Thoroughly Good Classical Music Podcast

Composer Laura Bowler on leading the Cheltenham Music Festival's Composer Academy, recorded on-site during the week of workshops in Gloucestershire. She talks about what conservatoire didn't teach her — pitching, funding applications, resilience — plus a look back at Houses Slide, her 2021 piece for London Sinfonietta and seventeen cyclists.

Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre isn’t a name many will recognise — despite an opera that reached the Paris stage in 1694, two books of biblical cantatas published three years apart, in 1708 and 1711, and a career that ran for decades either side of those dates. The point this episode seeks to highlight is that legacy isn’t always guaranteed. You’ll need more than talent writing and managing business, but history needs to preserve your role and if it doesn’t you’ll need some champions further down the line. Taken into Louis XIV’s court in her teens, she went on dedicating nearly everything she published to the king, managing the patronage as deliberately as she wrote the music. But history has to a large extent still buried her achievements. This podcast episode highlights a forthcoming run of stage settings of three of these biblical cantatas in a production entitled ‘Belly of the Beast’ It is the work of writer and producer Toria Banks (Hera) and director Jennifer Fletcher, who working with Mahogany Opera and Dunedin Consort stage Jonah, from the 1708 book, and Adam and Jephtha, from 1711. None of them has been performed in English before. Adam, as far as anyone in the room can establish,  hasn’t been performed at at all since the eighteenth century.Banks wrote the English text — her second outing with de la Guerre’s biblical cantatas, after staging two others from the 1708 book, Susanna and the Elders, and Judith, in 2023. This distinctive production will run in six venues in Edinburgh, Aldeburgh, Spitalfields, Perth, Glasgow, Whitehaven.

This episode is being republished during this year's Aldeburgh Festiva. This episode was first published 1 June.Fifty years after Britten's death, Aldeburgh and Snape still carry his fingerprints — and still provoke the same question: what is this place actually for? In this special episode, contributors who've performed there, programmed it, and thought hard about its future speak in their own voices about why they came to East Suffolk, and why they couldn't leave.

Cellist Adrian Brendel on Tree of Strings, his new Dorset festival — the Harrison Birtwistle story behind its name, genre-mixing, and watching his father Alfred's final tour from the audience, occasionally incognito.

Bergen International Festival Artistic Director and Chief Executive Lars Petter Hagen talks programming, audiences, leadership and listening in this special Thoroughly Good Classical Music Podcast episode - something of a pilgrimage for Jon Jacob.

Time with the most playful of interviewees, Franco Fagioli, recorded in Versailles in March 2026. Fagioli appears with Orchestra de l'Opera de Versailles at St Martin in the Fields on 13th June 2026.

Christophe Rousset is a harpsichordist, conductor, and founder of Les Talens Lyriques. In this conversation, recorded in Paris, he talks about completing his twenty-year project to record all thirteen of Lully's operas — a composer long dismissed as boring, and why that dismissal gets the history wrong.We also discuss the young Mozart as musical sponge, absorbing Jommelli and Gassmann before finding his own voice; the Amadeus problem and what it gets wrong about Salieri; the relationship between scholarly knowledge and artistic intuition; and the kind of authority a conductor holds — total in theory, useless if exercised clumsily.The closing distinction Rousset draws — between playing with rules and breaking them — turns out to be the most revealing thing he says.In this episodeWhy comparing Lully to Rameau is a category errorHow a twenty-year recording project accumulates rather than gets plannedThe young Mozart's debts to Jommelli and GassmannScholarliness versus intuition in the rehearsal roomPower, charm, and persuasion as a conductor"Playing with the rules" as a governing philosophy** SUBSCRIBER EDITION EPISODE **The Aldeburgh Festival subscriber edition is available via the podcast feeds on Spotify or Apple, and via the the Thoroughly Good Blog. £2.99 a month to get early access to this and future episodes. Subscribe now.

Fifty years after Britten's death, Aldeburgh and Snape still carry his fingerprints — and still provoke the same question: what is this place actually for? In this special episode, contributors who've performed there, programmed it, and thought hard about its future speak in their own voices about why they came to East Suffolk, and why they couldn't leave.