Show Notes
Hello
Grab a pillow and lay down. Drift off. Allow yourself to dream.
Such overt direction wouldn't normally feature in a Thoroughly Good Podcast introduction, but its fitting for this one with pianist Hanni Liang who, ever the experimenter with concert formats, tests out an element of her forthcoming Edinburgh Festival appearance on me in a bit of a podcast first. Liang combines a performance of Debussy Reverie with audience-led improvisation at The Hub as part of Edinburgh International Festival this year, inviting people to share their dreams so that she can improvise on the ideas that emerge from it. She does the same here with me. It's only really since recording this that I've come to understand what my recurring dream really is about - in its simplest terms its to do with the panic of time running out. And now, having understood that, it is phenomenally disappointing to realise I've been having this same dream for as long as I can remember. Even so, I've not had it since recording this episode. There is then a therapeutic impact to Hanni's work. More than that, Hanni's candid reflections on the experience of improvisation isn't that far from a theme stitched through recent episodes - leadership qualities, and specifically in this case, the need for and the experience of vulnerability.
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.
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.
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