Classical For Everyone

A percussion instrument is pretty much anything that can be hit, tapped, scraped, scratched or banged. In an orchestra it is generally the responsibility of the individual or small group of people up the back… the ones who get to make the most noise and have to master the most instruments and who, in this episode, help give us armies fighting on an ice covered lake, a peasant girl dancing herself...

If you've ever been puzzled why once you scratch the surface of classical music the name Johann Sebastian Bach seems to just keep turning up… this episode might offer some clues… beyond the fact that the music is pretty good. With the assistance of The English Concert, Maurizio Pollini, John Eliot Gardiner, Wolfgang Rübsam, Masaaki Suzuki, Glenn Gould, Itzhak Perlman, Christophe Rousset, Helena Ra...

Amongst all the instruments in the modern string family… violins, violas, cellos and double basses… it is the cello that most closely approximates the range of the human voice… from the lowest bass to the highest soprano and that may be one reason why it seems especially popular. Music from Josef Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, Edward Elgar, Sergei Prokofiev, Samuel Barber, Dmitri Shostakovich;  and,...

This episode of Classical For Everyone includes musicians slowly leaving the stage… lovers separated by the call of duty…  music for beginning a journey…  and music for a sad and very final farewell. A section of a symphony by Josef Haydn, eight minutes of a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart opera, a Felix Mendelssohn overture, maybe one of the saddest farewells ever written… from Henry Purcell, and the Ada...

This episode is all music written by people who have the particular distinction of still breathing. I think it's important to say that nowhere near all classical music is written by dead men from Vienna. One of the unintended consequences of a whole genre of music being called 'classical' is that associations with past eras can disguise the fact that exciting and brilliant new music is being writt...

There's a string quartet written by the American composer Morton Feldman in the 1980s that is about 6 hours long. 'Einstein on the Beach', the opera by Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson, is about five hours long and is performed without an interval. There is of course plenty of classical music that is well under these eye-watering durations. A Vivaldi concerto can be over in ten minutes… Aaron Copla...

This episode of Classical For Everyone is all about Night.. music that evokes the night… that captures the different moods of nighttime, and music written to be performed at night. Night in the Gardens of Spain, Moonlight over the Suffolk Coast, Midnight in a Chapel, Goblins in the bedroom, a walk in a deep, dark forest at night… a Nocturne… and a little night music. Sixty minutes of music by Manu...

Maybe the place to start... An eight-minute overview of the podcast including some unfairly brief excerpts from music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Dmitri Shostakovich, Johann Sebastian Bach, John Adams, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, George Gershwin and Ross Edwards.

If you're exploring classical music, you'll bump into the term 'sonata' everywhere - piano sonatas, violin sonatas, trio sonatas… even sonata-form. This mini-episode untangles the many meanings of this surprisingly variable word, from its simple origins in Italian to its complex modern uses. And suggests perhaps why composers keep using it when they want you to really listen.

Composers have drawn inspiration from the sea for centuries but only with the rise of the larger orchestras of the nineteenth century did they get the palate needed to create fully persuasive depictions of it. So, apart from one piece for solo piano, major orchestral works are what you will hear in this episode... 'The Sea and Sinbad's Ship' from Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's 'Sheherazade' an unfairly...

Spend any time with musicians who play in an orchestra it won't be long before they are sharing war stories of their experiences with dreadful conductors. The subtext of some of these conversations is a half-serious belief that the conductor is just a face for the poster, a body for fundraising events and a target for critics having a bad night… someone the orchestra could survive perfectly well w...

James Brown once sang, 'It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World' - and for centuries, classical music was exactly that. While talent knows no gender, opportunity certainly did, and countless musical voices were silenced by social barriers and prejudice. But some composers refused to be quiet. This episode introduces music by six women who found ways to make their voices heard: Fanny Mendelssohn, whose wo...

Ravel was born in the Basque borderlands of France in 1875 and much of his music can be thought of as Spanish rhythms meeting French elegance. He was accepted into the Paris Conservatory as a teenager to study piano but instead focused on composition. For the first couple of decades of his adult career he was not welcomed by the musical establishment of the day. But especially after the First Worl...

Sonata, cantata, concerto, adagio... for English speakers approaching classical music, these Italian terms can feel like an unnecessary barrier. This mini-episode explores how Italian became classical music's universal language… its journey from the cultural power of Renaissance Italy to today's international concert halls. A short look at why these terms are still with us, and (annoyingly) why kn...

Like many terms in classical music 'woodwind' is a vague catch all that is now a little out of date. After all, modern flutes aren't even made of wood anymore. But tradition is strong and everyone is going to keep calling them 'woodwinds'. More importantly, these instruments, whether crafted from wood, metal, or modern materials, have drawn composers to their distinct voices for over two centuries...

Composers respond to ideas, emotions, literature, people, history… and places. Places they've lived, places they've been and places they've only dreamed of. In this episode Felix Mendelssohn captures the echoes of Fingal's Cave, Peter Sculthorpe and William Barton evoke a rocky outcrop in Australia's Northern Territory, Charles Ives wanders through Central Park, Peter Maxwell Davies celebrates the...