Music Matters Folgen

On the eve of the launch of her new album, ‘Seraph’, featuring works for trumpet and string orchestra by James Macmillan, Grieg, and Satie, Tom Service speaks to Norwegian trumpeter Tine Thing Helseth about her diagnosis with cancer last year, her relationship with music during gruelling treatment, and the conscious decision she made after her recovery to commit again to a career in music. As Arts Council England reveals its 2023-26 national portfolio of funded organisations, Music Matters speaks to ACE’s Director of Music, Claire Mera Nelson, about the body’s investment decisions. We hear from a cross section of organisations who’ve seen changes to their public funding, as well as first-time recipients, with contributions from Chief Executive of the Paraorchestra, Jonathan Harper; Artistic and Executive Director of MishMash productions, Liz Muge; and Chief Executive and Artistic Director of the Britten Sinfonia, Meurig Bowen. And as the EFG London Jazz Festival celebrates its 30th anniversary, Tom’s joined by jazz author and presenter, Alyn Shipton, former Director of Serious (the creative company who administer the festival) Claire Whitaker; and the British-Bahraini jazz trumpeter, flugelhornist and composer, Yazz Ahmed, who discuss how the British jazz scene has evolved since the early 90s.Producer: Marie-Claire Doris

The Labeque Sisters, Katia and Marielle Labeque, shot to fame in 1980 with their arrangements of Gershwin, including the Rhapsody in Blue, and for more than half a century have made a unique musical life together. Tom Service talks to Katia and Marielle about the broad range of music that they are creating, the boundaries that they are constantly pushing, and their sound-world within two pianos.Before the release of their award-winning Gershwin disc in 1980, Katia and Marielle Labeque predominantly performed contemporary music, and encountered the composer Olivier Messiaen, who overheard them practising his Vision de l’Amen while they were still students at the Paris Conservatoire. They’ve since worked with Boulez and Berio, and it was on tour in Los Angeles, performing Berio’s Concerto for Two Pianos, that they happened across Gershwin for the first time. As students at the Paris Conservatoire, they had to fight to be accepted into the chamber music class, and they tell Tom about perceptions of piano duos and the mission to constantly seek new repertoire. The sisters’ continual curiosity and creativity has led them on a journey, as Marielle describes it, where one chance encounter leads to another. They have commissioned new works from musicians of backgrounds from rock to classical, from Bryce Dessner to Nico Muhly, and they have worked alongside Giovanni Antonini who helped them to acquire two reproductions of Bach’s Silbermann keyboards, which they keep in their Palazzo in Venice. The sisters speak to Tom at length about all their musical projects, delve into what keeps them going, and discuss how their distinct two-piano sound really works.

Presenter Tom Service visits the Pit Theatre at the Barbican to learn more about a new theatrical meditation on the bittersweet consolations of sorrow. He speaks to countertenor Iestyn Davies about the melancholy of John Dowland’s music and its power to process grief, while the director Netia Jones tells Tom how she’s weaved together creative visuals with philosophical musings of Robert Burton’s 17th-century treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy as well as those of Freud and other contemporary experts of the human condition. As the BBC celebrates its centenary, Music Matters is joined by composers Matthew Herbert and Anna Meredith, and Artistic Associate of the Southbank Gillian Moore, to discuss the corporation’s role as a commissioner of contemporary repertoire during the past 100 years. Tom catches-up with composer Tom Floyd, singer Sophie Goldrick, and Professor Marion Thain during rehearsals of a new opera, Veritable Michael, which charts the creative life and love affair of two women who operated together under the pseudonym Michael Field – a 19th century fictional author whose work was celebrated by the likes of Oscar Wilde and Robert Browning. And Tom takes a trip to the Victoria and Albert Museum where he’d joined by Harriet Reed, the co-curator of Re:Imagining Musicals – a new display of glittering costumes and musical memorabilia – to explore the craftmanship, creative renewal, and evolutionary impetus behind some of the most iconic musicals of the past seven decades.