The Music of World War II and the Holocaust w...

We humans seem to love comeback stories, and there is no comeback quite as compelling in the classical music world as Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto. It was written three years after the disastrous premiere of his First Symphony, a premiere so catastrophic that it lives on ...  Show more

A piece that I have been asked to cover probably a dozen times is Handel's Messiah. It's a piece I love, but a piece that I've never conducted or played, and so therefore I don't know it incredibly well. There are plenty of pieces like this in the repertoire, and so I've decided ...  Show more

Jeremy Eichler's new book, Time's Echo, just out from Faber (HB; £25) tangles with memory – what we choose to remember, what to forget – as history takes hold, and he argues that music can become in many ways the most powerful form of memorial. To ill ...

Matthew Sweet looks at music for films set against the background of WW1, including Joseph Kosma's music for Jean Renoir's masterpiece La Grande Illusion. The First World War prompted a cinematic response even before the War was over and has continued to exercise the film maker's ...  Show more

Both interviews today will transport you into the exciting world of classical music. No, really! The first is with Brendan Slocumb, whose new book, The Violin Conspiracy, is a mystery surrounding a musician trying to recover his stolen violin. It's also about how hard it is to be ...  Show more

Series exploring famous pieces of music and their emotional appeal.When Mendelssohn wrote his Violin Concerto in 1844 he could hardly have imagined how famous and well loved it would become. In this programme, people tell how it has played an important part in their lives. Violin ...  Show more