Show Notes
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.
More from Thoroughly Good Classical Music Podcast
On Saturday 24 October, Britten Pears Arts stages the world premiere of My Father Cannot Speak: a seventy-minute opera scored for one singer and six instrumentalists, about a son trying to get his father to tell him who he is. Baritone Roderick Williams takes the lead. Composer Ben Parry, for whom this is a first opera, has teamed up with librettist and director Garth Bardsley, both of whom have collaborated for more than twenty years. What began as a poem, about a museum that locks its doors, quickly grew into this compact, sometimes funny, often deeply poignant 70 minute exploration of inter-generational relationships and the confusion and clarity that emerges when an inciting incident brings about a sudden pivot. I heard part of a rehearsal in the Britten Studio, then talked to the three of them for half an hour. We talk about the title and whether its double meaning was planned (it wasn’t), how you build seventy minutes for six players, including an accordion that breathes, and a singer and what demands that places on him, and why the director of an opera tends to ask opera singers to be less operatic.
Gavin Higgins & Mark Simpson discuss Higgins' new clarinet concerto premiered by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in October 2026.
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.