Saturday Classics

Rob Cowan mines the archive for great recordings, forgotten musical heroes and repertory adventures

Rob Cowan's selection of music includes Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, violinist Arthur Grumiaux playing Saint-Saëns's Introduction and Rondo capriccioso and Aaron Copland conducting his own compact, dazzling Piano Concerto with soloist Earl Wild.

Rob Cowan mines the archive for great recordings, forgotten musical heroes and repertory adventures

Rob's selection this week includes Barber's delightful wind quintet 'Summer Music', a rhapsody by Bartok played by the young Hungarian virtuoso Barnabas Kelemen and cellist Jacqueline du Pré in a live recording of Saint-Saëns's first concerto accompanied by her husband, conductor Daniel Barenboim.

Ahead of his first lead singing role in twenty years in The Threepenny Opera at The National Theatre, actor Rory Kinnear presents a personal selection of music for voice. The voice as instrument, the voice as storyteller, voices together and voices alone, voices from the past and present, sacred and secular, voices which have all recently made him think: "Oh gosh, how long until we open?"

Including Strauss's Geduld which brings back painful memories of a school singing competition, Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares who inspired a plum brandy soaked trip to Bulgaria, and Mozart's Mass in C minor, which moved Rory to tears in a village hall in the Brecon Beacons.

Writer and historian Dr Amanda Foreman takes a personal journey through the musical history of Britain, introducing works which have inspired her over the years and which reflect different aspects of what it is to be British.

Foreman is the author of the award-winning best sellers, 'Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire' (1999) and 'A World on Fire: A Epic History of Two Nations Divided (2011), and is seen and heard frequently on TV and radio history programmes.

Having lived in the UK and the United States, Foreman has both an inside and outside view of Britain and the music which defines it. In her varied choice, she introduces works such as the Medieval "Agincourt Carol", pieces by Byrd and John Bull which entertained women in the Tudor Court, as well as evocative musical portrayals of the 20th century English and Scottish landscapes by Elgar and Hamish MacCunn.

2016 sees the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, and in amongst Foreman's choices are works inspired by his writing, including Judith Weir's "Storm" with texts from "The Tempest", incidental music from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by Mendelssohn and Henry Bishop's "Lo! Here the lark" from his music for "The Comedy of Errors".

Other music includes works by Henry Wood, Ethel Smyth, Thomas Weelkes, Henry Purcell, William Walton and Hubert Parry.

Producer Helen Garrison.

Rob Cowan mines the archive for great recordings, forgotten musical heroes and repertory adventures

This week, conductor Willem Mengelberg presents lively Handel from New York, Elly Ameling and Helen Watts sing Bach, while violinist Henryk Szeryng's account of Szymanowski's luminous Concerto no.2 is an unmissable classic of the gramophone.

Rob Cowan mines the archive for great recordings, forgotten musical heroes and repertory adventures

This week, conductor Rene Leibowitz sends Faust on a whirling dance routine, Conchita Supervia proves the most alluring Carmen ever and Rafael Kubelik conducts Karl Amadeus Hartmann's fiercely intense Second Symphony.

Julian Barnes's fifty-year relationship with music recently culminated with his novel The Noise of Time, the central character of which is Shostakovich. Today Julian takes Shostakovich and his battles with Stalin as the starting point for a musical journey through works by Mozart, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Bach.

Actor Greta Scacchi with a personal selection of aquatic and sea-themed music including 'La mers' from Debussy and Charles Trenet, Schubert's 'Trout' Quintet and an extract from Britten's opera Peter Grimes. Her choice also includes songs from Joni Mitchell, Fats Waller and Mario Lanza

Star of films such as The Player and The Red Violin, Greta Scacchi has been seen most recently as Countess Rostov in BBC One's epic production of War And Peace. For Saturday Classics, she draws on her Italian roots, her adolescence in Australia and her passionate advocacy of maritime environmental causes for a wide-ranging selection of music.

Ahead of his BBC4 series Renaissance Unchained, art critic Waldemar Januszczak conjures up the sound world of this epoch of huge passions and powerful religious emotions across all of Europe. The term 'Renaissance', or 'rinascita', was coined by Giorgio Vasari in 16th-century Florence, and his assertion that it had fixed origins in Italy has since influenced all of art history. But what of Flanders, Germany and the rest of Northern Europe? Waldemar presents music from the time of the Renaissance greats: Jan Van Eyck, Hans Memling, Albrecht Dürer, Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo and El Greco.

Northumbrian piper and fiddler Kathryn Tickell chooses some of her favourite classical pieces inspired by folk music, including works by Antonio Soler, Samuel Barber, Charles Ives, Johan Halvorsen, Percy Grainger, Juan de Araujo, Henry Cowell, Pehr Henrik Nordgren and Howard Skempton.