It should be simple. All you have to do is turn a page of a score while the pianist’s hands are otherwise engaged. But page turning is fraught with difficulties, for both pianist and turner. What if you’re turning pages and a bee flies into your shirt and stings you? What if you’re playing and every time you need the page turned, the heaving embonpoint of your turner obscures your view of the music? Top of the list of Thankless Tasks, the essential but stressful job of page turning is only successful if it passes unnoticed. Find out what makes an accomplished page turner; being one of the world’s foremost pianists is not necessarily a qualification. Featuring Pierre Laurent Aimard, Iain Burnside, Ivan Ilic and Alice Farnham.

How do you practice a concerto without an orchestra? Who controls a concerto - conductor or soloist? Are there any similarities between taking the role of soloist and sitting at the back as the anonymous orchestral pianist? Guests Stephen Hough, Lucy Parham and Ben Dawson paint a picture of solitary practice rooms, the pressure of not missing your cue, going into battle with an orchestra and the thrill of a Tchaikovsky piano concerto.

The piano has played a starring role in some the nation's best loved novels, acting as a signifier of everything from social class to seduction. Professor John Mullan guides listeners through some of the most memorable novelistic piano moments, starting with Jane Austen's Persuasion - where the piano finds itself at the centre of a plot typically fraught with issues of class and gender, then on to Emily Bronte's Jane Eyre, where Blanche Ingram puts the piano to use as a 19th century flirtation technique in her quest to impress the brooding Mr Rochester. In EM Forster's A Room with a View and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, it's the experience of listening to the piano - or not listening to it - that enables the novelists to shine a revealing light on their characters. Featuring Juliet Stevenson.

Piano improviser extraordinaire, Harry the Piano, silent film accompaniment specialist Neil Brand and writer and broadcaster Matthew Sweet – all experts in the field of film music – explore the role of the piano in movies, from the very first days of silent cinema, through Brief Encounter's immortalisation of Rachmaninov's 2nd Piano Concerto, to modern classics such as Michael Nyman's haunting music for The Piano.

The right hand may be the belle of the ball but the left hand is no dowdy Cinderella. The left hand is a fundamental part of piano music - literally, the fundamental is the root part of every note on the piano.

There are sad keys and glad keys, so they say; F sharp minor is turbulent and C major is sunny. Every pianist knows how a key feels under their fingers, as every key has its own combination of black and white on the keyboard. Before the Baroque period, keyboards had to be re-tuned to play in each different key. But with the development of the modern piano, so-called “equal temperament” evened out the differences between the keys. One great masterpiece represents this development – JS Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, which expresses his faith in the new tuning system by having pieces in all the 24 different major and minor keys. But another curious factor of keys still remains a problem – the fact that different countries tune their pianos to different pitches. So middle C is, for instance, a bit higher in Germany than in the UK. Featuring Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Iain Burnside and David Owen Norris.

Ever since the early ragtime of Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton the piano has been a key instrument in the development of Jazz. Associated with the smoky bar-room, the instrument allows the jazz pianist to play all the elements of the band - stretching the harmony, roll a great rhythmic bottom-end, and improvise singing, soaring melodies. Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Thelonius Monk, Herbie Hancock, among others, all stretched what the Jazz piano could do. Featuring Julian Joseph and Gwilym Simcock.

Some people can do it and some can't – sit down at the keyboard and simply make music up on the spur of the moment. The piano can be the perfect instrument for jazz improvising, capable of a vast range of sounds from the percussive to the lyrical. But there are many ways to improvise – classically trained players may choose to follow clear structures in improvising, for instance in the cadenza of a concerto; and jazz musicians will often have at least a fixed chord sequence from which to elaborate; whereas a silent film accompanist often improvises spontaneously to a film which may last for an hour or more, having never seen it before sitting down to perform to an audience of cinema-goers. And in the genre known as Free Improvisation, the pianist tries to avoid all pre-thought or pre-arranged structures, and be completely open to the ideas of the moment when hammer strikes string. Featuring Gwilym Simcock, Stephen Horne, Harry the Piano and Ivan Ilic.

Often when a concert pianist steps onto the stage to perform, they have to play a piano that has been hired. Surprisingly, while many are in great shape, sometimes they aren't. Sometimes they are appropriate for the repertoire about to be played and sometimes not. The challenge for the artist is to work out how to play this piano in such a way that the concert is the best it can be. How does a pianist coax a beautiful performance out of the hired concert grand? Featuring Pierre Laurent Aimard, Richard Sisson, Jonathan Biss and Ulrich Gerhartz.

Glenn Gould was a Canadian pianist who became one of the best-known and most celebrated classical pianists of the 20th century. He was particularly renowned as an interpreter of the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Gould was well known for his unorthodox musical interpretations and mannerisms at the keyboard. He stopped giving concerts at the age of 31 to concentrate on studio recording and other projects. Featuring Kevin Bazzana, Murray Perahia, Stephen Hough, David Owen Norris and Gidon Kremer