Thoroughly Good Classical Music Podcast

Composer Laura Bowler on leading the Cheltenham Music Festival's Composer Academy, recorded on-site during the week of workshops in Gloucestershire. She talks about what conservatoire didn't teach her — pitching, funding applications, resilience — plus a look back at Houses Slide, her 2021 piece for London Sinfonietta and seventeen cyclists.

Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre isn’t a name many will recognise — despite an opera that reached the Paris stage in 1694, two books of biblical cantatas published three years apart, in 1708 and 1711, and a career that ran for decades either side of those dates.  The point this episode seeks to highlight is that legacy isn’t always guaranteed. You’ll need more than talent writing and managing busine...

This episode is being republished during this year's Aldeburgh Festiva. This episode was first published 1 June. Fifty years after Britten's death, Aldeburgh and Snape still carry his fingerprints — and still provoke the same question: what is this place actually for? In this special episode, contributors who've performed there, programmed it, and thought hard about its future speak in...

Cellist Adrian Brendel on Tree of Strings, his new Dorset festival — the Harrison Birtwistle story behind its name, genre-mixing, and watching his father Alfred's final tour from the audience, occasionally incognito.

Bergen International Festival Artistic Director and Chief Executive Lars Petter Hagen talks programming, audiences, leadership and listening in this special Thoroughly Good Classical Music Podcast episode - something of a pilgrimage for Jon Jacob.

Time with the most playful of interviewees, Franco Fagioli, recorded in Versailles in March 2026. Fagioli appears with Orchestra de l'Opera de Versailles at St Martin in the Fields on 13th June 2026.

Christophe Rousset is a harpsichordist, conductor, and founder of Les Talens Lyriques. In this conversation, recorded in Paris, he talks about completing his twenty-year project to record all thirteen of Lully's operas — a composer long dismissed as boring, and why that dismissal gets the history wrong. We also discuss the young Mozart as musical sponge, absorbing Jommelli and Gassmann before find...

Fifty years after Britten's death, Aldeburgh and Snape still carry his fingerprints — and still provoke the same question: what is this place actually for? In this special episode, contributors who've performed there, programmed it, and thought hard about its future speak in their own voices about why they came to East Suffolk, and why they couldn't leave.

Sheffield Chamber Music Festival 2026 curator Claire Booth was asked a blunt question when she was invited her to put together this year's programme: why is selling a song recital so difficult? This year's Sheffield is the answer — or rather, her answer, or the argument. Or maybe its her case for it. Across a week of concerts, she pulls in Ravel's Scheherazade into the orbit of folk ta...

Composer and pianist Huw Watkins explores his work, his musical language, his collaborations with musicians including Tamsin Waley-Cohen with whom he has released a new album on Signum, Reflection.

A conversation with violinist and singer Lizzie Ball that begins with “big announcement week” energy and opens into a thoughtful exploration of intimacy, collaboration, and how classical music can be presented with integrity, warmth, and curiosity — from Ronnie Scott’s new series to life on and off the stage..

What’s the point of pursuing something you can never reach? Hope, apparently. Mezzo-soprano Katie Bray makes a compelling case. Her new album In Search of Youkali explores Kurt Weill’s musical response to longing, exile, and the fragile idea of belonging.

Discover Penelope Appleyard's Live from London’s festive Jane Austen programme with Zeb Soanes and pianist Jonathan Delbridge: song, domestic music-making, and Regency wit brought to life in an intimate Christmas performance.

How do we make the classical music industry inclusive for people from lower socio-economic backgrounds — when even the “comfortable” ones struggle to get a foothold? How does an industry that desperately needs a diverse workforce to survive remove the barriers it has quietly maintained for decades?

Composer and sound artist Ruby Colley releases her new album Hello Halo on 14 November 2025 — a work shaped by field recordings, family archives, and her lifelong conversation with her nonverbal brother Paul. It premiered at King’s Place in February, evolved through performances at Aldeburgh’s Britten Weekend, and arrives now as both an album and a film — an invitation to listen differently I met...

Carole Hayman is a writer, director and producer best known for creating the long-running Radio 4 comedy Ladies of Letters, and for her work across theatre, film and television. This conversation explores her fascination with understanding the motivations and actions of women who kill. When she began interviewing psychiatrists and families, a nurse warned her: “It’s a minefield — and no one escape...

Vache Baroque didn’t start with a five-year plan. It started with a can-do attitude. In 2020, soprano-producer Betty Makharinsky and conductor Jonathan Darbourne looked at a locked-down industry and staged Purcell's Dido and Aeneas outdoors—in eleven weeks. Since then they’ve built a distinctive live experience: bold repertoire choices, playful staging, circus performers, and sound design subt...

Pianist Clare Hammond is no stranger to the Thoroughly Good Podcast. She appeared here a few years ago to talk about performing Schubert in prisons. This time she returns with composer Michael Betteridge to discuss another prison project — one in which they co-created new music with prisoners, pieces Clare later performed. What follows is a conversation about impact — about leadership, trust, and...

When the leaves begin to turn and shifting clouds reveal brief bursts of autumn light, music like that on pianist Aïda Lahlou’s new album Mirrors and Echoes seems to meet the moment — even if you didn’t know there was one waiting to be met. The Casablanca-born pianist, winner of the 2024 Royal Overseas League Award, has assembled a beguiling selection of piano works by Beethoven , Brahms , and Rav...

Thirty minutes with one of the loveliest leaders in the classical music industry.

Violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen talks candidly about the additive experience of motherhood in this podcast episode recorded on Barbican terrace in mid-September 2025.

In this episode, conductor Alice Farnham is working with English Touring Opera in September and October in performances of The Elixir of Love and Britten's Rape of Lucretia. The productions pop up in a variety of different locations across England. Visit the ETO website for more details. When she and I met for this podcast interview, I provided a provocation. I'd seen something short and s...

In this episode, composer Julian Anderson discusses his new work Life Cycle , to be premiered by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in September 2025. Conducted by Stephan Meier, and featuring soprano Anna Dennis, the concert also includes Charlotte Bray’s Reflections in Time and the premiere of Serpentine by Birmingham composer Marcus Rock. At the heart of this conversation, though, is Anderson’...

Trumpeter Matilda Lloyd releases her third album on the Chandos Label featuring four premiere recordings by Roxanna Panufnik, Richard Barbard, Deborah Pritchard and Owain Park, alongside transcriptions of music by Johan Sebastian Bach, Martini, and Johann Ludwig Kreps. Matilda is an invigorating presence on the classical music scene, combining her craft with an astute eye for social media content...

Audiences. Strategy. Credibility. What does cultural leadership in classical music look like when credibility is tested by data? Sam Jackson - Radio 3 Controller and BBC Proms Director - talks to Jon Jacob about Radio 3's new sound, recent listening figures (have they been spun or are they actually improving?), strategy, and his role as an audience-facing leader in a changing BBC challenged by...