Brad Mehldau, François-Xavier Roth

Music Matters

With his new memoir ‘Formation - Building a Personal Canon, Part I’ hitting bookshops, and a new collaborative album with the tenor Ian Bostridge released this week, the American Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau joins Kate Molleson to discuss his childhood in small town New England, his forays into the New York Jazz scene of the 1990s, his encounters with kind musical heroes and future collaborators, and what it means to be a musician.

Telling the story the 18th-century “Irish giant” Charles Byrne, whose corpse was stolen to order and put on public display, Kate speaks to composer Sarah Angliss about the World Premiere of her new opera Giant at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival. She explains how she’s treating this surprisingly tender tale of grave robbing and dissection.

As Gypsy, Roma and Traveller History Month gets under way, Music Matters learns about a new project to highlight the invaluable recorded collection of gypsy and traveller voices archived within the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. We speak to the University of East Anglia’s Dr. Hazel Marsh about the impetus to make collections, housed at the English Folk Dance and Song Society, more accessible to Gypsy and Traveller people seeking engagement with their cultural heritage, and hear from the Scottish Traveller Ian McGregor.

Celebrating two decades of music making with Les Siècles, Kate hears from conductor François-Xavier Roth as he prepares to tour with the orchestra to the Barbican, Edinburgh International Festival and BBC Proms. With new albums of works by Ravel and Ligeti about to be released this month, too, he tells Kate about the energy of discovery which drives the ensemble’s prolific recording activity, and why performance needs to be dangerous.