Episodes
Feb. 9, 2025
Landscapes… Music for deserts, parks, rocks, islands and an entire continent.
Composers respond to ideas, emotions, literature, people, history… and places. Places they’ve lived, places they’ve been and places they’ve only dreamed of. In this episode Felix Mendelssohn captures the echoes of Fingal's Cave, Peter...
Feb. 9, 2025
Woodwinds… Great music for Oboes, Flutes, Clarinets & Bassoons.
Like many terms in classical music ‘woodwind’ is a vague catch all that is now a little out of date. After all, modern flutes aren't even made of wood anymore. But tradition is strong and everyone is going to keep calling them ‘woodwinds’....
Feb. 9, 2025
Mini-episode: Why is almost everything in Italian?
Sonata, cantata, concerto, adagio... for English speakers approaching classical music, these Italian terms can feel like an unnecessary barrier. This mini-episode explores how Italian became classical music's universal language… its journey from the...
Feb. 9, 2025
Maurice Ravel… An hour of music by the incredible French composer.
Ravel was born in the Basque borderlands of France in 1875 and much of his music can be thought of as Spanish rhythms meeting French elegance. He was accepted into the Paris Conservatory as a teenager to study piano but inste...
Feb. 9, 2025
Music from six remarkable composers... who just happen not to be men.
James Brown once sang, 'It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World' - and for centuries, classical music was exactly that. While talent knows no gender, opportunity certainly did, and countless musical voices were silenced by social barriers and prejudice. But...
Feb. 9, 2025
Mini-episode: Are conductors really that important?
Spend any time with musicians who play in an orchestra it won’t be long before they are sharing war stories of their experiences with dreadful conductors. The subtext of some of these conversations is a half-serious belief that the conductor is just...
Feb. 9, 2025
The Sea… When composers face the deep.
Composers have drawn inspiration from the sea for centuries but only with the rise of the larger orchestras of the nineteenth century did they get the palate needed to create fully persuasive depictions of it. So, apart from one piece for solo piano,...
Feb. 9, 2025
Mini-episode: Why does the word 'sonata' keep turning up?
If you're exploring classical music, you'll bump into the term 'sonata' everywhere - piano sonatas, violin sonatas, trio sonatas… even sonata-form. This mini-episode untangles the many meanings of this surprisingly variable w...
Feb. 12, 2025
An Introduction to the Podcast… with a little music.
Maybe the place to start... An eight-minute overview of the podcast including some unfairly brief excerpts from music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Dmitri Shostakovich, Johann Sebastian Bach, John Adams, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, George Gershwin and Ross...
March 2, 2025
Night… Classical music after the sun has set.
This episode of Classical For Everyone is all about Night.. music that evokes the night… that captures the different moods of nighttime, and music written to be performed at night. Night in the Gardens of Spain, Moonlight over the Suffolk Coast,...
March 8, 2025
Mini-episode: Why is some Classical Music so damn long?
There’s a string quartet written by the American composer Morton Feldman in the 1980s that is about 6 hours long. ‘Einstein on the Beach’, the opera by Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson, is about five hours long and is performed without an...