Lopa Kothari presents new world music and a session with singer-songwriter Vusi Mahlasela. 
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Andreas Staier on Bach’s Goldberg Variations
Tom Service talks to the harpsichordist and pianist Andreas Staier about how Bach’s gigantic, complex, playful, cosmic work, with its Aria and 30 variations, has been giving him sleepless nights for the whole of his life in music. He only recorded the piece a couple of years ago, and plays it at Wigmore Hall in London this weekend, and for Staier, the Goldbergs are simply the summit of the repertoire – not just Bach’s, but for the keyboard as a whole.
Photo: Andreas Staier © Eric Larrayadieu for Harmonia Mundi -
A Choral Christmas at King’s College, Cambridge
Tom travels to King’s College Chapel in Cambridge from where the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols is transmitted around the world every Christmas Eve. There he meets composer John Rutter and historian Christopher Page to explore the medieval pre-history of the Christmas Carol and its contemporary significance as the pre-eminent musical form of Christmas’s joyous religious and popular celebrations.
Photos: John Rutter © BBC Professor Christopher Page © Anne Dunan -
György Ligeti - Of Foreign Lands and Strange Sounds
György Ligeti died in 2006 and as is the way of things, it’s only after a great composer’s death that those who knew them best feel able to say what really happened in his classes, his rehearsals rooms, and his homes. Tom discusses a new book of essays on the composer with its editors Wolfgang Marx and Lousie Duscheneau. He finds that the book isn’t a warts and all attempt to reveal the truth behind Ligiti’s compositional genius but a celebration of a man and his music that will go on influencing composers and audiences as long as there are ears and minds to hear him.
Photo: Ligeti at a rehearsal in London 1989 © Foundation Ines Gellrich -
The Enchanted Island
New Year’s Eve at the Metropolitan Opera in New York will be celebrated with the premiere of The Enchanted Island, a contemporary “pasticcio” with a libretto by Jeremy Sams and conducted by William Christie. The idea is to create a baroque opera that would consist only of bejewelled brilliance instead of the longueurs of a surfeit of da capo arias. This entailed rifling through two centuries of musical history to find neglected hits by Leclair, Handel, Campra, Vivaldi et al, and knotting the whole thing together to tell a single story – in this case a fusing of Shakespeare’s The Tempest with A Midsummer Night's Dream. Tom talks to Jeremy Sams and William Christie and you can hear extracts of the music from members of the cast which includes Danielle de Niese, Joyce Di Donato, David Daniels and Placido Domingo. The opera will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Saturday 21st January 2012.
Photo: David Daniels as Prospero and Joyce DiDonato as Sycorax in “The Enchanted Island.” © Nick Heavican/Metropolitan Opera. Background image: Set design for "The Enchanted Island" by Julian Crouch
Broadcasts
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BBC Radio 3Sat 17 Dec 2011 12:15 BBC Radio 3
Podcast
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Music Matters
The latest news on classical music. Interviews with key UK and international performers, composers,...
