Duo Windborne are two of Australia’s finest recorder players: Rodney Waterman and Ryan Williams. Their debut album, Venus Bay Fireside Sessions, is a record of their improvisational partnership. Originally intended to be recorded outside as a direct response to the natural world of Venus Bay, the weather drove them indoors and beside the fire – hence the title. They join Andy in studio with a fraction of their huge instrument collection to talk about their relationship with nature, their collaboration, and mount a defence of their much maligned instrument. Coral Reid is a fiddle player, a clog ..read more

Four pieces of music written in the years after World War II – Strauss’s Metamorphosen, Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Britten’s War Requiem, and Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony, ‘Babi Yar’  – paint a complicated picture of how European composers memorialised war in Jeremy Eichler’s new book Time’s Echo. Jeremy joins Andy on the show to trace the connections and conflicts in the ways that a German, a Jewish Austrian in exile, an Englishman, and a Russian looked back at the war(s) and the Holocaust. Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance by Jeremy ..read more

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners are advised that this program contains the name of someone who has died. Melbourne double bassist Sam Anning’s latest album is dedicated to Archie Roach. The album’s title Earthen comes from a remark Roach made from his hospital bed about instruments being ‘earthenware’—coming from the earth, carrying music and then returning to the earth. The septet on this record is made up of Anning's friends and long-term collaborators and he reflects on writing for specific people rather than instruments, and how tragedy and grief can become j ..read more

Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson is most of the way through an international tour that sees him playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations almost a hundred times, including his first ever performances in Australia. He joins Andy in the studio, in front of the piano, to talk about finding infinite variety in those Variations. We remember the late pianist Maurizio Pollini who died this week. “With Pollini things were never simple,” says Víkingur Ólafsson, “Chopin became the musical architect, Stockhausen the poet, Beethoven the philosopher. Many of us became better listeners and players.” Plus new mu ..read more

In the 1960s, the Les Girls Revue made Carlotta a star, and earned her the moniker “Queen of the Cross”. In Sydney’s red light district, she made a name for herself before hitting the road – she’d be the first to remind you that Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is at least partially based on her rural tours. Now she’s contemplating (but not committing to) retirement, she looks back at her career as an entertainer with Andrew Ford.   Maria Grenfell is a composer for the concert hall and for film, and also a teacher of composition at the University of Tasmania Conservatorium of Musi ..read more

From the rattling charge of The Lone Ranger to the slick, warbling vocals of White Lotus, music for television has been beckoning us to the couch for the best part of a century. In Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring, Jon Burlingame has charted the history of music for telly in the form of an elegiac sort of look back at the medium as streaming overtook network TV and the 2007 writers’ strike looked to have changed the medium forever. Now a new edition, released in the context of a new and bitterly long writers’ and actors’ strike, may serve as an elegy fo ..read more

Peter Garrett has still got a fire in his belly at 70. The True North, his new solo album, tackles similar ground to an Oils record—the climate crisis, politics and addiction to technology, but it's his own songwriting voice out front. The songs contain messages of hope and anger in equal measure. The music is provided by The Alter Egos (which includes Midnight Oil alumnus Martin Rotsey and The Jezabels' Heather Shannon) as well as his daughters Grace and May on backing vocals. Opera Australia is a beast of a company, most famously nestled beneath the sails of the Sydney Opera House ..read more

It was hard to miss Corinne Bailey Rae’s ubiquitous track from 2006 'Put Your Records On'. And it’s still heard in coffee shops the world over. The English singer songwriter released her fourth studio album late last year and it represented a complete left turn in both sound and subject. Black Rainbows is her first album not on a major label and spans genres like rock, jazz and punk. It's a celebration of Black history and resilience, with each track inspired by books, photographs and objects that Corinne encountered at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago. Ju Ben is a Fijian h ..read more

Simone Young, who has just renewed her contract with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra for another two years, talks about conducting Gurrelieder for the first time. Schoenberg's late-Romantic extravagance is one of the most sumptuous works of the twentieth century, and one of the biggest - such a concert hall rarity that Simone herself has never heard it live. We also talk about her forthcoming cycles of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung at the theatre Wagner himself built in Bayreuth, Germany. Eleanor McEvoy is one of Ireland’s foremost singer songwriters, and we pick up the conversation where we lef ..read more

An hour with two Irish living legends, singer songwriter Lisa O’Neill and concertina master Cormac Begley. Both stalwarts of the Irish traditional music scene, they united for an intense, wailing version of All the Tired Horses which was used in the final moment of Peaky Blinders. They play live and talk to Andy about what tradition means, how new writing can sing alongside the old songs, and the highs (piccolo) and lows (bass) of having a concertina collection. Including live performances of: All the Tired HorsesThe Green Groves of ErinTo WarOld NoteWhen Cash Was KingO’Neill’s March/Croppy Cr ..read more