Episodes
June 26, 2025
Mozart’s 1791… Music from his final year
You could take almost any year of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s life, probably from the age of fifteen onwards and be staggered by both the scale of his output… AND the quality… but his final year… 1791.. was a truly ast...
June 19, 2025
Ghosts & Monsters… Music of the Supernatural
There are composers who revel in depictions of the unseen… manifestations of the darker aspects of our imaginations… creatures from realms that four centuries of science just can’t seem to eradicate from our vulnerable psyche...
June 12, 2025
Aotearoa / New Zealand… New Sounds and Cultures for Classical Music
Even if you have listened to a fair bit of classical music I’m quietly confident you will not have heard a note of any of what I am going to play you in this episode… unless you happen to hail from or reside in that jewel of ...
June 5, 2025
Early Beethoven... From Provincial Pianist to Vienna Celebrity
Ludwig van Beethoven arrived in Vienna in late 1792 as a 22-year-old from the town of Bonn to study with Josef Haydn who was at the time undeniably Europe's most celebrated living composer. Beethoven also quickly established ...
May 30, 2025
The Clarinet… In The Twentieth Century
This episode starts in Paris in 1909 and ends up in Buenos Aires in 1994… and the music includes a healthy dose of the influence of jazz. If you have a small voice inside saying this is going to be a little more ‘modern’ and ...
May 22, 2025
Music for Small Spaces… aka ‘Chamber Music’.
There’s no way around the fact that this entire corner of classical music is generally known by the term ‘chamber music’ but please don’t let that stop you from experiencing some incredible music… even if you find the term, a...
May 16, 2025
Stanley Kubrick’s Music… The impact of a well-placed tune.
No other filmmaker has used classical music to better effect than the American director Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999). Whilst composers did score some of his films, Kubrick frequently used existing classical pieces… in particul...
May 8, 2025
Antonio Vivaldi… So much more than changes in the weather.
If you have hit play for this episode then that means you are in that part of the population who have not been entirely turned off Vivaldi by the overuse of his deservedly popular set of violin concertos… ‘The Four Seasons’. ...
May 2, 2025
The Guitar… From Spanish Courts to Global Stages.
This first adventure with the guitar on Classical For Everyone features quite a bit of music from Spain.. probably the country that was most closely identified with the instrument until companies in America popularised the el...
April 24, 2025
Happiness… Music to make you feel good.
Sometimes music can just be for pleasure and if that is the composer and the performers’ intention, then good for them… and good for us listeners. If most music is created to make you ‘feel’… then some music can just be to ma...
April 17, 2025
Muses. Six people who have inspired great music.
Much music has been inspired by love, passion or obsession… but only in a handful of cases has the person who was the inspiration… the muse… become publicly linked to a work. Here are the stories of six of them… Alma Schindl...
April 10, 2025
Percussion. A loud episode.
A percussion instrument is pretty much anything that can be hit, tapped, scraped, scratched or banged. In an orchestra it is generally the responsibility of the individual or small group up the back… the ones who get to make ...
April 3, 2025
Johann Sebastian Bach. An introduction in nine pieces.
If you’ve ever been puzzled why once you scratch the surface of classical music the name Johann Sebastian Bach seems to just keep turning up… this episode might offer some clues… beyond the fact that the music is pretty good....
March 27, 2025
The Cello. Music as expressive as the Human Voice.
Amongst all the instruments in the modern string family… violins, violas, cellos and double basses… it is the cello that most closely approximates the range of the human voice… from the lowest bass to the highest soprano and ...
March 21, 2025
Farewells. Music for Partings, Journeys & Goodbyes.
This episode of Classical For Everyone includes musicians slowly leaving the stage… lovers separated by the call of duty… music for beginning a journey… and music for a sad and very final farewell. A section of a symphony by Josef...
March 16, 2025
Not Dead Yet. Music from Living Composers.
This episode is all music written by people who have the particular distinction of still breathing. I think it’s important to say that nowhere near all classical music is written by dead men from Vienna. One of the unintended consequences of a whole...
March 8, 2025
Mini-episode: Why is some Classical Music so damn long?
There’s a string quartet written by the American composer Morton Feldman in the 1980s that is about 6 hours long. ‘Einstein on the Beach’, the opera by Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson, is about five hours long and is performed without an...
March 2, 2025
Night… Classical music after the sun has set.
This episode of Classical For Everyone is all about Night.. music that evokes the night… that captures the different moods of nighttime, and music written to be performed at night. Night in the Gardens of Spain, Moonlight over the Suffolk Coast,...
Feb. 12, 2025
An Introduction to the Podcast… with a little music.
Maybe the place to start... An eight-minute overview of the podcast including some unfairly brief excerpts from music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Dmitri Shostakovich, Johann Sebastian Bach, John Adams, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, George Gershwin and Ross...
Feb. 9, 2025
Mini-episode: Why does the word 'sonata' keep turning up?
If you're exploring classical music, you'll bump into the term 'sonata' everywhere - piano sonatas, violin sonatas, trio sonatas… even sonata-form. This mini-episode untangles the many meanings of this surprisingly variable w...
Feb. 9, 2025
The Sea… When composers face the deep.
Composers have drawn inspiration from the sea for centuries but only with the rise of the larger orchestras of the nineteenth century did they get the palate needed to create fully persuasive depictions of it. So, apart from one piece for solo piano,...
Feb. 9, 2025
Mini-episode: Are conductors really that important?
Spend any time with musicians who play in an orchestra it won’t be long before they are sharing war stories of their experiences with dreadful conductors. The subtext of some of these conversations is a half-serious belief that the conductor is just...
Feb. 9, 2025
Music from six remarkable composers... who just happen not to be men.
James Brown once sang, 'It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World' - and for centuries, classical music was exactly that. While talent knows no gender, opportunity certainly did, and countless musical voices were silenced by social barriers and prejudice. But...
Feb. 9, 2025
Maurice Ravel… An hour of music by the incredible French composer.
Ravel was born in the Basque borderlands of France in 1875 and much of his music can be thought of as Spanish rhythms meeting French elegance. He was accepted into the Paris Conservatory as a teenager to study piano but inste...