Stormy Weather

Representing the weather with music is probably an ancient practice. In our earliest superstitions the percussive blasts of thunder would probably have been mimicked to either flatter or placate the spirit world. And perhaps whoever was organising the noisy tributes to the sky gods got something of the same thrill as composers might when they decide to use the weather for inspiration. In the next hour I'm going to give you a sort of chronological meander through what a handful of composers have done with the idea of storms over the last three hundred years with music from Georg Phillip Telemann, Ludwig van Beethoven, Ethel Smythe, Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, Jean Sibelius, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten and John Adams.