Thoroughly Good Classical Music Podcast

Tenebrae began with no plan, no name and a dinner Nigel Short tried to get out of. Twenty-five years on, the choir marks its anniversary with concerts and a new album, The Journey. In this conversation, Nigel talks about the chance encounters that founded it, the pocket-money calculation that swapped a paper round for a parish church choir, and the Handel opera, learned overnight, that got him thrown out of the Royal College of Music. It's a story about risk, and about the self-trust it takes to say yes before you know how to do it.

Writer Fran Wilson's debut publication 'Facing the Music' captures a lifelong love of experiencing music both from a performer and an audience member's perspective.

Buy the book in bookshops, Amazon and on Kindle Unlimited.

Does the world need another recording of the Elgar Violin Concerto?

Yes, I think it does.

This episode makes the case: a conversation with violin Thomas Bowes and pianist, composer and arranger Eleanor Alberga, celebrating a touching lifelong musical partnership with a new release on the Rubicon label featuring Sinfonia Arcadiana conducted by Nic Fallowfield.

In this episode, listen to singer Jessica Walker introduce the story of Barbara — the singer, composer and lyricist whose output equals Jacques Brel's, someone who sold over a million copies of a single song in a day, but who remains little known in the UK.

Walker has spent years translating these songs, many of which are released in English for the first time on her new album La Solitude.

We talk about the translation process … eventually. After we've tackled our view on the industry and the systemic barriers now in place limiting a new generation of composers and performers. None of it planned. A conversation that although bleak is, strangely for me at least, self-affirming.

We start with new music, funding, and who gets to be trusted with a commission.

A scrapbook in sound: voices, reflections and field recordings from Three Choirs Festival 2026 in Gloucester — a postcard from two life-enhancing days.

Days before his BBC Proms appearance marking 50 years since the death of Benjamin Britten, cellist Guy Johnston talks candidly about his career, his influences, and his preparation for performance.

Beatrice Nicholas is a British concert pianist and composer. She performs the traditional classical canon, and she composes and arranges, fusing classical and jazz together. She's also a member of the Chineke! Chamber Ensemble, drawn from principal players of the Chineke! Orchestra.

On the seventeenth of August, she makes her debut Upstairs at Ronnie Scott's — a set that runs from a straight Beethoven sonata through to jazz-trio reworkings of Chopin and Liszt, alongside Hazel Scott, Lil Hardin Armstrong, Florence Price and Margaret Bonds.

Composer Laura Bowler on leading the Cheltenham Music Festival's Composer Academy, recorded on-site during the week of workshops in Gloucestershire. She talks about what conservatoire didn't teach her — pitching, funding applications, resilience — plus a look back at Houses Slide, her 2021 piece for London Sinfonietta and seventeen cyclists.

Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre isn’t a name many will recognise — despite an opera that reached the Paris stage in 1694, two books of biblical cantatas published three years apart, in 1708 and 1711, and a career that ran for decades either side of those dates. 

The point this episode seeks to highlight is that legacy isn’t always guaranteed. You’ll need more than talent writing and managing business, but history needs to preserve your role and if it doesn’t you’ll need some champions further down the line. 

Taken into Louis XIV’s court in her teens, she went on dedicating nearly everything she published to the king, managing the patronage as deliberately as she wrote the music. But history has to a large extent still buried her achievements. 

This podcast episode highlights a forthcoming run of stage settings of three of these biblical cantatas in a production entitled ‘Belly of the Beast’ 

It is the work of writer and producer Toria Banks (Hera) and director Jennifer Fletcher, who working with Mahogany Opera and Dunedin Consort stage Jonah, from the 1708 book, and Adam and Jephtha, from 1711. None of them has been performed in English before. Adam, as far as anyone in the room can establish,  hasn’t been performed at at all since the eighteenth century.

Banks wrote the English text — her second outing with de la Guerre’s biblical cantatas, after staging two others from the 1708 book, Susanna and the Elders, and Judith, in 2023. This distinctive production will run in six venues in Edinburgh, Aldeburgh, Spitalfields, Perth, Glasgow, Whitehaven.

This episode is being republished during this year's Aldeburgh Festiva. This episode was first published 1 June.

Fifty years after Britten's death, Aldeburgh and Snape still carry his fingerprints — and still provoke the same question: what is this place actually for? In this special episode, contributors who've performed there, programmed it, and thought hard about its future speak in their own voices about why they came to East Suffolk, and why they couldn't leave.