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 Smyth conducting imprisoned suffragettes with a toothbrush.Plus: Jonny arrives with a Wagner Pride T-shirt and a grievance from the Proms, Alex becomes classical music’s answer to Hello! magazine, and we discover just how much of our own musical knowledge we may have invented.Episode 9 of The Classic Pod is out now 🎧

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 Duncan dancing Wagner barefoot, the chaos surrounding the premiere of The Rite of Spring, some surprisingly operatic English queens – and take a detour to Bayreuth to ask what happens when AI enters Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk.

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 seductive, so expensive, and occasionally so absurd — from Glyndebourne and Longborough to Opera Holland Park and Garsington. Plus: Gerald Barry’s gloriously deranged The Importance of Being Earnest, Jorge Bolet playing Liszt, and why everybody should commission an opera immediately.

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 music.We also talk about what happens after studying music: job interviews, classical music media, arts work, bookbinding old scores, the strange smallness of the music world, and why being nice about other musicians should not be a controversial act.Plus, our Albums of the week take us from Rachmaninov’s choral music with Tenebrae to Mackerras’s gloriously fun Gilbert and Sullivan ballet Pineapple Poll.Expect exam trauma, career confusion, inexplicable dogs in dissertations, and probably too many things we had to edit out.Let us know your own musical highs, lows and horror stories in the comments.

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 Alicia de Larrocha’s crystalline pianism, Diana Damrau’s Queen of the Night, Joyce DiDonato’s masterclasses, Antonio Pappano’s piano-side opera explainers, Gerald Finley’s Figaro, and Stephen Sondheim in person — or, at least, in the same room. Along the way, Alex and Jonny consider the cult of the soprano, the risks of meeting your idols, the weird glamour of classical celebrity, and whether the art form might benefit from a little more screaming.Plus: dodgy conductors, accidental oboe trauma, The Magic Flute’s chaotic pacing, recommendations from Amadeus to Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, and the eternal question: who are your musical idols?

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 unexpected places, Lady Gaga’s extremely surprising connection to the Well-Tempered Clavier, and why film scores absolutely count as classical music. We also get into Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, video game soundtracks, Animal Crossing village tunes, Wii Music, and why composing for games deserves to be taken seriously.Along the way, there’s classical music in adverts, classical music as “fancy perfume energy”, Shostakovich in McDonald’s, MacMillan’s Seven Last Words from the Cross, and Jonny carrying a suspiciously large trombone case on the Tube.Plus, our recommendations of the week: a vivid, theatrical recording of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and Billie Holiday’s version of Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low”.Basically: you probably know more classical music than you think.

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 click with, from Chopin and Debussy to the broader question of why some music grabs us and some simply doesn’t.Along the way, we end up talking about everything from Handel and Puccini to Bach chorales, new music, Schoenberg, and why audiences still seem far more excited by the classics than by work being written now. It’s opinionated, slightly chaotic, and very much from the heart — in other words, exactly what you’d hope for from a podcast about classical music that refuses to be too serious.🎧 Listen to The Classic! Podcast EVERY other FRIDAY on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts🔔 Don’t Forget to Subscribe!📱 Follow Us on Social Media:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theclassicpod/Facebook: @theclassic!podTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_classicpod