With his new memoir ‘Formation - Building a Personal Canon, Part I’ hitting bookshops, and a new collaborative album with the tenor Ian Bostridge released this week, the American Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau joins Kate Molleson to discuss his childhood in small town New England, his forays into the New York Jazz scene of the 1990s, his encounters with kind musical heroes and future collaborators, and what it means to be a musician. Telling the story the 18th-century “Irish giant” Charles Byrne, whose corpse was stolen to order and put on public display, Kate speaks to composer Sarah Angliss about ..read more

Marking the centenary of Hungarian composer György Ligeti, Tom Service talks to musicians who knew him and who love his music. Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and composer and conductor Thomas Adès explore the musical universe of the Violin Concerto; pianist Tamara Stefanovich describes meeting the composer and the intensity and fragility required to perform his music; Tom joins composer Anna Meredith in her studio to listen to one of his last works, the Hamburg Concerto; and György Ligeti’s son, the composer and instrumentalist Lukas Ligeti reveals the passion he shared with his father for ..read more

Tom Services talks to German baritone Christian Gerhaher during rehearsals for Alban Berg's Wozzeck at the Royal Opera House. Having recently recorded all the songs of Robert Schumann as well as Mahler, Brahms and Schubert, Christian reveals how he sees the differing role of the singer when performing lieder and opera, and why he believes celebrating the complexity of classical music will secure its future. Tom also meets singer, multi-instrumentalist and composer Rhiannon Giddens whose opera 'Omar' has just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music. The opera tells the story of Omar Ibn Said ..read more

Sara Mohr-Pietsch talks to violinist Nicola Benedetti as she prepares for her inaugural programme as Edinburgh International Festival director, becoming the first Scot to hold the position in the festival's 75-year history. Nicola discusses the challenges of balancing the festival job with life as a performer and sets out her vision for opening up music to a wider audience and deepening the culture of listening. We visit English National Opera to find out about a new staging of Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, 30 years after the first commercial recording of the piece shot to fame ..read more

Presenter Tom Service is joined by the Spanish pianist Javier Perianes, ahead of his concert at Wigmore Hall, to discuss the creative and musical connections between Enrique Granados and the trio of German composers – Robert and Clara Schumann, and Johannes Brahms. Javier explains why you don’t necessarily need to be a native to play Spanish music, and how composers from both the Iberian peninsula and across Europe draw inspiration from the folk music of their native land. Javier talks too about his plans to direct, from the keyboard, Mozart and Beethoven piano concerti with the Orchestre de C ..read more

Tom Service talks to conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner at his home in Dorset as he celebrates his 80th birthday later this week. His work as Artistic Director of his Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique has made him a central figure in the early music revival and a pioneer of historically informed performance. Together with the musicians from his performance groups, John Eliot Gardiner has performed and recorded repertoire which spans five centuries, from Monteverdi to Berlioz, Schutz to Schumann as well as the two composers he’s especially ass ..read more

Kate Molleson marks the 150 anniversary of Sergei Rachmaninov's birth. She visits his home in Switzerland - after years of renovation, the beautiful Villa Senar, on the banks of Lake Lucerne, is reopening to the public. This is the peaceful summer residence where Rachmaninov lived in in the 1930s and where he composed the Rhapsody on a theme by Paganini and the Third symphony. Kate is shown around the Villa by its director Andrea Loetscher. They are joined by pianist Boris Giltburg, who is about to release his new Rachmaninov piano concertos disc, and who performs specially for Music Matters o ..read more

Kate Molleson talks to composer Anna Clyne, clarinettist Martin Frost and violinist Pekka Kuusisto together about the concertos Anna has written for the acclaimed soloists. The UK premiere of her clarinet concerto for Martin - Weathered - took place at the Royal Festival Hall this week, with Pekka conducting. Her violin concerto for Pekka - Time and Tides - will have its UK premiere in March 2024, with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Also, Marques L.A. Garrett tell us about The Oxford Book of Choral Music by Black Composers, which he has edited. It features 35 pieces from countries including B ..read more

Tom Service visits the installation Bigger and Closer at Lightroom in London, a journey into the creative mind of David Hockney, with images of his work projected on huge walls with a score especially written to accompany it by the American composer Nico Muhly, who explains how he devised music for such a project. Also Tom is taken through the installation by Lightroom's Chief Executive, Richard Slaney. Tom takes a look at 'A Thousand Splendid Suns', an opera which receives its world premiere in Seattle this week, based on Khaled Hosseini's novel spanning a generation about two women going thr ..read more

Tom Service visits Evelyn Glennie to discuss her life and career. As a soloist and improviser, the profoundly deaf musician created a role that had never existed in the classical world before, that of a solo percussionist. Growing up on a farm in Aberdeenshire, Evelyn Glennie’s journey to musical stardom took her through the Royal Academy of Music to playing at the Proms in 1992; she was a household name on TV throughout the late 80s and 90s, and led hundreds of musicians at the Olympic Opening Ceremony in 2012. She's commissioned an entire repertoire of concertos, has a vast archive of percus ..read more