Classical For Everyone

The name comes from the night of the week when for some of us, the frustrations of insomnia hit the hardest… and because my preferred antidote is getting lost in some music. Of course this series is for everyone… but it is perhaps intended a little more for those of you whose sleep has been troubled. The idea of the special is to play just one piece, uninterrupted and in its entirety… with a few minutes of background explained at the end of the episode. This month… Ralph Vaughan Williams' Sixth Symphony. The BBC Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Andrew Davis.

This episode features a living musician, still very much in his prime… the Dutch cellist, Pieter Wispelwey. So, what prompted me to choose him? Well, a few things. I've been a fan for a long while and have been lucky enough to hear him play a number of times over the last three decades. And about 18 months ago the record company Channel Classics released a big box of CDs of recordings he made for the company… and they're terrific. And Wispelwey is equally at home with music from any of the last several centuries. Plus he is still touring… so for many of you listening to this podcast… he will be on a stage near you at some point and I recommend you grab the opportunity to hear him play. And perhaps most importantly I can get to play you some of the best music written for the cello… from Johann Sebastian Bach, Josef Haydn, Pyotr Illich Tchaikovsky, Benjamin Britten, Antonin Dvorak, Antonio Vivaldi, Dmitri Shostakovich and Peter Sculthorpe. [The episode photograph is by Michel Garnier.]

Much music has been inspired by love, passion or obsession… but only in a handful of cases has the person who was the inspiration… the muse… become publicly linked to a work. Here are the stories of six of them… Alma Schindler, Josephine Brunsvik, Kamila Stösslová, Peter Pears, Clara Wieck and Mathilde Wesendonck. And the music they inspired… by Gustav Mahler, Ludwig van Beethoven, Leos Janacek, Benjamin Britten, Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner. [The episode image is a photographic portrait of Alma Schindler taken about eighteen months before she met Mahler. It is likely the image was made by Moriz Nähr but the attribution is difficult to confirm.] *This episode is from back in April 2025. Whilst I am away from the microphone and the CD library for another week, I'm repeating one of my very favourite episodes. Enjoy.

Maurice Ravel (1875 – 1937) is arguably the most beloved composer France has given the world… able to take classical and pre-classical forms, absorb the harmonic colours of Impressionism, draw on the dance traditions of his Basque mother's heritage, and infuse his later work with the energy of early jazz. All of it synthesised into a language that is quite distinctly his own. In this episode… a section of his first Piano Concerto, the Pavane for a Dead Princess, a little taste of his String Quartet, the amazing orchestral work La Valse, or The Waltz, the 'Blues' section of his second Violin Sonata… and the irresistible 'Bolero'. Plus a little biography thrown in. *This episode is from the group that launched the podcast back in February 2025. Whilst I am away from the microphone and the CD library for a couple of weeks, I'm repeating some of my favourite episodes. Enjoy.

Music for the hour before dawn. Which is in no way intended to be too prescriptive… the episode can be listened to any time… but I hope it is music that has a calmness and perhaps a contemplative tone that suits the hour when there is a glow in the sky, things are at their most quiet… and you have the world to yourself. The music is by Felix Mendelssohn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Luys Milan, Josef Haydn, Georg Friedrich Handel, Rachel Portman, Nicholas Gombert, Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach. Regular listeners to the podcast might recognise a couple of pieces from earlier episodes. Forgive me for playing favourites. Now, for this show I am going to be pretty sparing in talk; but I'll add a few paragraphs on each piece to the episode's page at classicalforeveryone.net.

Music written by people related to the composer Johann Sebastian Bach. That may seem an odd way put a show together. If you were to make a playlist of the greatest hits of people related to Taylor Swift, it would be a very short list. But if you ever wanted to get into a complicated debate about nature versus nurture, the Bach clan of what is now northern Germany would be an interesting place to start. Somewhere between twenty and thirty relatives of Johann Sebastian Bach wrote music still recorded and performed two and three centuries later. And these were not merchants who wrote a few choral works for fun — these were people who made their living from music. As an aside… Of the six Bach relatives you'll hear in this episode, there is only one whose first name is not Johann. This is not going to be confusing at all.

The name comes from the night of the week when for some of us, the frustrations of insomnia hit the hardest… and because my preferred antidote is getting lost in some music. Of course this series is for everyone… but it is perhaps intended a little more for those of you whose sleep has been troubled. The idea of the special is to play just one piece, uninterrupted and in its entirety… with a few minutes of background explained at the end of the episode. This month… Johannes Brahms Fourth Symphony. The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Manfred Honeck.

The relationship between classical music and William Shakespeare's writing is one of the longest and most productive partnerships in the history of either art form. Composers have been drawn to Shakespeare's plays for four centuries and there is a vast amount of music to choose from. For this episode I have nine pieces, but only from four plays which suggests that some of the plays are perhaps more beloved by composers than others… Music from composers responding to 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', 'Romeo and Juliet', 'Hamlet' and 'Othello'. And those composers… ranging from the 19th century to the 21st are… Felix Mendelssohn, Sergei Prokofiev, Benjamin Britten, Hector Berlioz, Giuseppe Verdi, Dmitri Shostakovich, Frederick Delius and Thomas Adès.

I did an episode of music by women composers back in November based around a CD Box release by the record label 'Brilliant Classics' and called it 'Brilliant Women'. No prizes for imagination but it was clear and accurate. So, I am going to keep things simple and call this show 'More Brilliant Women'. I could also call it 'music I am genuinely extremely excited to play for you that just happens to be written by women'. But that would be a little cumbersome. What I can say is this is just fabulous music which I think there is a very good chance you will enjoy. In the next hour and a bit I am going to play music by Ethel Smyth, Augusta Read Thomas, Rachel Portman, Anna Clyne, Liza Lim, Katia Beaugeais, Jenny McLeod, Maria Grenfell, Elena Kats-Chernin and Florence Price.

The name comes from the night of the week when for some of us, the frustrations of insomnia hit the hardest… and because my preferred antidote is getting lost in some music. Of course this series is for everyone… but it is perhaps intended a little more for those of you whose sleep has been troubled. The idea of the special is to play just one piece, uninterrupted and in its entirety… with a few minutes of background explained at the end of the episode. This month… Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3 – 'Symphony of Sorrowful Songs' from 1976. Performed by the London Sinfonietta conducted by David Zinman featuring the soprano, Dawn Upshaw.

It's Classical For Everyone's 1st Birthday, so here's a personal favourite. This was the first time a choir and soloists had been added to a 'symphony'. Choral and orchestral music had been combined before but at the time there were quite rigid expectations of what a 'symphony' should be. That said there was a fascination amongst some parts of the Viennese audience with the way Ludwig van Beethoven seemed to be frequently tearing down traditions and replacing them with what somehow very often seemed to have been an innovation that was music's next natural step. And with the final movement of this symphony, Beethoven took that step. Suddenly there was singing. [Episode Image: Alfred Eiesnstaedt; Beethoven's Birth Room Bonn (1934)]

On the day this episode is released, the American composer Philip Glass celebrates his 89th birthday. In a career now lasting well over five decades he has somehow achieved two extraordinarily rare things for a contemporary composer of classical music... a prolific amount of creative output and a degree of broad popularity. For the next hour and a quarter please enjoy a quick survey of five decades of great music… films, operas, concertos, quartets… and an unfairly small section of solo piano music. Happy Birthday!

Representing the weather with music is probably an ancient practice. In our earliest superstitions the percussive blasts of thunder would probably have been mimicked to either flatter or placate the spirit world. And perhaps whoever was organising the noisy tributes to the sky gods got something of the same thrill as composers might when they decide to use the weather for inspiration. In the next hour I'm going to give you a sort of chronological meander through what a handful of composers have done with the idea of storms over the last three hundred years with music from Georg Phillip Telemann, Ludwig van Beethoven, Ethel Smythe, Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, Jean Sibelius, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten and John Adams.