthusiast Henry Goodman.

On Saturday at 12.15pm Tom Service asks the big questions in Music Matters. Does opera reach the parts that no other art form can? Is opera relevant in today's world or just a museum art form? You can take part by emailing musicmatters@bbc.co.uk. Later the same day, you have the chance to appreciate a stunning production from the Royal Opera House: Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at 6.00pm. Sophie Koch plays the role of Octavian, Soile Isokoski, the Marschallin, and Lucy Crowe, Sophie, in this performance conducted by Kirill Petrenko.

Saturday 5th June 2010
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

As part of the BBC opera season, Tom Service is joined by experts and listeners to explore whether opera still matters today and discuss what it contributes to society. Is it possible to live without the drama and the passion that opera brings or does opera reach the parts that no other art form can? Is opera relevant in today's world or is it just a museum art form with nothing new to say anymore? Tom is joined by, among others, John Fisher, chief executive and artistic director of Welsh National Opera and Nicholas Payne, director of Opera Europa, the association for professional opera houses and festivals, as well as director Penny Woolcock and tenor John Mark Ainsley. Plus Joyce DiDonato, Stephen Fry and AC Grayling on what opera means to them, and also a chance to hear from other people behind the scenes arguing the case for opera - or otherwise.

"Hot out of the studio and I can exclusively reveal that between us, John Fisher (Chief Executive of Welsh National Opera), John Mark Ainsley (doyen of British tenors), Penny Woolcock (director of English National Opera’s The Pearl Fishers, which opened earlier this week), and Nicholas Payne (director of Opera Europa), and I (PhD, presenter, director of - well, nothing, actually) have both summed up opera in Britain today and solved all of its problems. Our contribution to Opera on the BBC is thus rendered still more unmissable than it was - as you’ll find out at 12.15 tomorrow.

Alright, so that might be overselling our collective achievements in just 45 minutes of radio, but it does a fair job in representing the combined brilliance of our panel, the breadth of the questions we cover (a few of them from you, dear listeners - thank you!) and the solutions the panel give. As you’ll hear, there’s a lot of love around for opera as an art-form at the moment, but it’s important to remember that doesn’t go for everyone.

So here are some of the questions whose answers are still reverberating around the studio upstairs in Broadcasting House. Why should our big opera houses get the huge state subsidies they do? How do they justify this expense - and are they dealing sufficiently responsibly with that cash? Is there enough new work on our opera stages? Is the glut of productions directed by film and theatre directors and actors really the future? And what does opera outside the opera house mean - Birmingham Opera Company’s productions in disused warehouses and factories, Jonathan Dove’s pieces for communities around the country? How can the art-form shake off its supposedly snobbish image - and does the opera world want it to? How is Britain doing in the international scheme of things? And what’s the future for this infuriating, expensive, revelatory, life-changing art-form? Answers, provocations, and debate on all of the above and more, as well as a set of exclusive short interviews with Stephen Fry, Joyce DiDonato, David Pountney, and AC Grayling"

Saturday 12th June 2010 (starting tomorrow afternoon)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service meets young British conductor Jonathan Nott, principal conductor of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra since 2000, and in demand throughout Europe and the USA. And, as part of Radio 3's Schumann 200 season, Robin Holloway offers his thoughts on why so many contemporary composers continue to be fascinated by this most enigmatic of romantic geniuses.

"A new musical scene on this weeks’ programme - and for once that’s not just marketing speak, or even journalistic nicety. Possibly! Here’s the thing: we’ve been along to Gabriel Prokofiev’s (yes, he is Sergei’s grandson) Nonclassical night in a room above a pub in East London. The idea is to take contemporary classical music and other genre-busting creativity out of the sometimes intimidating and always convention-bound concert hall, to allow new music to find a new audience. There were nine world premieres of pieces for violin and electronics the night we were there - as you’ll hear (well, OK, not all of them!). Nonclassical isn’t alone: there are a whole host of nights in London that are trying to create new contexts for classical music, and I’ll be talking to harpist Catrin Finch, who has just played at Limelight, a classical gig in a jazz club, and Matt Fretton, inventor of This Isn’t For You, one of the pioneering attempts to try and find new situations for classical mu!
sic. A real scene or mere experimentation? See what you think tomorrow.

Conductor Jonathan Nott conducts two concerts with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra next week. Astonishingly for a son of Solihull, this is his debut with the orchestra. As one of the most successful 40-something conductors in the world, it’s a surprise it’s taken so long for the CBSO to sign him up - but the reason is that Nott has made his career on the Continent, working his way through German opera houses in Wiesbaden and Frankfurt, ending up as the Principal Conductor of Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain, and, since 2000, Music Director of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra. I ask Jonathan about what makes German orchestral culture special, about the award-winning Mahler cycle he’s building up in concert and on disc with Bamberg, and how he connects music from Boulez to Beethoven.

Janacek is a composer whose reputation can be reduced to a few headlines: he’s a Czech nationalist, his approach to the vocal writing in his magnificent operas comes from his obsession with the speech-rhythms of his native language, he fell in love with a much younger woman, Kamila Stösslova, who inspired his late, great music, and works like The Makropulos Case and From the House of the Dead have no precedents in the literature. Job done. Or not: Derek Katz’s new book challenges the hegemony of these hoary truths - or are they myths? Derek busts some Janacek myths for us, and I talk to tenor Ian Bostridge and director David Alden about how useful - or otherwise - these ideas are to their interpretations and performances of his music. And you can also here David Alden's recent ENO production of Janacek's Katya Kabanova on Opera on 3 on Saturday night at 18.00.

All that and composer Robin Holloway on the composer he describes as ‘the composer’s composer’ - that’s a lot of ‘composers’, but there’s only one Robert Schumann! Robin has specially written a subtle and even moving reflection on his relationship with Schumann, our contribution to Radio 3’s Schumann 200 season".

Saturday 26th June 2010
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Associate editor of The Guardian newspaper and opera fanatic Martin Kettle asks why in the most popular tragic operas the sopranos, and occasionally the mezzos, meet a gruesome end. He explores how composers' own relationships with women might shed light on their dying divas, as well as considering a feminist approach to 19th-century tragic opera which presents death as a punishment that the female romantic lead is required to pay for living too passionately. He is joined by singers Natalie Dessay and Christine Rice, singer-cum-director Catherine Malfitano, director David McVicar, ENO music director Edward Gardner, The Royal Opera House's director of opera Elaine Padmore and scholars Peter Conrad, Susan McClary and Margaret Reynolds.

Saturday 3rd July 2010 (starting tomorrow afternoon)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service talks to Oliver Hilmes, author of Cosima Wagner, The Lady of Bayreuth, and reviews this biography of the composer's wife, so crucial to his life, with Wagnerians John Deathridge and Fiona Maddocks. Tom talks to the people involved in the project Music from the Genome, which uses the genes of members of a choir and transforms them into a new choral piece, called Allele. He talks to composer Michael Zev Gordon, Dr Andrew Morley and poet Ruth Padel, who wrote the text. And Tom goes to rehearsals and talks to those involved in John Adams' I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky'. He talks to director Matthew Xia, music director Clark Rundell, and also to members of the cast, in this new co-production between the Barbican and the Theatre Royal Stratford East.

Good old Wagner. You can always rely on Richard to kick up some posthumous controversy. Except this week, it’s not the great/horrendous/genius/appalling composer himself, but his wife Cosima that takes centre stage. Oliver Hilmes new biography of this extraordinary woman tells a story that I found almost unbelievable when I read it. The daughter of Liszt, Cosima hardly saw her father, she married Hans von Bülow, she had an adulterous relationship and bastard children with Wagner - consummating their union with Von Bülow in the same house, she became essential as Wagner’s administrative secretary and muse as the Bayreuth project got off the ground, and she continued the Wagner myth after he died in 1883, surviving him for 47 years. It’s a lot to pack into a single volume, and writers and critics John Deathridge and Fiona Maddocks review it with me.

At least Don Giovanni isn’t a controversial opera - at least, we can all agree it’s a bit of a masterpiece. But that’s the whole problem. Sometimes we take these great works of the past so much for granted that we don’t hear the radicalism and modernity at their core. That’s what Vladimir Jurowski is doing as he prepares to conduct the piece at Glyndebourne. He tells me that he wants to restore the shocks and strangeness of Mozart’s music and Da Ponte’s drama - and how he deals with the postmodern schizophrenia of the score. It’s music, as you’ll hear, that takes you over if you’re lucky enough to conduct it. So does Jurowski have to become Don Giovanni when he’s conducting it? Find out tomorrow.

There’s contemporary opera on the show as well - John Adams’s I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky (Ceiling/Sky from now on). Actually ‘opera’ isn’t the right word. It’s really a hybrid of pop tunes, pastiche, and musical theatre, with a bit of opera thrown in. The drama is built around the 1994 earthquake that shook Los Angeles, an event in which the characters weave their stories of love, lust, and loss. The piece hasn’t fared well since its premiere in the mid-1990s, but a new production at the Theatre Royal, Stratford in East London in collaboration with the Barbican is trying to change all that. With a cast of actors and pop signers rather than operatic voices, the team are trying to reclaim Adams opera/musical/earthquake-pastoral for audiences today. I went along to rehearsals - and I think they’re in with a chance of vindicating Adams’ ambitious, problematic piece.

All that and music from your genes. Well, not yours exactly, but some of the genes of the New London Chamber Choir. Geneticist Andrew Morley commissioned composer Michael Zev Gordon and poet Ruth Padel to transmute the arcana of cutting-edge research on the human genome - specifically, a project that attempts to find out if and what the human gene for musicality might be - into a creative context. The piece raises the question of what the relationship between science and art might be, but it creates real connections between them. Gordon’s music translates the letters of tiny parts of the singers’s genetic sequences into musical notation, and then makes a large 20-minute piece from the results. So where does science end and art begin - and vice-versa?

Saturday 10th July 2010 (starting tomorrow afternoon)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Petroc Trelawny talks to celebrated guitarist Julian Bream, who has had pieces written for him by composers including Malcolm Arnold, Lennox Berkeley, Britten, Henze, Michael Tippett and William Walton. Petroc is joined by Nicholas Kenyon and Nigel Simeone to review the new book by renowned American musicologist and pianist Charles Rosen, entitled Music and Sentiment. They assess Rosen's importance and stature as a writer on music. Plus a new book by Vincent Giroud celebrating the remarkably rich repertoire of French opera, from Lully to Poulenc and beyond, via Rameau, Bizet, Gounod, Massenet and Debussy.

I went to Durham on Monday, where the pubs were busy stocking up on disposable pint glasses ahead of the Miners Gala, which takes place tomorrow (Saturday). Up the hill in the majestic Cathedral, a simple memorial pays tribute to those who gave their lives working in the counties collieries. In fact the last pit closed in the 1990s - but the Gala is as great an event as ever - one of Europe’s largest political gatherings. Music is absolutely central, with fifty brass bands marching behind the silk colliery banners. The Gala coincides with ‘BRASS: Durham International Festival 2010’. It has commissioned American film-maker Bill Morrison to make a work for the Cathedral which will explore the near century-and-a-half history of the Gala. We’ll hear from him and members of the NASUWT Riverside Band as they prepare for the big day.

Julian Bream came to Broadcasting House on Wednesday, to talk about his new Trust which aims to undertake two of his passions - commissioning new works for the guitar, and helping exceptional guitar students with scholarships. His career started when he got a scholarship to the Royal College of Music; Arnold, Britten, Berkeley and Tippett were amongst those who later composed works for him. Bream is on great form. He is retired now but still plays lute and guitar for two hours a day, as well as tending his garden and walking his dog. We reflect on the days when he was one of Britain’s most recognised musicians, seldom off the television, his records earning platinum discs.

This is the last programme before the Proms take over the Royal Albert Hall and Music Matters goes on its summer break. So we couldn’t resist two books to pop into the canvas beach bag. Charles Rosen occupies a place on the bookshelves of many a musician thanks to his seminal work ‘The Classical Style’. Now the pianist and musicologist has written a new work which explores the power of music to move us, to convey emotion, even reduce us to tears. Barbican boss Nicholas Kenyon and writer Nigel Simeone join me to discuss ‘Music and Sentiment’.

And why don’t we see more French opera? There is no shortage of works to chose from, but beyond Bizet, and a few other favourites (Massenet’s Manon for example, broadcast on Radio Three tomorrow night) Gallic works in the repertoire are rare. An omission Vincent Giroud is determined to right. He joins me from Paris to talk about his new book ‘ French opera: A Short History’.

The music of Alkan is well worth discovering.....

Chopin's Neighbour
On: BBC Radio Three
Date: Saturday 17th July 2010
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Piers Lane explores the mysterious life and music of French pianist and composer Charles Valentin Alkan. The Italian composer Busoni considered him to be one of the five greatest writers for the piano since Beethoven. He was a friend and neighbour of Chopin and possessed what Liszt called the 'greatest technique' he had ever heard. Piers asks why, by the end of his life, this Romantic virtuoso was all but forgotten.

Saturday 31st July 2010
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service delves into Ravel's La valse, considered to be one of the most original and enigmatic works in all music. While it is presented as a charming Viennese waltz in the style of Johann Strauss, La valse begins first to dismantle the form, and then finally to take an orchestral sledgehammer to it. Ravel refused to be drawn on what prompted this violent and exhilarating work, but some have taken the view that it is a perfect picture of an out-of-control Europe heading inexorably towards the Second World War. With contributions from conductor Eliahu Inbal, composer George Benjamin, Ravel biographer Roger Nichols and David Lamaze, who claims to have discovered in La valse a hidden clue to its composer's intent.

Scriabin - A Life in Colour
Saturday 21st August 2010
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Scriabin - A Life in Colour: Peggy Reynolds explores the extraordinary life and music of Russian composer, pianist, mystic and philosopher Alexander Scriabin, with contributions from Gerard McBurney, Simon Morrison, and pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy. At the turn of the 20th century, this remarkable figure's music and ideals challenged the very nature of individual and musical expression. His compositional technique and style evolved extraordinarily during his life - his early, romantic piano pieces reflect his adoration of Chopin, and his later compositions explore new reaches and innovations in harmony. Scriabin became enthralled by the theosophy movement of Madam Blavatsky and was convinced that he was destined to produce an all-consuming work of art - an apocalyptic work of cosmic proportions which would transfigure mankind and its universe.

Purcell and Dryden: A Professional Friendship
Saturday 28th August 2010
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Alyn Shipton explores Dryden and Purcell's collaboration on the semi-opera King Arthur, bringing to life the world of Restoration theatre.

We open Music Matters this week with Donald Runnicles, the Edinburgh born conductor, who learnt his craft in Germany, led San Francisco Opera for 17 years, and is now back home as Chief Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony. I went to Glasgow to meet him, and talk Wagner. This week he’s opening the SSO’s new season with Act 1 of Die Walkure - and his passion for the German composer is clearly one of the reasons he took on his other new European job, General Music Director of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. There, Ring Cycles are a regular event; he’s just about to conduct Tannhauser, and in the new year Graham Vick will direct a new production of Tristan and Isolde. Plus a big chunk of the orchestra play in the Bayreuth pit every year. In other words it’s the perfect place for a Wagnerian like Runnicles. We also reflect on the financial woes of Scottish Opera, where he had his first Wagnerian experience, Das Rheingold, conducted by Sir Alexander Gibson, a school trip when he was !
just 16.

We’re also examining the reputation of William Glock. For fourteen years he was Controller of BBC Music, re-inventing the Proms, the BBC Orchestras, and Radio 3. For him provincialism was a sin; he wanted to bring an international perspective to BBC output. But in doing so did he unfairly silence a generation of British composers? Edmund Rubbra, George Lloyd, Herbert Howells are three who lost out. Was there even a blacklist of banned names? Leo Black, who worked at the BBC with Glock throughout his years in charge, has just written a memoir which takes the controller as its starting point, and I’ll be joined by one of Glock’s successors, Nicholas Kenyon, and one of the composers who lost out under Glock, John McCabe.

I have to say I raised my eyes a little when I heard that we were going to see an exhibition in south-east London in which three contemporary Polish multi-media artists responded to the music of their country’s most famous cultural export. But I had to do a little hat eating. ‘Where’s Chopin?, a show running simultaneously in London and Warsaw is fascinating and rather provocative. In one piece the audience is asked to dance on a white sheet, triggering tiny particles of Chopin’s music; in another, artist and pianist Jaroslaw Kapuscinski has filmed dozens of music lovers, listening as he plays them Chopin. He has then created a film, shown on a triptych of screens, and activated by the sound of Chopin, either played live, or on Disklavier piano. Chopin lover and Sunday Times critic Waldemar Januszczak takes us round the show.

And will a forgotten, 700 year old musical style provide a modern hit for a major British record label? We’ll be reporting on a project which links Southampton University with two Australian institutions, researching ‘Conductus’, works that were performed widely across Europe in the 13 th century, but haven’t been heard since. Hyperion are going to make three CDs of them as part of the research process.

Saturday 9th October 2010 (starting tomorrow afternoon)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service talks to Alexander Goehr at rehearsals for his new opera Promised End, which is fashioned from 24 short scenes from Shakespeare's play King Lear, and which the composer says will be his last. He explores Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano with the author of a new book which looks at the complex background to these seminal works, and gets the latest score from Leif Segerstam, the Finnish composer, conductor and teacher who has so far published 220 symphonies.

I can play the C major Prelude of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues for piano, an interpretation of which I’m inordinately proud, and on which American writer Mark Mazullo has based a new book on Shostakovich’s grandest work for his own instrument. Thankfully for all concerned, only half of that it is true, and so as Mark’s magnum opus is published, we talk to a pianist who can play the whole piece, Alexander Melnikov, and a composer who was there in 1951 when Shostakovich first played the cycle to a committee of Soviet bureaucrats, Rodion Schedrin. We’ve dug out footage of pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva talking about the piece which she inspired, and explore the unique world of this vast work, one of the central masterpieces of 20 th century piano music.

It’s not just in Britain that the cuts are beginning to bite. Who knows what the comprehensive spending review will mean for music and the arts, a subject we’ll be exploring on the programme in a couple of weeks. In The Netherlands, the national Broadcasting Music Center will be shut if a government proposal gets the go-ahead. It would be like about half of the BBC ensembles getting their P45s: there are four performing groups that would disappear with a stroke of the bureaucrat’s pen, the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic, the Metropole Orchestra, and the Netherlands Radio Choir. I talk to Anton Kok, current general manager of the Center, and to Guido Van Oorschot, critic of the Volkskrant, to find out what this would mean for Dutch musical life.

There are still new operas to look forward to here - for the moment at least. Alexander Goehr’s Promised End, an opera ‘in 24 Preludes’ (pure Shostakovichian coincidence, promise!) on Shakespeare’s King Lear, which opens tomorrow night at the Linbury Studio Theatre at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Alexander - ‘Sandy’ - tells me about writing this piece and about the mistakes and redemptions of old men as an incipient old man himself. And director James Conway and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth explain how Sandy’s score, and the drama he created from Lear with Frank Kermode, took them by surprise - as the piece will too, for audiences who hear it on tour throughout England, and when it’s broadcast on Radio 3 on the 18 th December.

We end tomorrow’s show with an encounter with the world’s most prolific symphonist in music history, ever. Leif Segerstam is possibly more familiar to you as a conductor, but he has also written 239 symphonies. Yes, you did read that right, not 23.9 or 2.39, but 239. He’s probably composed another one by the time you read this. In an encounter of magnificent, revelatory eccentricity, Leif outlines his philosophy of music: atemporal, fluxatively pulsating, Segerstamically orgasmic, the big nnnnoooowwww!!! Seriously. Enjoy it all, as ever, tomorrow at 12.15

Saturday 13th November 2010 (starting tomorrow afternoon)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service meets Californian composer Terry Riley, whose famous 1964 work In C heralded the arrival of minimalism as a new force in American music. Tom talks to the author of a new book which charts the rise and fall of the influential Centre for Creative and Performing Arts at the University of New York at Buffalo, which became a beacon for experimental composers like Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss and George Crumb. And Tom talks to German tenor Jonas Kaufmann, who has been creating waves in the concert hall and on the opera stage. He discusses his career and art ahead of his appearance in the Royal Opera House's new production of Adriana Lecouvreur.

Jonas Kaufmann is one of those singers whose every performance at the moment is greeted with bouquets of adulation, wonder, and hyperbole. If you believe the hype, Jonas may be the tenor who is simultaneously the natural successor to Domingo in Italian and French repertoire, and the longed-for Heldentenor the like of which we haven’t seen or heard since Melchior or Lorenz, the most exciting Wagner interpreter of the age. He has a lot to live up to. He’s in London to sing in Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur at Covent Garden, a piece that hasn’t been staged at the Royal Opera House for over a century, and frankly, wouldn’t be, were it not for the starry casting of Kaufmann and Angela Gheorghiu in the main roles. But all of that starriness and hyperbole goes out the window when you meet Kaufmann: he’s one of the most genuine, honest, sorted, and witty musical uber-celebrities I’ve ever met. Unless he was acting: Kaufmann is also one of the best singing actors you can see on stage at !
the moment - See what you think tomorrow.

As a roll-call of the late 20 th century’s greatest musicians and composers, it’s pretty impressive: Cage, Stockhausen, Terry Riley, Lukas Foss, David Tudor, Morton Feldman, Elliott Carter, Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew - etc, etc, etc. No, this wasn’t the famed summer courses in Darmstadt, or a concert series in, say, Chicago or Boston. No: all of these luminaries, and hundreds of others, were resident at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at the university in Buffalo, the sleepy, often snow-bound town in upstate New York, between 1964 and 1980, when the Center ran out of money. This was a unique gig for performing and composing musicians. There was no necessity for them to teach students or to involve themselves in the mundanities of university admin: all the Creative Associates had to do was further their musical explorations and performances. It was a set-up that produced an atmosphere of unfettered imagination, as well as some brilliant works. Renée Levine !
Packer was the Center’s administrator for 14 years, and has written a book on Buffalo’s golden age of new music. She tells us her story with composer and flautist Robert Dick, the Center’s last Creative Associate.

And, with typical Music Matters serendipitousness, I talk to Terry Riley, one of Buffalo’s most famous alumni. Riley’s In C is one of the signal masterpieces of minimalism - well, really, of all time and in any genre! - and has been his most performed piece since its premiere in 1964. But Riley’s musical explorations as performer, improviser, and composer, have taken him to areas of spirituality, meditation, psychedelic drugs, and music that fuses the sounds of the cosmos with the Kronos Quartet. He reveals what his years of study - and compositional silence - with his guru, Prandit Pran Nath, gave to his musical practice, and how the essence of his music is a seeking out of transcendence, and spirit. Riley has a radiant, positive presence. His voice, his laugh, his beard (have a look at the website), and his music, of course, are all the non-narcotic routes to transcendence you could possibly need. Enjoy it all tomorrow, as ever, at 12.15.

Sad news as we go to press and put the programme together today: the death has been announced of Polish composer Henryk Górecki. Most famous for his Third Symphony, 'Symphony of Sorrowful Songs', there was much more to him than that piece, as we'll discover on next week's programme when we consider his life, legacy, and music. In Tune will talk to those who knew him and his work tonight.

Saturday 20th November 2010 (starting tomorrow afternoon)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service meets pianist Angela Hewitt, and talks Schumann and Bach. He visits Thurrock where the Royal Opera House are putting on The Purfleet Opera which opens their brand new production park in Essex. There's music from bands of the RAF at their new rehearsal rooms at RAF Northolt, and the story of a dog becoming human at English National Opera with Russian composer Alexander Raskatov's new work, A Dog's Heart directed by Simon McBurney.

A programme that takes us from Bach to battlefields, from avant-garde theatre to opera in Essex, we’re live tomorrow lunchtime bringing you a Music Matters cornucopia - starting with pianist Angela Hewitt.

I’ll just have time to talk to Angela about being one of the most - if not the most - celebrated performer of Bach on the modern piano, and her new book of Bach arrangements, before she jumps in a cab to a rehearsal for her concert at the Wigmore Hall tomorrow evening. I’ll be asking how a girl from Ottawa becomes obsessed with Bach, why she has a problem with her famous Canadian predecessor, Glenn Gould, and his approach to Johann Sebastian, and how and why his music seems capable of sustaining her whole musical life. Oh, and on being the same age as Madonna.

Imagine the situation. You’re trained as a euphonium player, but you’re sent to the front line of the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan. That’s exactly the situation them members of the RAF’s Music Service have found themselves in over recent years. I’ve been to RAF Northolt to see their bespoke music studios as the bands were rehearsing for their national tour, talking to the musician/soldiers there, and finding out how they balance life as a working musician with their military duties - and how the players in the Central Band feel now that their new CD is one of the top pre-Christmas sellers. The head of the Music Services, Wing Commander Duncan Stubbs, will be in the studio to tell us more.

As will John Berry, Chief Executive of English National Opera. That’s because ENO’s new production (OK, co-production the Netherlands Opera, strictly speaking-) of Alexander Raskatov’s new opera, A Dog’s Heart, takes place in London tomorrow night. Raskatov is an unfamiliar name to you? Frankly, I’m not surprised, but he’s one of the exciting, eclectic generation of Russian composers born in the 1950s, who have had to find a distinctive voice away from Shostakovich or Schnittke. But the show has been more hyped in the build up thanks to the involvement of director Simon McBurney and his theatre company Complicite. It’s a mouth-watering combination: a brilliant Soviet satire, in the story by Bulgakov that was banned for 60s years by the USSR, a team of visual effects wizards from Complicite and puppeteers, and Raskatov’s unpredictable music. But is this the way forward for opera?
Do you have to have a sexy name from theatre or film-land to make new opera productions sell, as so many of John Berry’s shows have had?

One of the respondents to that question with be Paul Reeve, our other studio guest. Paul is Head of Education at the Royal Opera House, who have just moved to Thurrock, right beside the bridge over the Thames at Dartford. Well, the Royal Opera is about to open its new production workshop there, a building the size of an aircraft hangar, emblazoned with the ROH insignia, which looks just a wee bit out of place amid the chimneys, warehouses, and other industrial gubbins of the landscape around Thurrock and Purfleet. But there is a connection: this Thurrock outpost will be the opera house’s factory where sets are built and new generations of back-stage staff are trained. They’re opening with an outdoor fair and a community opera at the start of December - and I hope they get a better day that the grey chill that greeted our arrival.

Paul will tell us how the Thurrock project fits into Covent Garden and its surrounding communities, and the others will quiz him on the Royal Opera out east. I wonder if John Berry’s jealous? Duncan probably isn’t: the RAF have warehouses that could swallow a dozen Thurrocks. Anyway - join us all tomorrow at 12.15!

Saturday 27th November 2010 (starting tomorrow afternoon)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

The Kreutzer Sonata.

Marking the centenary of his death, Katie Derham considers the relationship between the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy and the Russian composers of the early 20th century. One of the most renowned of his later works was a novella called The Kreutzer Sonata which told the tale of the infatuation of an older married woman for a young violinist. Music remained a source of continued recreation and delight for him Tolstoy and was an emotional stimulus for him for much of his life. He loved Russian folk music and the rousing music of the gypsies; at university, he was inspired by friends who had a passion for music to play the piano and he wrote a waltz. He even thought he might become a composer. Eminent musicians visited the Tolstoy homes in the country and in Moscow - and some performed there. They included the great pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein, Rachmaninov, harpsichordist and pianist Wanda Landovska and, most famously, Tchaikovsky.

Saturday 4th December 2010
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service meets Italian mezzo soprano Cecilia Bartoli as she prepares for concerts in London and Manchester. After making her first public performance in Tosca at the age of eight, Bartoli has gone on to become one of the world's best loved singers and has championed baroque repertoire. Her latest CD Sospiri sees Bartoli tackling bel canto arias from the likes of Bellini, Rossini and Handel. Steetwise Opera works with the homeless to further their personal development through high quality music making. Tom drops in on a rehearsal for their latest project: Fables - A film Opera, a collection of short film operas which are being created by Streetwise Opera performers in collaboration with high profile film makers and composers, including Orlando Gough and Mira Calix. The results will premiere in a live theatrical staging in London's Shoreditch Church. Mischa Aster's new book The Reich's Orchestra tells the remarkable story of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra's controversial relationship with Hitler's government. In Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon, Erik Levi explores the way in which the Nazi regime manipulated Mozart's music for political gain. Tom talks to both authors, and then reviews the books with John Deathridge, King Edward Professor of Music at King's College London and expert in German music; and author and broadcaster Norman Lebrecht.

Gender-bending with Cecilia Bartoli on tomorrow’s show. Don’t say we don’t push the boundaries on this programme. The world’s most famous and most bankable mezzo-soprano - no one apart from Bartoli could shift half a million copies of a CD of arias that had never been recorded by obscure Neapolitan baroque composers originally composed for castrati – has made her career singing music written for men who were playing women, gelded boys singing gods, monsters, and heroes and heroines of all sexes, i.e. both. I’m getting my knickers in a twist. The point, Bartoli has not ploughed the familiar furrows of mezzo-land by raking in the cash singing Carmen all over the world. Instead, she has brought operatic music by Salieri, Vivaldi, and Porporo to vast audiences, and made us rethink the vocal music of the 18 th and 19 th centuries - and she has done it all with a combination of superhuman technique and sensual abandon. As she tours Handel and the music of the castrati to Britain I!
find out what drives this unique musician.

And two new books on some of the darkest days for music in the 20 th century: two stories of how the Nazis appropriated the Berlin Philharmonic and the music of Mozart for political ends. Misha Aster’s book on the Berlin Phil reveals how the orchestra were saved by Goebbels, the musicians given special dispensation during the war - once they had got rid of the handful of Jews in the ensemble - and how they played for the Nuremberg rallies and Hitler’s birthday celebrations, as well as touring the world; showing, with conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, how the Germans did classical music better than anyone. What were the consequences of these tortuous political compromises for the orchestra? How did the experience shape them - and scar them? Erik Levi’s book on Mozart and the Nazis tells a previously unknown story of how the regime forced Wolfgang into an ideological straitjacket with matching jackboots.
The biggest cultural celebration of the entire Nazi period? No, not Wagner, or even Beethoven or Bruckner - but Mozart, in 1941, a Reich-wide festival of the 150 th anniversary of his death. These are chilling stories both, but are they well told? John Deathridge and Norman Lebrecht review the books with me.

We end the programme with a heartening, life-affirming story, though, of Streetwise Opera’s new project with the homeless community: Fables: A Film Opera. The company works all year round with homeless communities all over the country, giving participants in their projects the chance to express themselves through creative work, to improve their sense of self-esteem - or simply to escape their daily lives in the concentration on singing and performing. For the past few years, Streetwise’s performances have taken opera to places no one would have thought it could go, and this year, they’re trying something even more ambitious, making films alongside live performances, and commissioning four different creative teams to make their own ‘fable’ with the participants. I went along to see rehearsals at St Martin in the Fields in London, to hear the music - and the stories. As ever, it’s all tomorrow at 12.15.

Saturday 5th February 2011
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service discusses a new biography of composer Lennox Berkeley and explores the legacy of 19th-century Devon folk song collector Sabine Baring-Gould. Plus a contemporary music festival in Plymouth which investigates the links between science and the arts.

This week on Music Matters – Kurt Masur: the 83 year-old German conductor came to international fame with his public intervention in a stand off between the people and the authorities in the former East Germany in 1989, convening the first ever public sharing of views between the oppressed population of Leipzig and the city’s political masters in the Gewandhaus, the concert hall he had built for his orchestra. He was asked to stand for President of the newly reunited country, but turned the idea down, asking: ‘am I so bad a conductor I need to become a politician? His jobs running the London Philharmonic and New York Philharmonic made him instrumental again in the confluence between classical music and international events, when he gave an unforgettable performance of Brahms’s German Requiem in New York just after 9/11. He’s back this week in London with the orchestra and music he loves, the LPO and an all-Brahms programme. Music is Masur’s life, but he tells me it’s also an!
answer to the rather important wee philosophical question of why we’re here at all – and he also gives his vision of the future of the art-form.

Lennox Berkeley is one of the nearly men of 20 th century British music. You’ll have heard of him if you’ve an interest in pre- and post-war creative culture, but you’re unlikely to have heard much of his music in concert halls or on orchestral programmes. As I discover this week, that’s a shame: and not just because of the quality of the music, but because of the human story behind Berkeley’s music. Tony Scotland – yes the Tony Scotland!, if like me, you grew up with hearing his voice on Radio3 – has written a book called Lennox and Freda, the story of Berkeley’s journey towards his marriage in 1946. It’s an unflinchingly honest, generous, and open account of Berkeley’s early years, his deep sexual and creative relationships, nearly all with men – including Benjamin Britten, his attempt to reconcile his sexuality with his religious convictions, as well as to contribute to British musical culture as teacher, programmer, and composer. And it’s also the story of how Freda met !
Lennox at the BBC in 1945, and decided pretty well instantly that she was going to marry him, despite apparently insurmountable obstacles. When the marriage happened, it seemed one of the least likely unions that could be imagined to his closest friends. But it worked for Berkeley – and his music. Find out how tomorrow from Tony, Freda, and Stephen Banfield.

Milton Babbitt died over the weekend at 94. Composer, conductor and one of Milton’s close friends, Gunther Schuller, tells us why his music is so important, and why his death is such a huge personal loss to anyone who knew him. For Schuller, Babbitt’s music is among the greatest ever written in the 20 th or 21st centuries. Babbitt wanted to write music that was ‘literally as full as possible’; as full, that is, of uncompromised and uncompromising musical content. Its music that demands to be engaged with, listened to, and understood, a journey Gunther says we should all make more often. And if you’re worried the music might be forbidding or complex, there’s humour in it too – you can’t write a piece called ‘The Joy of More Sextets’ without a sense of humour. Or, it turns out, an encylopaedic knowledge of baseball and early jazz.

There’s more English music you should have heard of on this week’s show, too. Sabine Baring-Gould ought, by rights, to be as famous a name in the story of the collection, preservation, and continuation of English folk music traditions as, say, Cecil Sharp. He ought to be, but he isn’t – yet. You see, in Devon and the South-West in the late 19 th century, Baring-Gould – whose interests ranged from lycanthropy (the study of werewolves, if you have to ask…), to local history, and for good measure, he was also one of the top-ten-selling novelists of the Victorian era and writing hymns like ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ - was among the first to systematically collect the folk songs of a region and to disseminate them as widely as he could through books, talks, and even operas. I travelled to a village near Okehampton in Devon to find Baring-Gould’s former home and library, and to see how the members of Wren Music are making his legacy part of people’s lives today, through choirs, !
bands, and a new on-line archive…

Saturday 12th February 2011
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Presented by Tom Service. With Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove talking about the Government's response to the Henley Review of Music Education. Mark-Anthony Turnage talks about his new opera at Covent Garden, 3907838::Anna Nicole Smith, based on the life of the American model and former stripper. Marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Australian-born composer 499493::Percy Grainger, Tom investigates the music and the life of the man whose interests ranged from folk music to fashion design. Plus how music lovers who have been affected by tinnitus learn to live with the condition, and an interview with 6149579::Daniel Harding, principal conductor of the LSO, who talks about his work with the orchestra and his love of football.

Daniel Harding is ‘my little genius’ – the words of Claudio Abbado – no more. The wunderkind of all wunderkinder (he was conducting Schoenberg in his teens, assisting Simon Rattle while still at school, and he made his debuts with the world’s great orchestras, including the Philharmonics of Berlin and Vienna, in his early 20s) is in his mid-30s. Because of his unique experience, he’s already in the middle of his career. He’s already carved a place for himself in musical culture that makes all those PR labels like ‘the new Simon Rattle’ completely meaningless – he’s running arguably Europe’s best chamber orchestra, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, as well as the Stockholm Radio Symphony Orchestra, and is Principal Guest Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra – and he’s reached a point in his life where he wants to take stock of what he’s doing. He tells me about his coach, comparing his relationship with Mark Stringer to that of a top sports star and their trainer. Daniel’s !
doing this for a reason, though: to become as good and efficient a conductor as he can. It’s as simple, and as difficult, as ‘less is more’.

Anna Nicole Smith is a perfect subject for an opera. Her life story has got everything: love, tragedy, addiction, lawyers, billionaire 89 year-olds, sex, surgery, and scandal. But Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new piece for Covent Garden, with a libretto by Richard Thomas (author and composer of Jerry Springer: The Opera) has kicked up something of a stushie in the press recently. Some have felt the subject too tawdry for the opera house (have they seen Don Giovanni or La Traviata?), others that the story is too contemporary (she died of an accidental overdose in 2007). I talk to Mark-Anthony Turnage about the music, which will be played by an orchestra including Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, and to conductor Antonio Pappano about how Anna Nicole has taken over the Royal Opera.

The Henley Review of Music Education was finally published on Monday, a document of signal importance for the future of musical culture in England. On paper, the government response to Henley’s 36 recommendations is positive, including £82.5 million for Music Services and other provision for another year. But what happens after that? There are questions, too, over music’s place on the National Curriculum, over what happens to the In Harmony projects (England’s microcosm of Venezuela’s El Sistema), and whether the government will really support Henley’s idea of music education ‘hubs’ in each Local Authority area. Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove explains the government’s vision for the future, and Susanna Eastburn, from Arts Council England, and arts consultant Marc Jaffrey, give their views on the fall-out from the Henley report.

All that, and Percy Grainger, as Penelope Thwaites prepares a huge celebration of everyone’s favourite Anglo-Australian-American eccentric at Kings Place in London. She has edited a new book on Grainger’s music, too, and tells me why there’s so much more to the man and his music than, say, S&M and Country Gardens. Seriously: there’s no mention of Percy’s private life on the programme, just a single-minded focus on his unique, visionary output.

Saturday 26th February 2011 (starting tomorrow afternoon)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Associate editor of The Guardian newspaper and opera fanatic Martin Kettle asks why in the most popular tragic operas the sopranos, and occasionally the mezzos, meet a gruesome end. He explores how composers' own relationships with women might shed light on their dying divas, as well as considering a feminist approach to 19th-century tragic opera which presents death as a punishment that the female romantic lead is required to pay for living too passionately. He is joined by singers Natalie Dessay and Christine Rice, singer-cum-director Catherine Malfitano, director David McVicar, ENO music director Edward Gardner, The Royal Opera House's director of opera Elaine Padmore and scholars Peter Conrad, Susan McClary and Margaret Reynolds.

Yes, I know it’s the norm for us to have a musical superstar on Music Matters, but rarely, rarely has that epithet been as accurate to describe our first interview tomorrow: pianist Lang Lang, inspiration to more than 40 million fledgling pianists in China, the globe-trotting 28 year-old who counts Daniel Barenboim as his mentor, and the concert halls of America, Europe, and Asia as his homes. As well, presumably, as a fleet of jumbos on which Lang Lang has to spend most of his time given that his dream of a teleportation device to spirit from one end of the globe to another in an instant has so far remained out of reach of science. His life in music is a story of intense pressure from his parents and his inner drive to be number one in every competition he entered as a kid, thousands of hours of practice and occasional trauma – his father once asked him to kill himself because he hadn’t practised enough – that paid off when he was a last-minute replacement for a Tchaikovsky!
First Concerto in Chicago. That was 13 years ago, and the world has been his stage ever since. He’s in London for a series of concerts this week, and I met him in the bowels of the Steinway store in central London to ask him about being an icon, his inspirations, and his future. Even if we don’t get round to teleportation.

Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream is a joyous Shakespearean romp, right? Fairies? Check. Star-crossed lovers? Check. A merry band of rustical mechanicals and some of Britten’s more ethereal music? Yes! And, er, no. Christopher Alden’s new production for English National Opera opened last night, and we’re reviewing it with Fiona Maddocks and Peter Conrad on Saturday. This is a show that reveals the deep darknesses in the Dream, setting the opera in a school where Oberon and Tytania use Puck and the children, who play the fairies, as their playthings – in every sense. Puck is not some happy sprite but an abused boy, the subject of Oberon’s love and scorn, the mechanicals are the school’s workmen who present a play that spirals out of control into verbal and sexual abuse. It’s controversial – but, in my view, coherent and revelatory on what it tells us about the opera. That’s what I think – but what did my august colleagues make of it?

Gustav Mahler died one hundred years ago and the place to be if you’re a jet-setting Mahlerian is Leipzig, where the city is hosting performances of all ten symphonies, a cycle that began with the Second this week. Riccardo Chailly conducted the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and he talks to me about Mahler’s relationship with the city – he spent two years in his 20s as a journeyman conductor in Leipzig, and composed the First Symphony and the piece that became the opening of the Second there – and how his relationship with Mahler has deepened since he took over the Gewandhaus orchestra six years ago. This is a cycle with a difference: Chailly isn’t hogging the whole lot, but has invited other great orchestras and maestros, like the New York Phil and London Symphony to take part. He has, though, reserved the gigantic, cosmic, universe-shattering Eighth for himself, the Mahler symphony he’s conducted more than any other. Lucky man.

And to end this week, we’ve one of the most engrossing radiophonic essays on music I’ve ever heard. You’ll just have to take my word for it until Saturday, but Simon McBurney’s meditation on Mahler is a mesmerising, personal yet universal, intimate yet philosophical reflection on what this music is and how it affects us so deeply. I commend it to your ears, and hope that you will do so to everyone you know! Enjoy – as ever, it’s all at 12.15 tomorrow.

Saturday 28th May 2011
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Music of the King James Bible.

The Rev Richard Coles assesses the influence that the Authorised Version of the Bible has had on music during the past 400 years. With the help of composers, writers and musicians he follows the trail of the King James translation from madrigals to missionaries and from Handel to hip-hop. Richard considers the problems and rewards of setting the sometimes-difficult language of the 1611 version in choral anthems and oratorios. But he also tracks its journey into the American gospel tradition and discovers its central importance in the lyrics of Bob Dylan.

Saturday 4th June 2011
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service talks to countertenor Andreas Scholl as he prepares for a solo recital in London devoted to Purcell, Dowland and other English composers of Early Music. There is an interview with John R Near, in which he discusses his biography of Charles-Marie Widor, A Life Beyond the Toccata, exploring the organist's other, less well-known output, which includes four operas, a wealth of songs and chamber music. As the British Association for Music Therapy opens a new, state-of-the-art centre in Sussex, Tom assesses the latest research in the field. And Tom explores the findings of an amazing quest undertaken by Balint Andras Varga in his book Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers.

Andreas Scholl, doyen of counter-tenors. Or should that be doyenne? Any countertenor has to deal with the gender-bending weirdness of singing music originally written for women, or playing parts composed for castrati opposite women playing men in baroque opera. But Scholl tells me – half serious, half joking - that he wants to take all this to a new level by performing the title role in Bizet's Carmen. The habanera may have to wait a bit though: for now, he's touring English music around the world - he may even give audiences in London and America his grief-wracked version of Dido's Lament - and he's returning to the music that first inspired him to become a counter-tenor, when he heard recordings by James Bowman and Alfred Deller. He rates Purcell's music among the greatest ever composed for voice, as he reveals to me tomorrow.

If you've ever been to a wedding, or ever had the experience of an organist showing off their instrument, you've probably heard Widor's Toccata, that glorious, uplifting showpiece that crowns the king of instruments with a halo of arpeggio-laden glory. But there's more to Widor. A new biography tells the story of a life remarkable not just because of how long he lived - he died in his 90s in 1937 - but because of how central Charles-Marie was to the whole of French musical life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He wrote operas, ballets, chamber music, as well as his series of 10 Organ Symphonies - not a lot has been recorded, alas... And he taught the young Turks of 20th century French music - Messiaen, Honneger, Milhaud, Varèse among them. We find out more with biographer John Near, organist Daniel Roth, and musicologist and Francophile Richard Langham-Smith.

Getting to the heart of what composers do and how they do it is one of great challenges for any interviewer - as I know myself! But Bálint András Varga has found an ingenious solution. His new book, Three Questions for Sixty Five Composers, does exactly what it says on the tin: over the course of a couple of decades, he posed the same three questions to composers from John Cage to Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbitt to Elliott Carter. The results are fascinating, and create a uniquely wide-ranging portrait of contemporary music, as the composers get to grips with Varga's questions, revealing what was their Damascene moment of musical inspiration to how they define their personal style. I talk to Bálint about what most shocked and surprised him in the answers he received. And bringing us right up to date, young composers Chris Mayo and Emily Howard come into the studio to react to Varga’s findings and to pose their own set of three questions to each other. Listen out tomorrow for t!
he cracking of the compositional code.

And as National Music Therapy Week gets under way from Monday, we explore how the profession has changed the lives of those who experience it; I meet George, a 3 year-old boy born with a rare condition, bilateral anophthalmia, which means he has no eyes, and watch one of the music therapy sessions he regularly receives from Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust. And as the profession is accepted as an important part of the way patients with a variety of conditions are treated – now including schizophrenia as well as autism, depression, and dementia - Professor Helen Odell-Miller tells us how music therapy can transform lives in the future too. As ever, it's all at 12.15 tomorrow.

Saturday 2nd July 2011 (starting in 4 hours and 55 minutes)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service travels to Moscow and St Petersburg to report on the XIV International Tchaikovsky Competition, one of the most important events in the Russian musical calendar. Founded in 1958 to demonstrate Russian musical superiority at the height of the Cold War, the competition was one of the glories of Soviet cultural life. For many years, it was arguably the most important competition to win, but recently its reputation has become tarnished. Conductor Valery Gergiev has been charged with turning things around, putting together juries consisting of some of the highest profile performing musicians in the world, moving part of the competition to St Petersburg, creating new rules and increasing the prize money. With contributions from Gergiev himself, previous winners, including Peter Donohoe, Barry Douglas and Viktoria Mullova, many of the competitors, and some of the Russians who have followed the competition for generations.

Scriabin: A Life in Colour
On: BBC Radio Three
Date: Saturday 6th August 2011
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Peggy Reynolds explores the extraordinary life and music of Russian composer, pianist, mystic and philosopher Alexander Scriabin, with contributions from Gerard McBurney, Simon Morrison and pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy. At the turn of the 20th century, this remarkable figure's music and ideals challenged the very nature of individual and musical expression. His compositional technique and style evolved extraordinarily during his life - his early, romantic piano pieces reflect his adoration of Chopin, and his later compositions explore new reaches and innovations in harmony. Scriabin became enthralled by the theosophy movement of Madam Blavatsky and was convinced that he was destined to produce an all-consuming work of art - an apocalyptic work of cosmic proportions which would transfigure mankind and its universe.

Saturday 24th September 2011
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Iain Burnside considers the idea of how hands, fingers, thumbs and their use have directly affected Western keyboard composition. Pianist Stephen Hough, composer Huw Watkins and critic Bryce Morrison give insights into how the physiology of great composers' hands had an impact on the music that they wrote and the various challenges performers face as a result. Includes music by Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Rachmaninov and Ligeti.

Saturday 15th October 2011
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service talks to American composer, conductor, horn player, author, historian and jazz musician Gunther Schuller as he prepares to launch his autobiography. Schuller speaks about famous conductors he worked under, like Arturo Toscanini, Fritz Reiner, Leopold Stokowski and Bruno Walter, experiences that sometimes left him disappointed. He explains his double life as a horn player with the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera, as well as a performer in celebrated jazz bands. Schuller also reflects on combinginin classical and jazz techniques, which he believes opened the door to the wide and varied musical landscape we enjoy today.

As everyone's favourite fluvial philosopher says, 'you can never step in the same river twice', to probably paraphrase Heraclitus. But what if, in the stepping, it wasn't just the river that changed, but you changed the river too?

Pushing a metaphor too far? I certainly hope so! All that by way of preamble for our live programme tomorrow from Radio 3's free-wheeling intellectual jamboree, to mix another metaphor: Free Thinking at the Sage Gateshead.

The overarching theme this year is Change, and on the spirit of Heraclitus, I literally have no literal idea what's going to happen tomorrow. Our theme is: Has Music Changed the World? A monstrous topic we need some big characters, bigger brains, and even bigger slices of life and musical experience to deal with.

And so, while I can't tell you precisely what we're all going to say, I can tell you who will join the audience and me in Gateshead, and how they've responded in discussions so far to the theme. First up, ex MD of the Berlin Philharmonic, Pamela Rosenberg. Born in Venezuela, Pamela will have unique insight into El Sistema and its effect on society, but she'll also tell us how a city can change an orchestra - and vice versa! - following her transformative time in Berlin.

Next up, historian and musician Chris Page. As well as a gigantic historical overview of music and societies over the past couple of millennia, Chris has got something controversial to tell us about how music has often been an agent of the wrong sort of change: intolerance, chauvinism, xenophobia, and nationalistic narrow-mindedness, among other things. Find out more tomorrow!

Composer Christopher Fox thinks that music can't change the world - but that it's been used to symbolise all kinds of political and social upheaval, in the 20th and 21st centuries especially. And Katherine Zeserson, who's Director of Participation at the Sage, knows how music does change people's lives, above all those of the young people who have been involved in education projects ever since the Sage opened in 2004.

All of the above, and violinist and music and the brain guru, Paul Robertson. For Paul, music is a divine force that we need all the most “hifalutin” branches of science to begin to understand. Paul has direct experience of how music has changed and even saved him, after recovering from serious illness a few years ago.

Alright, so I don't expect us to come up with all the answers in 45 minutes to get to the bottom of a question that could take more like 45 years to answer. But I'm sure that sparks will fly at the Sage, and that along with questions from our audience, we'll delve as deep as we can into that great, ever-changing musical river, of, er, change. Ok, give it a rest, Heraclitus... And enjoy it all, as ever, as 12.15 tomorrow!

Saturday 10th December 2011
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Suzy Klein talks to American soprano Renee Fleming about her career on the opera stage and the concert platform and discusses her passion for the music of Strauss. Suzy also talks to the author of a new book that explores the creation and reception of Stravinsky's ballets - works which changed everything in the world of dance in the early years of the 20th century.

Renee Fleming is a woman who understands that mystery and rarity can work wonders for an opera singer. Her reputation is built not on the showy bel canto roles usual for a soprano but instead, as she puts it, ‘a couple of Massenet roles and Rusalka’. Just why audiences have come to treat her with such adoration and reverence is down, in part, to Fleming’s steely determination to succeed. Today she reigns supreme at the New York’s Metropolitan Opera, famed for her limpid voice, beautiful diction, her stagecraft. But more than that, she has crossed over from the operatic stage, forging a wider kind of stardom - even appearing on the David Letterman show! She's sung at President Obama’s inauguration and was the voice of America's commemoration of 9/11 at Ground Zero.

On Music Matters this week, Renee Fleming talks about her determination and single-mindedness, and how singing for her is a ‘personal form of validation’. She speaks frankly about coping with pressure, the fear of performance and how she wishes she were ‘more of a diva’.

If Renee Fleming has devoted her professional life to her art, then the oboist Christopher Redgate is similarly evangelical about his. Finding that the traditional oboe simply couldn’t scale the Herculean heights required by contemporary composers, Redgate set out to design a new instrument. His 21 st century oboe is historically rooted and clearly related to its traditional cousin, but it allows for a whole new palette of technical and tonal possibilities. Christopher gives us a guided tour of the new Redgate-Howarth oboe; we ask the oboist Janey Miller to give us her frank first impressions (and ask her whether she’ll be buying one!) and the composer Paul Archbold tells us how this new instrument expands his musical horizons. Expect a whole lot more quarter tones, multiphonics and screechingly/scarily high altissimo notes in the oboe music of the future.

One man who never shied away from the glistening, knife-sharp edge of ‘the new’ was Igor Stravinsky. His 11 ballets are one of the major musical achievements of the last century, a single imposing body of work that brought into its orbit some of the key cultural figures of the last hundred years, including Nijinsky and Diaghilev, Picasso, Cocteau and Balanchine. Now, the American academic Charles Joseph has chosen to focus his third Stravinsky book on those ballets. Leading choreographer and Director of Birmingham Royal Ballet David Bintley and Stravinsky scholar Stephen Walsh give us their verdict.

And as if that weren’t enough, we pop down to Bath to celebrate the unsung heroes of The Pump Room which for 300 years has been providing live music, along with the promise of health-restoring waters. If tea and scones are more your thing than that famed reviving, sulphurous drink fear not: there’s a lot of clinking teacups as well as music at the Pump Rooms daily concerts, as you’ll hear in our feature…

In this week’s programme András Schiff gives the first broadcast of a new piece by Johannes Brahms in a soon to be published edition by Christopher Hogwood. They join me in the studio to explain the fascinating provenance and re-discovery of this little piece written by the 20 year-old Johannes. Written in 1853, the work - that Christopher has called 'Albumblatt', 'sheet from an album' (it does what it says on the tin...) - is a fabulously enchanting melody in A minor. But it's more than that: it's really a proper little piece with a beginning, middle, and end – and it also has more than a few secrets to give up. All will be revealed tomorrow by András and Christopher. Suffice to say there were goose-bumps in the studio as we all heard this piece for the first time in András's astonishingly sensitive, virtuosic hands!

Frederick Delius was born 150 years ago. Yes yes, another of those classical music anniversaries the industry is so obsessed with - but this time, there's a real job to do in bigging up the reputation of a composer who should be better known and loved. Confession time: I love Delius. But the very fact there's even a trace of embarrassment, of sharing something I shouldn't in that statement, shows the persistent problems with Delius’s legacy. Well that, and my being ribbed for liking all that cowpat stuff when I was at university. The scars run deep... Thing is, Delius is a great, unique figure. And he is not - at all!! - the sentimental pastoralist of his denuded reputation. Don't take my word for it - listen to composer Anthony Payne, writer Daniel Grimley, violinist Tasmin Little, and pianist Piers Lane, a crack team of Delians to convince you - should you need convincing - on the unbelievably moving brilliance of music like his violin sonatas or his string concertos, or t!
o renew your relationship with this astonishing music.

And we’ve pianist Stephen Hough with the latest of our reflections on the musical world in 2012. Stephen’s subject can be put quite concisely, in less than 140 characters in fact: would Rachmaninov have enjoyed Twitter? Stephen, whose blogs and tweets are some of the most fascinating of any classical musician anywhere, gives us his thoughts on the relationship between the public and private sides of being a world-famous concert pianist. Social media, as he rightly says, are here to stay.

Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola knew what it was like to be a prisoner. In 1917 when he was a teenager, he and his family were interred in Graz by the Austrians. It was an experience that haunted him, but it would take decades before he would turn the strength of those feelings into music. Mussolini's regime, and the Second World War were the catalysts, and the result is one of the most important operas of the 20th century: The Prisoner, first heard in 1948. That's my view at least – and much more importantly, it's what conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen thinks, who leads a performance in London next week, as you’ll hear. He and writer Misha Donat explain why The Prisoner is such an essential document of 20th century’s political and musical experience, and why its message is still so resonant today. Or even tomorrow - as ever, it’s all on Saturday at 12.15.

Saturday 28th January 2012
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Cellist Julian Lloyd Webber introduces four forgotten heroes of the cello-playing world and asks why cellists Felix Salmond, Milos Sadlo, Antonio Janigro and Leonard Rose are not better known. He tells the story of these cellists, introduces rare and relatively unheard recordings, explores how they inspired him and looks at how the art and style of the cellist has changed through the centuries. With contributions from music historian Tully Potter, Prof Robin Stowell from Cardiff University and cellist and conductor Kenneth Woods.

Saturday 19th May 2012
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service meets American pianist Murray Perahia at his home. They discuss Perahia's new theories about Beethoven's Moonlight sonata, his friend and mentor Vladimir Horowitz, his own development as a musician over the last ten years, and his love of jazz. Plus influential writer Christoph Wolff's new book Mozart at the Gateway to his Fortune.

Saturday, June 23rd, 2012 on BBC Radio Three from 12:15pm to 1:00pm

Celebrating Claude Debussy.

In a special edition, Tom Service travels to Paris to hear the French view of Debussy. Trying to unlock the elusive musical world of the composer often called an 'impressionist', Tom visits a cafe where Debussy would meet Proust and other writers, artists and thinkers, and learns that behind the mist and colours of Debussy's music lies rugged and innovative musical structures. And Tom finds that the composer of works such as Claire de lune, Pelleas et Melisande and the orchestral masterpieces such as Jeux and Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune was a great thinker, a lover of literature, fine wines and expensive tobacco, and a man beset by financial success and concerns.

Welcome to the Music Matters newsletter.

Music Matters

Saturday 3rd November at 12.15pm on BBC Radio 3

Follow the Music Matters team on Twitter - visit our homepage: www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/musicmatters

Hello

It's one of the biggest myths out there: that classical music is something that everyone ought to have the chance to experience, that its inherent qualities will speak to anyone on the planet if only they had the chance to hear it, that being part of classical musical culture as a musician, a listener, or a composer, will improve your life and - some say - might even make you a better person. In short: classical music is for everyone. Surely that's as uncontroversial as saying, you know, Radio 3 is a Good Thing? Or that music education is something that every child in the country ought to have access to? Or that air and water are necessary for our survival?...

But hold on a minute: what on earth is so special about classical music that means it should receive exponentially more state funding than any other genre? And why should this particular kind of music with its freight of history, patronage, and behemothic institutions be something that every person should enjoy? Isn't it ok to think that, really, classical music isn't for you, that it's an elitist art-form that has little to say to today's culture?

The reason I ask all this is that we're at The Sage, Gateshead tomorrow for a live show as part of our Free Thinking festival of ideas, debate - and music, asking exactly that question: Is Classical Music For Everyone? And we've put together a panel of people who will stoke the fires of polemic and pugnacious revelation on this social and ethical question about classical music's much-vaunted pseudo-universality.

Ladies and gentlemen, we present: Birmingham Opera Company's founder and artistic director, Graham Vick, a man who has done more to create new meanings and new communities for the performance of opera over the last 25 years than anyone else on the planet, I think; Paul Morley, ex-NME writer and author turned contemporary classical composer; Zoë Martlew, cellist, educationalist, avant-cabaret-artist, blogger, and commentator and Kathryn Tickell, Northumbrian pipe virtuoso, teacher at the University of Newcastle, and someone who sees classical music culture from inside and outside. All of their insight to look forward to, and we'll also hear from a colloquy of other voices, including Mariam Said and AC Grayling, on why classical music, they think, really can be for everyone.

But you can't take that for granted. So I hope we're going to take a good, hard, controversial look at issues like: what's wrong with elitism? Aren't some art-works designed to be complex, critical, and not for everyone? Are the claims for classical music's universality and power to heal social divisions based on real evidence or lazy clichés? Isn't classical music the over-privileged, periwigged cousin of the other musics that actually matter much more to more people: folk, pop, jazz? What is the value of classical music to community, to culture, in our contemporary world? And what's the point of that strange formulation, 'new classical music'? If we don't open all these questions up honestly and unflinchingly, we can't really make an argument for why classical music matters - if you think that it does!... So join us and our live audience tomorrow for a crucial discussion, and you too can be a sage at the Sage. Promise the jokes will be better tomorrow; find out at 12.15.

Tom

Now there's a real sadness to tomorrow's programme; a sense of loss - but also celebration. That's because, as you'll know if you've been hearing any of the music news of the past couple of weeks, we've lost two of the gigantic figures of post-war music: the German composer Hans Werner Henze, who was 86 when he died at the end of last month, and the American composer Elliott Carter, who was in his 104th year before his death on Monday.

So with critic, author and librettist of Carter's only opera, Paul Griffiths, and composers Mark-Anthony Turnage and Detlev Glanert, who studied with Henze, I ask what they think the world has lost in the last fortnight, and what these two very different composers gave to music in a their decades of ceaseless creativity.

We hear Henze's inimitable, urbane voice in interviews he gave for the BBC over the years, talking how this lyrical, expressive composer formed his voice after the horrors of the Second World War, how the avant-grade rejected his music as too conventional, too emotional, and how he refused to toe any narrow party-line of style or of politics to create a musical world that sings and soars, which reflects his times and ours in its thrilling richnesses, contradictions, and poetry.

Elliott Carter's musical universe was completely different from Henze's; but what they shared was an irresistible compulsion to compose. Carter was working right up until his death, and he had written more music in the last couple of decades of his life than in his first 80 years - a unique phenomenon not just in music, but in the entire history of human creativity. Pierre Boulez tells us why his work is unique in musical history, and what compelled him to perform and commission Carter; Irvine Arditti, founder and leader of the Arditti Quartet, talks about Carter's string quartets and their significance in renewing the genre; and Pierre-Laurent Aimard remembers Carter at recent Aldeburgh Festivals, where he's the Artistic Director, and how the music Carter composed in his second century had the energy, vivacity, and imagination of that of a young man.

Above all, what you'll hear tomorrow is a sense of wonder and inspiration at what Henze and Carter achieved. That we now know the limits of their gifts to the world is a sadness, but it should also be a catalyst to discover the life-enhancing richness of their music. As ever, it's all tomorrow at 12.15.

Tom

Music Matters

Saturday 17th November at 12.15pm on BBC Radio 3

Follow the Music Matters team on Twitter - visit our homepage: www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/musicmatters

Hello,

Opera. What’s that all about? Now, for you and me, the greatest of composite art-forms might very well be anything from quite simply the most magnificent summation of human creativity in the modern era, or it could be 'subsidised foreign vowels', as rottweiler spin doctor Jamie puts it in The Thick Of It. But whichever end of the spectrum you find yourself, you can't deny its importance over the last 400 years.

Ambitiously, and possibly brilliantly - you'll see what I mean - Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker have tried to sum the whole tetra-centenary of words+music up in a single volume, a new book they have written together. And they really have written it together: each sentence bears the imprint, they say, of both their hands, telling the story from Monteverdi to John Adams. Roger and Carolyn explain the celebration - and pessimism- of their vision of opera (its future repertoire, at least), and tenor Ian Bostridge and writer Sarah Lenton tell us what they make of their tome.

Calixto Bieito is one of the most quixotic, dazzling, and revealing people I think I've ever interviewed for Music Matters. His productions are, for many, a byword in sensual excess, cultural criticism, and, for some, the nadir of what happens if you allow a director free rein over Mozart, Verdi, Wagner et al. Nudity, simulated sex acts, rows of toilets, they can all be there in a Bieito show. But his defenders say that what Bieito's riotous productions do is create new meanings that help sustain the cultural mausoleums of our opera houses. Meeting the Spanish-born Calixto before his production of Carmen opens at English National Opera, I encountered one of the most fearlessly, restlessly, even recklessly creative people working in opera today, whose mind - as you'll discover - works just as mercurially and vividly as his visions of Bizet or Verdi.

American composer Meredith Monk, who turns 70 next week, never set out to be part of the future of opera. But you could say that's what a lot of her pieces have ended up doing. Her practice flows from and is rooted in her voice: Monk's work with movement, dance, theatre, ritual, lighting, and instrumental music all comes from the modern yet mythical use of her extraordinary voice, still as strong and resonant as ever. Meredith tells me how her work was born in the avant-garde of New York in the 60s and 70s. But instead of the fragmentation and deconstruction that so many of her colleagues were up to, Meredith's work was all about putting things together, about making a multi-faceted art-form in pieces like Dolmen Music, Epic, Atlas, or one of her recent projects, Songs of Ascension, that's as indebted to Zen as it is to American experimentalism.

Above all, her music is direct, mysterious and absolutely unlike anyone else's. If you're new to Monk, enjoy being introduced to her world tomorrow; if you're already a fan, you'll hear how she sees the world from the perspective of turning 7 decades young.

Tom

Saturday, November 24th, 2012 on BBC Radio Three from 12:15pm to 1:00pm

Pianist Andras Schiff talks to Tom Service about his performances of all of Beethoven's piano sonatas. Tom is joined by soprano Janet Baker and music critic Michael Kennedy to explore the latest volume of Britten's letters to be published, as they discover what the they reveal about the last ten years of the composer's life. And Irvine Arditti, the first violinist with the Arditti Quartet, talks to Tom about John Cage's Freeman Etudes and the influence that the Arditti quartet have had on 20th and 21st century string quartets.

For András Schiff, Beethoven's sonatas are gigantic Himalayan peaks of musical and human achievement whose complete traversal - without crampons but with a transcendent technique and sense of revelation - has become an essential part of his musical life. Having already played them all 20 times, and recorded them, too, he's just embarked on yet another survey of the 32 sonatas. He came into the studio and, at the piano, revealed how the pieces have accompanied his whole life in music, why he waited until he was 50 to attempt the last two sonatas, Op 110 and 111, and what listeners who come on his complete Beethoven expedition can expect to experience.

Benjamin Britten would have been 99 on Thursday; 99 St Cecilia's Days from his birthday in 1913. So as an upbeat to his centenary, I'll be talking about the latest - and last - volume of his selected correspondence that's just been published, letters that cover the period up to his death in 1976, and a new book of Britten in Pictures, which has some astonishingly candid images and photos of this most reticent and publicity-shy of great composers.

The Letters are no less revealing, with some unflinching and moving evidence of what Britten went through in the last few illness-wracked years of his life and the tenderness of his relationship with Peter Pears. Janet Baker features in the very first letter in the book, and I talk to her - for whom Britten wrote one of his last masterpieces, Phaedra, in 1976 - and writer Michael Kennedy, who also knew Britten, about whether these letters are essential illumination or give the reader too much information. And we hear from the book's editors, who provide astonishing detail in the notes that accompany each of Britten's missives.

All that, and we hear about Britten the reluctant public figure as he appears in photographs throughout his career; how Lucy Walker chose from the thousands in the Britten-Pears Archive, and how snapper Nigel Luckhurst managed to capture the real Britten in sessions towards the end of his life.

Violinist Irvine Arditti has a unique claim to fame. He's quite simply one of the most important musicians playing today. Why? Because ever since he founded the Arditti Quartet, he has been responsible for almost single-handedly making the string quartet a vital force in contemporary music. He and the quartet have commissioned more than 500 pieces in nearly 4 decades, and have established a performance practice for the quarters of Elliott Carter, Brian Ferneyhough, Helmut Lachenmann - and literally hundreds of others! - that could not have existed without him. Irvine tells me how his life has been shaped by his relationships with new music and its composers, from Cage to Stockhausen - and beyond. As ever, it's all at 12.15 tomorrow.

Tom

Saturday 15th December 2012
Welcome to the Music Matters newsletter.

Music Matters

Saturday 15th December at 12.15pm on BBC Radio 3

Follow the Music Matters team on Twitter - visit our homepage: www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/musicmatters

Hello,

Musical echoes of Christmas past this week, from the folk plays of these isles to the music of 17th century Germany. We’ve sounds remembered from across the last year, too, with my personal selection of Music Matters’ “best bits” of the last 12 months. And we pay tribute to a great thinker about, and player of, music: the pianist and writer Charles Rosen who died this week.

Nicholas Kenyon was good enough to be my guide to the life and work of Rosen and he began by telling me that Charles was a larger-than-life character; an old-fashioned intellectual of the sort they just don’t make any more. Rosen didn’t do pleasantries or small talk – he’d simply dive into a conversation with a spot-on comment or criticism of some area of musical culture. He wrote prolifically about his passions: the balance and beauty of Classical music, the Romantic generation and French food. Seldom has there been a musician whose clarity of expression, passion and belief made for such compelling reading.

There was also passion and belief aplenty when I visited the Crown Inn in Pewsey, Wiltshire. Here Bob Berry and his cohorts in the Potterne Christmas Boys troupe regaled me with their stories of Mummers plays – the traditional folk plays put on in England since the 18th century. After untangling the wonderfully silly plot of their own play (involving Father Christmas, a Spanish quack doctor and a Turkish Knight called ‘Turkey Snipe’) I settled down in front of the fire and was well and truly entertained as they gave an impromptu performance. There’s a picture of me and the boys on our website – but they’re dressed in their civvies. I’m afraid you’ll just have to imagine them in full festive costume with tattered coats and trousers, carrying swords and shields….

Meanwhile, some of our other Christmas traditions come from further away from home. Festive hymns and carols like In Dulci Jubilo and Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland were popularised during the golden age of the Hanseatic League and are still heard at this time of the year. The League was a collection of city-states that stretched from Novgorod in Russia to Kings Lynn in England and centred on what is today Germany. In this thriving musical world, composers such as Praetorius, Sweelinck, Schutz and Scheidt worked in its cities. Music historian Dr Stephen Rose and Gawain Glenton of the English Cornet and Sackbut Ensemble tell me how and why the Hanseatic League created such musical riches, and the early music supremo Reinhard Goebel joins me to explain why Hanseatic music remains a crucial part of Germany’s cultural heritage.

Finally, I cast my eye back over a packed Music Matters year, choosing some of my favourite moments. We hear composer John Adams talking his ever-controversial opera The Death of Klinghoffer and the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt on the necessity of always taking musical risks. There are also appearances from Metropolitan Opera boss Peter Gelb, pianist Andras Schiff, and the conductor Antonio Pappano among others.

It’s our last programme of the year, so I hope you can join me at 12.15 tomorrow to send out 2012 in style. Have a great new year!

Suzy

Welcome to the Music Matters newsletter.

Music Matters

Saturday 5th January at 12.15pm on BBC Radio 3

Follow the Music Matters team on Twitter - visit our homepage: www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/musicmatters

Hello,

'Semper Dowland, semper dolens'... That's a cheery wee epithet to start the new year, isn't it?, the motto of British music's greatest melancholic, the 'always sad' John Dowland, lutenist, composer, and quite possibly sometime spy, whose life traversed the 16th and 17th centuries. Dowland's life, even what little we know of it, is full of riches and enigmas, and his music created a directness of emotional expression and technical sophistication that his contemporaries admired but it was a uniqueness that would take centuries for the world to really understand.

Today, everyone from Harrison Birtwistle to Sting is bewitched by the power of Dowland's songs and instrumental pieces. So tomorrow we present a Dowland investigation in two parts: I meet Dowland’s biographer Peter Holman at the Royal Academy of Music to encounter a Dowland treasury of prints and manuscripts, and in the reverberant cistern of the Chapterhouse of York Minster, countertenor Iestyn Davies and lutenist Jacob Heringman perform arguably Dowland's most important single song, In Darkness Let Me Dwell. There's a connection with the Danish court at the end of the 16th century there - but you'll just have to listen tomorrow to find out more!

Violinist Midori is on a mission: to play the recitals and concertos to the stratospheric standards she has set herself ever since her debut three decades ago with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at the age of 11 but also, through her charitable foundations, to transform the lives of schoolchildren through music. And not just in her adopted America, either, but all over the world: she’s just come back from a project in Bangladesh, and is in occasional residence this year at the Wigmore Hall and with the Bridge Project in schools in London. Midori tells me how her education work inspires what she does on stage, and how her education programmes work with cultures and communities from New York to South-East Asia.

Marc Blitzstein was one of 20th century American music's great unclassifiables. He created a politically fearless music theatre in the 1930s that conquered Broadway - well, parts of it, anyway! - he was a passionate left-winger who wanted his music to help the cause of socialism in America, he was a brilliant pianist and lyricist, and someone whose virtuosity in styles from popular tunes to the avant-garde made him a key friend, ally, and inspiration for composers like Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. But for someone so influential, we still don't know enough of his music. So is that history's fault or his? A new biography of Blitzstein by Howard Pollock tells the story of his colourful and tragic life and remarkable music; we talk to the author, and musicologist Tim Carter tells us whether the book is all you need to know about Marc Blitzstein.

Composer Richard Rodney Bennett died on Christmas Eve at the age of 76. Richard's brilliance as a musician - as well as his operas, concert works and choral music, he was an Oscar nominated film composer, a fabulous jazz pianist, and an inimitable singer - I think made some people underestimate his unique contribution to musical life. He said that he wanted his music to be useful and to sound beautiful. And whether it’s in his concertos or symphonies, his scores like the waltzing brilliance of his music for Murder on the Orient Express, or his songs, I think he succeeded, and succeeded dazzlingly. Composer Oliver Knussen tells us why Richard’s music is so significant for him and for us all. As ever, it’s all at 12.15 tomorrow.
Tom

Saturday 26th January 2013
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

At the beginning of Britten's centenary year, tenor Ian Bostridge celebrates a composer whose work is at the heart of his repertoire.

Saturday 23rd February 2013
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Roderick Swanston explores musical deletions, revision and completions, tracing the process of how works reach their final version, uncovering some intriguing stories along the way and offering a vision of the creative process that is all too often ignored. Featuring music by Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Elgar, Mahler and Bruckner and insights from Christopher Hogwood, Anthony Payne, Barry Cooper, John Williamson and Lois Fitch.

Saturday 13th April 2013
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

To mark the 50th anniversary of Francis Poulenc's death, Tom Service assesses the composer's reputation and legacy, visits his old haunts in Paris and his beloved home in the Loire Valley where he escaped city life to compose.

Saturday 20th April 2013
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Suzy Klein remembers late conductor Sir Colin Davis hearing from those he knew, and delving into the archive to hear his thoughts on music and life, in his own words.

Saturday 15th June 2013
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Michael Gove, the secretary of state for education, talks to Tom Service about his plans and policy for music education and where he believes music sits in the national curriculum. Tom visits Sheffield to talk to musicians working with a new digital archive of English folk music called The Full English - which makes 12 collections available online to the public for the first time and has a taste of pieces derived from the archive performed by Martin Simpson, Fay Hield, Nancy Kerr, Rob Harbron and Sam Sweeney. Tom talks to Michael Haas, the author of Forbidden Music, which unravels the unexplored story of Jewish composers banned by the Nazis and the musical trends they established before being banned, murdered and exiled. Tom also assesses the book with musicologists John Deathridge and David Nice. And as part of Radio 3's British Music Month he talks to Deirdre Mckay and Ryan Molloy about what it means to be a Northern Irish composer.

Saturday 29th June 2013 (starting tomorrow afternoon)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

In Britten's centenary year, tenor Ian Bostridge celebrates a composer whose work is at the heart of his repertoire. Above all, Bostridge reflects on the greatness of Britten's vocal music, so much of which was written for the tenor voice. He pays tribute to Peter Pears, whose lifelong interpretation of Britten's music he greatly admires. He reflects on why Britten has never been fully absorbed into the mainstream of classical music and considers whether it has something to do with Britten's preoccupation with troubled, alienated characters and situations - exemplified in operas such as Peter Grimes and Turn of the Screw.

Saturday 13th July 2013 (starting tomorrow afternoon)
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Mckinney meets guitarist Julian Bream on the eve of his 80th birthday to discuss his career and a defining composition by Benjamin Britten that helped to elevate him and his instrument onto the global stage. With contributions from guitarist Craig Ogden, Britten expert Mervyn Cooke and Bream biographer Tony Palmer all discusing the legacy of the Nocturnal and of Bream's remarkable contribution to the guitar's history.

#77 - That was a delightful and informative programme on a man who should long ago have been Sir Julian.

Saturday 14th September 2013
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Verdi.

Tom chairs a discussion with a panel of guests including actor and broadcaster Stephen Fry, bass Robert Lloyd, the directors Graham Vick and Kasper Holten and the conductor Simone Young, focusing on Verdi and Wagner and how they each revolutionised opera in the 19th century.

Strauss 150.

In a special edition of Music Matters marking the 150th anniversary of the birth of Richard Strauss, Tom Service travels to Garmish-Partenkirchen, near Munich, where the composer made his home for more than 40 years and where he wrote many of his most important works including Elektra. As a festival celebrating Strauss begins, Tom is shown around Villa Strauss, the composer's former home, by Strauss's grandson, Christian. He hears from musicians including mezzo-sopranos Brigitte Fassbaender and Christa Ludwig about what the composer means to them, and Dr Christian Wolf from the Richard Strauss Institute, who talks about how Strauss is viewed more than 60 years after his death.

Saturday 5th July 2014
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

In a special live edition in front of an audience at Glyndebourne's Ebert Room, Petroc Trelawny and a panel of five opera practitioners discuss the question 'why does opera matter today?'. On the panel are bass Sir John Tomlinson, conductor and opera company director Wasfi Kani, music journalist Paul Morley, opera director Annilese Miskimmon and Glyndebourne's general director David Pickard.

Saturday 6th September 2014
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

In an exclusive encounter, two of arguably the greatest living composers - Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Sir Harrison Birtwistle talk to each other - and to Tom Service - about their parallel lives in music and modern Britain.

Saturday 1st November 2014
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Live from Sage Gateshead for Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival, Petroc Trelawny chairs a debate about how far knowledge can enhance our understanding and appreciation of classical music. Petroc considers questions such as how much we need to know about composers' lives to engage with their music, the importance attached to 'authentic' performance practice and what is the 'definitive critical edition'. He also asks how much knowing more than just the 'best parts' of a piece improves the listening experience. With guests including Sir Nicholas Kenyon, managing director of London's Barbican Centre, Glasgow-based music critic Kate Molleson and Professor Cliff Eisen of King's College, London.

Saturday 8th November 2014
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Presented by Petroc Trelawny. Including conversation with Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire who has just turned 70, and writer and composer Jan Swafford discussing his new book Beethoven, Anguish and Triumph. Plus critics Alexandra Coghlan and David Nice reviewing a new Royal Opera House production of Mozart's Idomeneo and the second of Anna Meredith's Postcards from China, in which she reflects on her residence in Hangzhou.

Saturday 22nd November 2014
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Presented by Tom Service. With conversation from Turkish pianist Idil Biret and S Andrew Granade with a profile of 'hobo' composer Harry Partch, one of the most distinctive and influential American composers of the mid-20th century. Chris Walton talks about his latest book, Lies and Epiphanies, which explores the inspiration of five composers from Wagner to Berg. Plus composer Anna Meredith's final Postcard from China, where she has been collaborating with local people in Hangzhou on a 'musical audio map' of the area.

Saturday 29th November 2014
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Tom Service is joined by countertenor Robin Blaze and musicologist Tess Knighton to review Ellen T Harris's new Handel biography A Life with Friends, a book which explores letters, diaries and personal accounts in search of the private man behind the public persona. John Bridcut talks to Tom about his new BBC Four documentary about Herbert von Karajan which traces the maestro's career from his work with the Philharmonia Orchestra after World War II, to his long tenure as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. And as London's Wigmore Hall celebrates the viola from the Baroque to the present day, Tom talks about the instrument and the music created for it with composer Brett Dean and violists Tabea Zimmermann and Garth Knox.

Saturday 31st January 2015
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

Presented by Tom Service. Pianist Kirill Gerstein talks about a new critical edition of Tchaikovsky's ever-popular First Piano Concerto, which returns the work to the version authorised by the composer at the end of his life. Tom also profiles American harpsichordist and music scholar Ralph Kirkpatrick, exploring Kirkpatrick's legacy with his niece, Meredith Kirkpatrick, who has edited a new collection of his correspondence, and with pianist and conductor Robert Levin. Tom also visits the School of Musical Instrument Crafts at Newark College in Nottinghamshire to find out about the courses they run for the making and restoration of instruments, from strings and woodwind to guitar and piano.

Saturday 25th April 2015
Time: 12:15 to 13:00 (45 minutes long)

As the Royal Opera House prepares its new production ofKing Roger, Karol Szymanowski's powerful last opera, Tom Service travels to Poland to explore the life of the most celebrated Polish composer of the 20th century. Tom visits the Villa Atma in Zakopane, Szymanowski's final home in the Tatra Mountains, now a museum dedicated to his life and works, and the National Museum in Krakow, which houses sketches of the ballet Harnasie. He is joined by writer and Polish radio host Alek Laskowski and the curator of the Villa Atma museum, Malgorzata Janicka-Slysz, while two Polish musicians - violinist Kaja Danczowska and pianist Janina Fialkowska - give their views on Szymanowski's music. Tom also asks the Royal Opera's conductor Antonio Pappano, director Kasper Holten and the Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien how their new production explores the struggle between human reason and sensual desire in Szymanowski's masterpiece.