The Classic! Pod

In Episode 6 of The Classic! Pod, we’re having a good ol' fashioned MTD.This week, we look back at our own musical journeys: childhood music exams, terrifying adjudicators, sight-singing nightmares, memory slips, sweaty Grade 8 violin exams, rogue piano competitions, orchestral chaos, university recitals and all the weird little formative moments that come with growing up around classical music.We also talk about what happens after studying music: job interviews, classical music media, arts work, bookbinding old scores, the strange smallness of the music world, and why being nice about other musicians should not be a controversial act.Plus, our Albums of the week take us from Rachmaninov’s choral music with Tenebrae to Mackerras’s gloriously fun Gilbert and Sullivan ballet Pineapple Poll.Expect exam trauma, career confusion, inexplicable dogs in dissertations, and probably too many things we had to edit out.Let us know your own musical highs, lows and horror stories in the comments.

Who were the musicians, performers and teachers who first opened the door to classical music? In this episode of Classic! Pod, Alex Maxted and Jonny Whiting talk musical idols in the broadest possible sense: not just the grand names — Callas, Pavarotti, Sondheim, Bernstein — but the performers, recordings, videos and teachers that shaped how they listen.There are formative encounters with Alicia de Larrocha’s crystalline pianism, Diana Damrau’s Queen of the Night, Joyce DiDonato’s masterclasses, Antonio Pappano’s piano-side opera explainers, Gerald Finley’s Figaro, and Stephen Sondheim in person — or, at least, in the same room. Along the way, Alex and Jonny consider the cult of the soprano, the risks of meeting your idols, the weird glamour of classical celebrity, and whether the art form might benefit from a little more screaming.Plus: dodgy conductors, accidental oboe trauma, The Magic Flute’s chaotic pacing, recommendations from Amadeus to Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, and the eternal question: who are your musical idols?

In episode 4 of The Classic! Pod, we ask whether people are really “classical music novices” — or whether classical music is already everywhere, quietly sneaking into films, adverts, TV shows, video games, McDonald’s after 11pm, and probably your childhood without you even noticing.We talk about film music, John Williams, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Brief Encounter, Kubrick, Bach in unexpected places, Lady Gaga’s extremely surprising connection to the Well-Tempered Clavier, and why film scores absolutely count as classical music. We also get into Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, video game soundtracks, Animal Crossing village tunes, Wii Music, and why composing for games deserves to be taken seriously.Along the way, there’s classical music in adverts, classical music as “fancy perfume energy”, Shostakovich in McDonald’s, MacMillan’s Seven Last Words from the Cross, and Jonny carrying a suspiciously large trombone case on the Tube.Plus, our recommendations of the week: a vivid, theatrical recording of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and Billie Holiday’s version of Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low”.Basically: you probably know more classical music than you think.

In episode 3 of The Classic! Pod, we’re talking about new music: what it is, why people are sometimes scared of it, and why “modern” classical music somehow still often means Schoenberg — despite the fact that Schoenberg is now over 100 years old.There are also detours into seeing elephants, smelling elephants, Mahler titles, whether anyone writes symphonies anymore, and the eternal question of how to get people to come back for the second performance of a new piece. Plus, our recommendations of the week: Mentor from the London Choral Sinfonia and Michael Waldron, and Iberia from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Domingo Hindoyan.