Thoroughly Good Classical Music Podcast

Tenebrae began with no plan, no name and a dinner Nigel Short tried to get out of. Twenty-five years on, the choir marks its anniversary with concerts and a new album, The Journey . In this conversation, Nigel talks about the chance encounters that founded it, the pocket-money calculation that swapped a paper round for a parish church choir, and the Handel opera, learned overnight, that got him th...

Writer Fran Wilson's debut publication 'Facing the Music' captures a lifelong love of experiencing music both from a performer and an audience member's perspective. Buy the book in bookshops, Amazon and on Kindle Unlimited .

Does the world need another recording of the Elgar Violin Concerto? Yes, I think it does. This episode makes the case: a conversation with violin Thomas Bowes and pianist, composer and arranger Eleanor Alberga, celebrating a touching lifelong musical partnership with a new release on the Rubicon label featuring Sinfonia Arcadiana conducted by Nic Fallowfield.

In this episode, listen to singer Jessica Walker introduce the story of Barbara — the singer, composer and lyricist whose output equals Jacques Brel's, someone who sold over a million copies of a single song in a day, but who remains little known in the UK. Walker has spent years translating these songs, many of which are released in English for the first time on her new album La Solitude . We...

A scrapbook in sound: voices, reflections and field recordings from Three Choirs Festival 2026 in Gloucester — a postcard from two life-enhancing days.

Days before his BBC Proms appearance marking 50 years since the death of Benjamin Britten, cellist Guy Johnston talks candidly about his career, his influences, and his preparation for performance.

Beatrice Nicholas is a British concert pianist and composer. She performs the traditional classical canon, and she composes and arranges, fusing classical and jazz together. She's also a member of the Chineke! Chamber Ensemble, drawn from principal players of the Chineke! Orchestra. On the seventeenth of August, she makes her debut Upstairs at Ronnie Scott's — a set that runs from a straig...

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...