Live and Let Die — Paul McCartney’s song helped take Bond into a new era (Financial Times)
How Rachmaninov came to loathe his Prelude in C sharp minor (Financial Times)
Teletubbies: The bizarre kids' TV show that swept the world (BBC Culture)
When You Wish Upon a Star — the Disney song taps into a need for escapism (Financial Times)
Barbie Girl — a novelty hit with a subversive twist (Financial Times)
Heaven on their Minds — how Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber sparked a storm (Financial Times)
Obsessed with the music of Line of Duty? Meet composer Carly Paradis (Radio Times)
House Music: What Our MPs Really Like Listening to (The i)
When Sir Keir Starmer sat down with Lauren Laverne to talk through his Desert Island Discs last month, the Labour Party held its breath. Would its leader flaunt phoney indie credentials, as David Cameron did in 2006? Surely it couldn’t be worse than Ed Miliband in 2013, his top choice of Robbie Williams’s Angels tickling the nation’s gag reflex.
Roberto González-Monjas: “Being a conductor is like being a psychologist” (Bachtrack)
Four Times You Should Have Been at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (BBC Radio 3)
‘For me, Huddersfield is about all sorts of music, but it’s not about the mainstream.’ Graham McKenzie, Artistic Director of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, is scrupulous in his pursuit of the obscure. Since its conception in 1978, the festival has hosted the full spectrum of musical experimentation, from acoustic reinterpretations of Kraftwerk tracks to a concert given entirely on half-cooked vegetables (the instruments were later served to the audience as soup).
Joan Tower: America’s Best-Kept Secret (BBC Radio 3)
Joan Tower is not a name you hear very often this side of the pond. The New York-based composer’s music has featured just once at the BBC Proms – her Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 1, conducted by its dedicatee, Marin Alsop, in 2012. A smattering of broadsheet reviews acknowledge Tower’s status as a ‘senior figure’ in the contemporary American scene but rarely do they unpack why that might be.
Stephen Cleobury: A Life in Music (BBC Radio 3)
To the outside world, the conductor and organist Stephen Cleobury could come across as reserved, stoic – unassuming. But his singers knew better: ‘You have to be in partnership with him to see an entirely different world of emotions revealed,’ one of his young choristers told the journalist Richard Morrison. It was through music that Cleobury best expressed himself, and if his many recordings are anything to go by, he had a lot to say.
19 COVID Theses (VAN)
By Jeffrey Arlo Brown, Timmy Fisher and Hartmut Welscher
Not long after the last global pandemic, in which some 50 million people died from Spanish flu, a social change began to take place in living rooms across the world. With the dawn of radio, and later television, the parlor gatherings and upright pianos that had once been the focus of evening entertainment were gradually phased out. A century later, with a new pandemic sweeping the globe, classical music has never felt more under threat …
