Gramophone Classical Music Podcast

Guy Johnston joins Hattie Butterworth to discuss his latest recording of the Arthur Bliss Cello Concerto with Andrew Manze and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

A technical mine field, the concerto was written for the great cellist Rostropovich and premiered with Benjamin Britten conducting at the 1970 Aldeburgh Festival. Guy also speaks about his dedication to pedagogy and gives details of more upcoming English cello rec...

As the 2025 BBC Proms season gets underway, Martin Cullingford is joined by Tim Parry and Hattie Butterworth select their top picks. From Rachmaninov with Yunchan Lim and the UK premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Cello Concerto to a late-night tribute to Arvo Pärt and a rare performance of Delius’s A Mass of Life, the team reflects on the Proms’s cultural significance, its breadth of programming,...

We're today continuing the theme set by last week's edition, in which we marked the 500th episode of the Gramophone Classical Music podcast by looking back over some of our most memorable interviews and episodes. The interview Editor Martin Cullingford chose to reflect on was a conversation he had with the guitarist Julian Bream all the way back in 2013, to mark his 80th birthday and also the fact that Gramophone had honoured him w...

Earlier this year the Gramophone Podcast passed 1 million downloads. Now we’ve reached another milestone: our 500th episode. Launched before podcasting’s current popularity, the series steadily built a following, which grew substantially once we adopted a weekly schedule and set formats.

Those formats include: interviews with m...

The vocal ensemble VOCES8 are marking their 20th anniversay with a new release – out today – celebrating the full breadth of their creativity, and an exciting season of concerts. Editor Martin Cullingford sat down with three of the key figures behind this most innovative of ensembles – the co-founders Barnaby Smith, Artistic Director, and Paul Smith, CEO, and soprano and long-standing member of the group And...

This week’s Gramophone podcast is a special focus on one of the most significant of 20th century composers, Dimitri Shostakovich, the 50th anniversary of whose death we mark this year. As our guide to his music we’re privileged to have conductor Andris Nelsons, who, together with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, has just reached the end of a journey through all his symphonies, plus the concertos for cello, pia...

The German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's 100th birthday falls on May 28. One of the most versatile singers of the last century – his operatic repertoire alone ranged from Gluck, Handel and Mozart via Verdi, Wagner and Richard Strauss to Berg, Busoni and Reimann – it's his devotion to song that remains his lasting legacy. To mark the anniversary of Fischer-Dieskau's birth, Gramophone's James Jolly spoke to song specialist and ...

In this week's episode, Editor Martin Cullingford met with the founder and Music Director of Bach Collegium Japan Masaaki Suzuki, along with the group's Principal Conductor Masato Suzuki, to talk about their new recording of Brahms's Ein deutsches Requiem, available now on BIS – as well as discussing Bach's St John Passion, which they had performed the day prior to the interview. The interview took place las...

In 2007, Yevgeny Sudbin released an album of music by Alexander Scriabin. Reviewing it in Gramophone, Bryce Morrison described it as a 'disc in a million'. Now, Sudbin has returned to the composer for his 25th recording for BIS, and offers a wide-ranging survey of music that includes two more of the piano sonatas.

James Jolly caught up with Yevgeny Sudbin recently to talk about his relationship with the composer and his unique musi...

Zlatomir Fung won the Cello category of the 2019 International Tchaikovsky Competition, and also has an enviable collection of other cello awards and prizes to his name. He was a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship Winner in 2022 and was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2020.

His debut recording, ‘Fantasies’, is just out from Signum and on it he explores, with his pianist Richard Fu, a very specific genre, the virtuoso fantasy...

Alan Gilbert is Chief Conductor of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, as well as Music Director of the Royal Swedish Opera. Gramophone's James Jolly caught up with him during a run of Wagner’s Die Walküre in Stockholm, where he lives.

They talked about his Hamburg-based orchestra, the role today of a radio orchestra and also about the work orchestra and conductor have just released (on the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester label to str...

In this episode, Gramophone's Editor Martin Cullingford talks to pianist Leif Ove Andsnes about his new recording on Sony Classical of the extraordinary work Via Crucis by Franz Liszt, the composer's deeply spiritual meditations on the Stations of the Cross, released just before the start of Holy Week. 

This week's podcast is produced in association with Wigmore Hall, where performers over the coming week include two performances b...