The Classic! Pod

The classical music quiz is back – and somehow it gets even more unhinged. This week: Saint-Saëns hiding  Carnival of the Animals  because it was too frivolous, Berlioz designing an orchestra of more than 800 performers, Schumann potentially destroying his hand with a finger-stretching contraption, Messiaen writing music in a prisoner-of-war camp, Christina Aguilera’s love of  Amadeus  and Ethel S...

We test each other on some of classical music history’s strangest stories. Why did Haydn make his orchestra walk off stage one by one? What happened when Beethoven’s hero Napoleon declared himself Emperor? How did Bach and Handel end up connected to the same terrifying eighteenth-century eye surgeon? And what exactly was Chopin writing to his male roommate? Along the way, we encounter Isadora Dunc...

In this episode, we catch up on a chaotic few weeks of music, travel and opera: Glyndebourne black tie etiquette, Waitrose picky bits, Zürich Opera House, Wagner’s Swiss exile, German churches with questionable air conditioning, Hong Kong and Shanghai choral adventures, and the strange ritual of the 90-minute countryside opera interval. We also talk about what makes summer opera festivals so seduc...

In Episode 6 of  The Classic! Pod , we’re having a good ol' fashioned MTD. This week, we look back at our own musical journeys: childhood music exams, terrifying adjudicators, sight-singing nightmares, memory slips, sweaty Grade 8 violin exams, rogue piano competitions, orchestral chaos, university recitals and all the weird little formative moments that come with growing up around classical m...

Who were the musicians, performers and teachers who first opened the door to classical music? In this episode of  Classic! Pod , Alex Maxted and Jonny Whiting talk musical idols in the broadest possible sense: not just the grand names — Callas, Pavarotti, Sondheim, Bernstein — but the performers, recordings, videos and teachers that shaped how they listen. There are formative encounters with Alici...

In episode 4 of  The Classic! Pod , we ask whether people are really “classical music novices” — or whether classical music is already everywhere, quietly sneaking into films, adverts, TV shows, video games, McDonald’s after 11pm, and probably your childhood without you even noticing. We talk about film music, John Williams,  Star Wars ,  Jurassic Park ,  Brief Encounter , Kubrick, Bach in unexpec...

In episode 3 of The Classic! Pod, we’re talking about new music: what it is, why people are sometimes scared of it, and why “modern” classical music somehow still often means Schoenberg — despite the fact that Schoenberg is now over 100 years old. There are also detours into seeing elephants, smelling elephants, Mahler titles, whether anyone writes symphonies anymore, and the eternal question of h...

In episode 2 of The Classic Podcast, we’re getting into our classical music hot takes — the opinions that might get us disinvited from polite concert conversation. We talk about staged overtures, children in theatre, why some productions feel a bit too eager to spell everything out, and whether opera acting has become overly physical. We also get into the composers and styles we just don’t quite c...

Welcome to the very first episode of  The Classic Pod . We’re Jonathan and Alex, and in this episode we’re introducing ourselves, explaining why we started the podcast, and getting into the strange, funny and occasionally chaotic experience of going to classical concerts today. We talk about concert etiquette, what on earth you’re meant to wear, whether anyone is actually concentrating the whole t...