Tom Service takes you on a journey into the extraordinary world of Stravinsky's ballet Petrushka, based on an archetypal puppet myth that shares the story of Punch.
3/26/2023
29:03
Here Comes the Bride
Tom Service with a guide to music written for and performed at weddings.
3/19/2023
29:00
Bluebeard's Castle: Enter at Your Peril
Tom Service intrepidly explores Bluebeard's Castle - the one-act Symbolist opera by Hungarian composer Bela Bartok first performed in 1918 which features just two characters: Duke Bluebeard and his fourth wife Judith. Newly married, he brings her home to his murky castle for the very first time, where she finds a torture chamber, armoury, treasury, garden, and lake of tears. And unfortunately for Judith, it's not long before she discovers just what happened to those first three wives...
With Harvard Professor of Folklore and Mythology Maria Tatar.
Producer: Ruth Thomson
3/12/2023
29:04
Collage, writ large: Berio's Sinfonia
Tom Service explores Luciano Berio's Sinfonia - an iconic piece of the late 1960s modernism, scored for orchestra and eight amplified voices who speak, whisper and shout texts by Samuel Beckett and Claude Lévi-Strauss. This groundbreaking work also incorporates a mass of musical quotations, from Bach to Stockhausen and everything in between.
Tom's witness is the virtuoso sitarist and composer Jasdeep Singh Degun, who like Berio, took Monteverdi's opera Orfeo and reinvented it.
Produced by Dom Wells
3/5/2023
29:26
Mystery, rumour and deception: Mozart's Requiem
Tom Service examines Mozart's final masterpiece - a work shrouded in mystery, rumour and deception. He’s joined by Dr Kathryn Mannix, a specialist in palliative care, who considers the factors of creativity - and music-making in particular - at the end of life.