Thoroughly Good Classical Music Podcast

Épisodes

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  237: Three Choirs 2026 in Gloucester with composer Grace Evangeline-Mason 01.08.2026 30min

  A scrapbook in sound: voices, reflections and field recordings from Three Choirs Festival 2026 in Gloucester — a postcard from two life-enhancing days.
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  236: Guy Johnston on Britten’s Cello Symphony 21.07.2026 41min

  Days before his BBC Proms appearance marking 50 years since the death of Benjamin Britten, cellist Guy Johnston talks candidly about his career, his influences, and his preparation for performance.
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  235: Pianist Beatrice Nicholas 17.07.2026 38min

  Beatrice Nicholas is a British concert pianist and composer. She performs the traditional classical canon, and she composes and arranges, fusing classical and jazz together. She's also a member of the Chineke! Chamber Ensemble, drawn from principal players of the Chineke! Orchestra.On the seventeenth of August, she makes her debut Upstairs at Ronnie Scott's — a set that runs from a straight Beethoven sonata through to jazz-trio reworkings of Chopin and Liszt, alongside Hazel Scott, Lil Hardin Armstrong, Florence Price and Margaret Bonds.
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  234: Laura Bowler and the Cheltenham Music Festival's Composer Academy 10.07.2026 28min

  Composer Laura Bowler on leading the Cheltenham Music Festival's Composer Academy, recorded on-site during the week of workshops in Gloucestershire. She talks about what conservatoire didn't teach her — pitching, funding applications, resilience — plus a look back at Houses Slide, her 2021 piece for London Sinfonietta and seventeen cyclists.
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  233: Belly of the Beast at Aldeburgh, Spitalfields and Edinburgh 21.06.2026 30min

  Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre isn’t a name many will recognise — despite an opera that reached the Paris stage in 1694, two books of biblical cantatas published three years apart, in 1708 and 1711, and a career that ran for decades either side of those dates. The point this episode seeks to highlight is that legacy isn’t always guaranteed. You’ll need more than talent writing and managing business, but history needs to preserve your role and if it doesn’t you’ll need some champions further down the line. Taken into Louis XIV’s court in her teens, she went on dedicating nearly everything she published to the king, managing the patronage as deliberately as she wrote the music. But history has to a large extent still buried her achievements. This podcast episode highlights a forthcoming run of stage settings of three of these biblical cantatas in a production entitled ‘Belly of the Beast’ It is the work of writer and producer Toria Banks (Hera) and director Jennifer Fletcher, who working with Mahogany Opera and Dunedin Consort stage Jonah, from the 1708 book, and Adam and Jephtha, from 1711. None of them has been performed in English before. Adam, as far as anyone in the room can establish,  hasn’t been performed at at all since the eighteenth century.Banks wrote the English text — her second outing with de la Guerre’s biblical cantatas, after staging two others from the 1708 book, Susanna and the Elders, and Judith, in 2023. This distinctive production will run in six venues in Edinburgh, Aldeburgh, Spitalfields, Perth, Glasgow, Whitehaven.
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  228 Repeat: Aldeburgh & Snape, 50 Years After Britten's Death 18.06.2026 38min

  This episode is being republished during this year's Aldeburgh Festiva. This episode was first published 1 June.Fifty years after Britten's death, Aldeburgh and Snape still carry his fingerprints — and still provoke the same question: what is this place actually for? In this special episode, contributors who've performed there, programmed it, and thought hard about its future speak in their own voices about why they came to East Suffolk, and why they couldn't leave.
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  232: Adrian Brendel on Tree of Strings 16.06.2026 36min

  Cellist Adrian Brendel on Tree of Strings, his new Dorset festival — the Harrison Birtwistle story behind its name, genre-mixing, and watching his father Alfred's final tour from the audience, occasionally incognito.
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  231: Bergen International Festival's Lars Petter Hagen 08.06.2026 44min

  Bergen International Festival Artistic Director and Chief Executive Lars Petter Hagen talks programming, audiences, leadership and listening in this special Thoroughly Good Classical Music Podcast episode - something of a pilgrimage for Jon Jacob.
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  230: Franco Fagioli 04.06.2026 38min

  Time with the most playful of interviewees, Franco Fagioli, recorded in Versailles in March 2026. Fagioli appears with Orchestra de l'Opera de Versailles at St Martin in the Fields on 13th June 2026.
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  229: Christophe Rousset on Lully, Mozart, and playing with rules 03.06.2026 33min

  Christophe Rousset is a harpsichordist, conductor, and founder of Les Talens Lyriques. In this conversation, recorded in Paris, he talks about completing his twenty-year project to record all thirteen of Lully's operas — a composer long dismissed as boring, and why that dismissal gets the history wrong.We also discuss the young Mozart as musical sponge, absorbing Jommelli and Gassmann before finding his own voice; the Amadeus problem and what it gets wrong about Salieri; the relationship between scholarly knowledge and artistic intuition; and the kind of authority a conductor holds — total in theory, useless if exercised clumsily.The closing distinction Rousset draws — between playing with rules and breaking them — turns out to be the most revealing thing he says.In this episodeWhy comparing Lully to Rameau is a category errorHow a twenty-year recording project accumulates rather than gets plannedThe young Mozart's debts to Jommelli and GassmannScholarliness versus intuition in the rehearsal roomPower, charm, and persuasion as a conductor"Playing with the rules" as a governing philosophy** SUBSCRIBER EDITION EPISODE **The Aldeburgh Festival subscriber edition is available via the podcast feeds on Spotify or Apple, and via the the Thoroughly Good Blog. £2.99 a month to get early access to this and future episodes. Subscribe now.
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  228: Aldeburgh & Snape 50 years after Britten's Death 01.06.2026 38min

  Fifty years after Britten's death, Aldeburgh and Snape still carry his fingerprints — and still provoke the same question: what is this place actually for? In this special episode, contributors who've performed there, programmed it, and thought hard about its future speak in their own voices about why they came to East Suffolk, and why they couldn't leave.
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  227: Claire Booth 24.04.2026 42min

  Sheffield Chamber Music Festival 2026 curator Claire Booth was asked a blunt question when she was invited her to put together this year's programme: why is selling a song recital so difficult? This year's Sheffield is the answer — or rather, her answer, or the argument. Or maybe its her case for it. Across a week of concerts, she pulls in Ravel's Scheherazade into the orbit of folk tales, positions Judith Weir's King Harald's Saga alongside a repeat performance of Gavin Higgins's Speak of the North, and premieres Julian Philipps's multilingual children's opera Henny Penny. Song sells itself because song tells a story. Recorded in the Royal Opera House café after a day of rehearsals, Claire talks about the Festival, a planned collaboration with Rufus Norris on Beckett, her 2025 RPS Singer Award, and — briefly, and with more disappointment than heat — Timothy Chalamet.
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  226: Huw Watkins 26.03.2026 41min

  Composer and pianist Huw Watkins explores his work, his musical language, his collaborations with musicians including Tamsin Waley-Cohen with whom he has released a new album on Signum, Reflection.
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  224: Lizzie Ball 28.01.2026 43min

  A conversation with violinist and singer Lizzie Ball that begins with “big announcement week” energy and opens into a thoughtful exploration of intimacy, collaboration, and how classical music can be presented with integrity, warmth, and curiosity — from Ronnie Scott’s new series to life on and off the stage..
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  223: Mezzo Soprano Katie Bray 09.01.2026 35min

  What’s the point of pursuing something you can never reach? Hope, apparently.Mezzo-soprano Katie Bray makes a compelling case. Her new album In Search of Youkali explores Kurt Weill’s musical response to longing, exile, and the fragile idea of belonging.
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  222: Penelope Appleyard 22.12.2025 25min

  Discover Penelope Appleyard's Live from London’s festive Jane Austen programme with Zeb Soanes and pianist Jonathan Delbridge: song, domestic music-making, and Regency wit brought to life in an intimate Christmas performance.
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  221: Revere Arts' Elise Brown and Class Ceiling 06.12.2025 14min

  How do we make the classical music industry inclusive for people from lower socio-economic backgrounds — when even the “comfortable” ones struggle to get a foothold?How does an industry that desperately needs a diverse workforce to survive remove the barriers it has quietly maintained for decades?
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  220: Composer and Sound Artist Ruby Colley 10.11.2025 39min

  Composer and sound artist Ruby Colley releases her new album Hello Halo on 14 November 2025 — a work shaped by field recordings, family archives, and her lifelong conversation with her nonverbal brother Paul.It premiered at King’s Place in February, evolved through performances at Aldeburgh’s Britten Weekend, and arrives now as both an album and a film — an invitation to listen differentlyI met composer Ruby for a cup of tea in Hastings. It was a joyous afternoon — unhurried, thoughtful, all very British. The resulting conversation was about the shared joy of listening — to sound, and to silence. It is one of those of handful of very special podcast interactions which captures the spirit of the moment and returns it in spades, perfect for a dark winter evening. Soothing, consolatory and motivating.
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  219: Writer Carole Hayman 03.11.2025 32min

  Carole Hayman is a writer, director and producer best known for creating the long-running Radio 4 comedy Ladies of Letters, and for her work across theatre, film and television.This conversation explores her fascination with understanding the motivations and actions of women who kill. When she began interviewing psychiatrists and families, a nurse warned her: “It’s a minefield — and no one escapes.”Material from those interviews became The Hive — an opera born from years of verbatim testimony, a four-screen installation, and, by Carole’s own admission, a slightly wine-soaked rehearsal that turned into something bigger.The Hive challenges the familiar, sensationalised image of the “female killer,” aiming instead to reconnect with the basic humanity of the people who’ve caused suffering.The opera premieres at The Tung Auditorium, Liverpool, in partnership with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, on Saturday 8 November at 7.30 pm.We talk about violence, laughter, and the ethics of turning other people’s pain into art — and about The Hive’s uncomfortable questions: how do we decide who’s guilty, and why do stories of murder fascinate us?
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  218: Vache Baroque's Betty Makharinsky 23.10.2025 37min

  Vache Baroque didn’t start with a five-year plan. It started with a can-do attitude. In 2020, soprano-producer Betty Makharinsky and conductor Jonathan Darbourne looked at a locked-down industry and staged Purcell's Dido and Aeneas outdoors—in eleven weeks. Since then they’ve built a distinctive live experience: bold repertoire choices, playful staging, circus performers, and sound design subtle enough that you barely notice it but absolutely benefit from. In this episode, Betty charts that journey—from scratch startup to trusted aesthetic—and why serving the audience sometimes means re-thinking tradition. Bear in mind this podcast does battle with some automated announcements from the Southbank Centre.