Scott Ross - Harpsichord Rebel
In 1984, an American harpsichord player called Scott Ross quit a teaching job in Canada and returned to France, the country that since he was a teenager had been his adopted home. It was the year that...
15 Jan 202343min
Unlocking Anne
Anne Lock, a woman living in 16th-century England, wrote the first ever sonnet sequence in the English language? Impossible, thought Clare Pollard. As a celebrated playwright and poet, with much of he...
1 Jan 202343min
What Walls Hold
London. Tavistock House. 1851. It shaped Charles Dickens’ life and career. Home to The Smallest Theatre in the World, Mrs Weldon’s Orphanage and an alluring French lodger called Charles Gounod, Tavis...
25 Dec 202243min
Sunday Feature: Shostakovich and the Battle for Babi Yar
Dmitri Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony was inspired by an unflinching poem about the ‘Holocaust of Bullets’ at Babi Yar in Ukraine, one of the biggest massacres of World War Two. Lucy Ash pieces to...
13 Dec 202244min
Briggflatts - A Northern Poetic Odyssey
Rory Stewart travels across Cumbria and Northumbria from an ancient Quaker meeting house in Brigflatts, to a medieval tower on Newcastle city walls, in search of clues in Basil Bunting's life and work...
28 Nov 202243min
Sunday Feature: Florence Price’s Chicago and the Black Female Fellowship
The remarkable female musicians and activists who helped Florence Price's music to thrive
5 Aug 202243min
Tchaikovsky's Island of Inspiration
If it hadn’t been for Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s love of jam, he may never have completed his first large-scale work. After graduating from the Conservatory of St Petersburg, the 26-year-old started composin...
2 Jan 202246min
Then there was Light - Stockhausen and LICHT, his opera cycle based on the seven days of the week
LICHT, the vast opera cycle composed by Karlheinz Stockhausen between 1977 and 2004 is an enigma, and composer and broadcaster Robert Worby goes on a personal journey to find out why it divides critic...
12 Juli 202143min
