Thoroughly Good Classical Music Podcast

Half an hour with the artistic director and conductor of Insula Orchestra and Accentus Choir as scholar on how she programmes, how she rehearses and how her visuals drive her experimentation with concert formats.

Beethoven came back to the fugue again and again, but two of his fugues stand above the rest. One closes the Hammerklavier Sonata, a piece of around forty-five minutes. The other, the Grosse Fuge, started life as the finale of a string quartet before Beethoven separated it and published it as a work in its own right. Both are in B flat major, and eight years separate them. The pianist Nicolas Namoradze hears the second as the sequel to the first. On his new album for Ondine, he puts them side by side, and because the Grosse Fuge was written for string quartet, he’s made his own arrangement of it for solo piano.Lots of delicious detail follows about the fugue, about Beethoven’s use of it, and what the brain is up to when you’re sat at a piano keyboard.

Tenor Nick Pritchard and pianist Ian Tindale have marked seventy years since Gerald Finzi’s death with an album entiteld The Dance Continued released in September 2026. Alongside three existing tenor song cycles, the album also includes five songs Finzi never published, found in manuscripts at the Bodleian Library. Nick Pritchard was introduced to Finzi at sixteen; Ian Tindale when he was studying at Cambridge. In this conversation, we talk about how Hardy’s regret does to Finzi’s harmony, why a false relation lands like a pang, and whether it’s right to release songs a composer chose to keep to himself. Nick admits he’s conflicted. Spoiler: they did it anyway.

On Saturday 24 October, Britten Pears Arts stages the world premiere of My Father Cannot Speak: a seventy-minute opera scored for one singer and six instrumentalists, about a son trying to get his father to tell him who he is.Baritone Roderick Williams takes the lead. Composer Ben Parry, for whom this is a first opera, has teamed up with librettist and director Garth Bardsley, both of whom have collaborated for more than twenty years. What began as a poem, about a museum that locks its doors, quickly grew into this compact, sometimes funny, often deeply poignant 70 minute exploration of inter-generational relationships and the confusion and clarity that emerges when an inciting incident brings about a sudden pivot.I heard part of a rehearsal in the Britten Studio, then talked to the three of them for half an hour.We talk about the title and whether its double meaning was planned (it wasn’t), how you build seventy minutes for six players, including an accordion that breathes, and a singer and what demands that places on him, and why the director of an opera tends to ask opera singers to be less operatic.Tickets: https://www.brittenpearsarts.org/events/my-father-cannot-speak

Gavin Higgins & Mark Simpson discuss Higgins' new clarinet concerto premiered by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in October 2026.

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 thrown out of the Royal College of Music. It's a story about risk, and about the self-trust it takes to say yes before you know how to do it.

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 talk about the translation process … eventually. After we've tackled our view on the industry and the systemic barriers now in place limiting a new generation of composers and performers. None of it planned. A conversation that although bleak is, strangely for me at least, self-affirming.We start with new music, funding, and who gets to be trusted with a commission.

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