Music Matters Folgen

Tom Service talks to Steve Reich, for many one of the most important composers alive today. He visits Carnegie Hall and St George’s Episcopal Church Rutherford Place where Dvorak played a key role in the development of black American classical music. Then to The New School which opened in 1919 as a centre of intellectual and artistic freedom where John Cage studied and taught experimental composition as well as Judson Church where choreographers, artists, and composers met in a socially engaged space to redefine what it is to make art in a spiritual and secular community. Tom also talks to composers and performers Claire Chase and Kamala Sankaram who breathe life and sound into this city, creating a multi-dimensional song that’s as vibrant and visionary as New York has always been.

This week Kate Molleson talks to one of the great mezzo-sopranos, Alice Coote as she prepares for her role as Orpheus in Wayne McGregor’s production of Orpheus and Eurydice by Christoph Gluck at English National Opera this season. As the curtain rises on English National Opera's Orpheus season Kate explores how myth of Orpheus has resonated through time with conductor John Butt, classicist Charlotte Higgins, singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell and Netia Jones, director of Philip Glass’s opera Orphée. Orlando Figes talks about his new book "The Europeans, Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture" which tells how Europe's cultural life transformed during the course of the 19th century through the lives of the great singer Pauline Viardot, her husband Louis, and the writer Ivan Turgenev. Photography © Jiyang Chen

In the last programme of season, Tom Service is joined by composer Tansy Davies, theatre and opera director Adele Thomas, and the Chief Executive of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Stephen Maddock to revisit some of the big issues that faced music and culture in the last year. They look at the impact that music has had on the environment, education, healthcare and as a beacon for social inclusion.Soprano, Renée Fleming is a champion for the work being done at the intersection of health and music. She has spearheaded the first ongoing collaboration between the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts, where she is Artistic Director and America’s National Institutes of Health. Renée Fleming talks to Music Matters about how music can move and comfort the human spirit and about how scientists are now discovering that music can teach us a lot about the brain itself. And pianist, Stephen Hough talks to Tom about his new book Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More which he describes as his notebook and is a lifetime’s worth of his thoughts on life in music.