The RHODcasts

In this concluding part of his audiobook, the renowned Mozartian Allan Schiller looks back on his student days at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatoire during the height of the Cold War.  The members of Schiller’s piano trio prepare for the day when they go on the road.

In the first part of this audiobook, internationally renowned pianist Allan Schiller looks back on 1961 when at the age of 18 he was selected for the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatoire.

Rhod Sharp and Tony Staveacre present a never-heard interview with a giant of music, Astor Piazzolla.

Piazzolla inspired generations of musicians with his classically-trained approach to a form once heard only in the brothels of Buenos Aires. He called it New Tango. Such was the initial hostility to it in Argentina that he was forever grateful he had grown up learning to box on the mean streets of New York, alongside his schoolmate Jake LaMotta, The Bronx Bull. Here, in Tony’s carefully preserved recording from 1989, is Piazzolla in his own words, richly illustrated with his thrilling music. Afterwards he said this was his best-ever performance on record. Sadly, it would also be the last time that this brilliant sextet were heard together in public. We are privileged to hear it now. (August 2023)

Allan Schiller is a modest maestro, acclaimed in The Guardian as the best Mozart interpreter of his generation. Now aged 80, and still playing his Steinway for several hours a day in his Bristol home, he has taken time out to write and record an account of his life in music. Here it is, read by the author, who also provides the elegant musical illustrations.

Allan Schiller launched his professional career as a concert pianist at the age of nine, playing Haydn's D major Concerto with the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra at Leeds Town Hall. He went on to make his name as a soloist, playing for audiences near and far with great international orchestras. In this second part of “Music Made Me” we can hear a shy and gifted young student grow into his illustrious career while coming to terms with life in 1960s U.S.S.R.

It was 50 years ago to the day when four of the very few people in the world who can actually say “I was there” talked to RHOD SHARP about The Beatles’ rooftop concert on January 30, 1969. In a conversation broadcast on BBC 5 Live’s Up All Night in 2019, Let It Be director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Apple Corps’ Kevin Harrington and Ken Mansfield and Metropolitan police constable Ken Wharfe provide a fresh take on the events depicted anew in Peter Jackson’s extended documentary.

Robert Moore of Britain’s ITV News stepped out one January morning a year ago into quite possibly the biggest scoop of his career. By luck and judgement he and his crew would be there in the Capitol reporting on the first time in US history that the building had been breached by a hostile force: a force of self-described American patriots. 

At least 5000 Black soldiers fought on the colonists’ side in the American war of of independence, despite a tempting offer to join the British forces. When a new school is dedicated to one of them, ALGY WARD tells Rhod Sharp the story of Marblehead’s Joseph Brown.

Rhod Sharp gets into the rich yachting history of Marblehead Massachusetts with the yacht designer and builder CHRIS HOOD.

An extraordinary gamble in early 2020 made RICK BOYD rich. But since we spoke back in March of 2021, it’s been a torrid spring for Bitcoin investors. Would you be OK with it? Is he? And whatever happened after HEATHER CAIRNS realized some of the torrent of wealth that came her way when Google went public? It’s all about risk, after all.