Music
BBC Music Magazine
Concert Heaven Concert Hell
Top artists recall their best and worst performances
2 min |
June 2025
BBC Music Magazine
Liszt thunders away on the piano... but Brahms nods off
On the morning of 12 June 1853, a young man with long blond hair entered an opulent reception room at the Altenburg mansion in Weimar, capital city of the grand duchy of Saxe-Weimar.
3 min |
June 2025
BBC Music Magazine
A voice for the ages
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's consummate artistry enthralled all who heard him sing. Andrew Green marks 100 years of the celebrated German baritone
7 min |
May 2025
BBC Music Magazine
The sound of oppression
In wartime Germany and its occupied countries, music was a carefully controlled part of the Nazi propaganda machine, as Erik Levi explains
6 min |
May 2025
BBC Music Magazine
Ralph Vaughan Williams Dona Nobis Pacem
Rebecca Franks explores a composer's choral plea for peace, written as the dark cloud of fascism moved ominously over a nervous Europe
4 min |
May 2025
BBC Music Magazine
Sound advice
Canada’s National Arts Centre is serious about education — and its flagship Orchestra is training the next crop of top musicians, writes Charlotte Smith
6 min |
May 2025
BBC Music Magazine
A different picture
There’s more to Dame Myra Hess than her morale- boosting National Gallery concerts — not least her formidable piano skills, writes Jessica Duchen
6 min |
May 2025
BBC Music Magazine
Man on a mission
For American composer Carlos Simon, highlighting injustice and racism through his art is a personal calling, as he tells Clive Paget
6 min |
May 2025
BBC Music Magazine
Pieces of me
Cellist Matthew Barley's Light Stories project has helped him to work through trauma dating back to a psychotic event in his teens, as he tells Ariane Todes
5 min |
May 2025
BBC Music Magazine
Jean Sibelius
Can we judge a composer's character from their music? With Sibelius, says Stephen Johnson, this would not necessarily appear to be the case
6 min |
May 2025
BBC Music Magazine
KEEP CALM AND COMPOSE
British composers played a vital role in lifting spirits in World War II, sometimes in unlikely ways.
9 min |
May 2025
BBC Music Magazine
Richard Morrison
From frontline action to opera: my father's musical memories of WWII
3 min |
May 2025
BBC Music Magazine
The fullscore
Our pick of the month's news, views and interviews
4 min |
May 2025
BBC Music Magazine
Music to my ears
The BBC Music Magazine team's current favourites...
1 min |
May 2025
BBC Music Magazine
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
Pianist Yevgeny Sudbin chooses the most gleefully ghoulish pieces inspired by death and mysticism
3 min |
May 2025
BBC Music Magazine
Wagner the revolutionary flees Dresden to avoid arrest
The Royal Kapellmeister Richard Wagner is wanted for examination on account of his active participation in the recent rising here, but as yet he has not been found'.
3 min |
May 2025
BBC Music Magazine
Play it with a smile
The most important film composer of the 20th century and beyond? Williams? Guðnadóttir? Steiner? I have another candidate: Charles Spencer Chaplin.
2 min |
May 2025
BBC Music Magazine
Look back in anguish
Despite Korngold's denials, there is much to suggest that his Symphony in F sharp is a grim depiction of the dark days of Nazism, argues Jessica Duchen
7 min |
March 2025
BBC Music Magazine
Come again?
If something is worth hearing once it's worth hearing again, explains Rebecca Franks, who charts a history of the use of echoes in music
6 min |
March 2025
BBC Music Magazine
THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW
Music by women and composers of colour is not a separate set of pieces from the ones we know
6 min |
March 2025
BBC Music Magazine
A brilliant melting pot of discoverable works
Erik Levi enjoys Patricia Kopatchinskaja and friends' eloquent performances of lesser-known works by exiled composers
2 min |
March 2025
BBC Music Magazine
Pierre Boulez
Tom Stewart celebrates a composer, conductor and musical iconoclast for whom breaking from tradition was not an option but a must
6 min |
March 2025
BBC Music Magazine
Vienna's cacophonous concert ends to the sound of slapping
‘Fighting at a Schoenberg concert.
3 min |
March 2025
BBC Music Magazine
Molto humoroso
Cartoonist and broadcaster Gerard Hoffnung lampooned the world of classical music with splendid affection and wit, writes Andrew Green
7 min |
March 2025
BBC Music Magazine
There and back again
With retrospectives on album and in concert this month, Oscar-winning composer Howard Shore reflects on his years in Middle-earth and tells Michael Beek why he has a lot to thank the LPO for...
7 min |
March 2025
BBC Music Magazine
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN Pick a theme... and name your seven favourite examples
Composer-conductor Odaline de la Martinez prizes tempo, swing and bounce in her top rhythmic works
3 min |
March 2025
BBC Music Magazine
Crystal clear with plenty of punch
The great is, they say, the enemy of the good, and that is certainly the case with David Sanger’s interpretation of Vierne’s Organ Symphony No. 1, which stands head and shoulders above a strong field of alternative versions.
3 min |
March 2025
BBC Music Magazine
Istanbul Turkey
Charlotte Smith is entranced by a city that straddles east and west, and places an abundance of art, music and culture at the heart of its identity
3 min |
March 2025
BBC Music Magazine
BBC muSIC MAGAZINE AWARDS 2025
VOTE NOW and help choose the best classical recordings of the past 12 months
3 min |
March 2025
BBC Music Magazine
Louis Vierne Organ Symphony No. 1
As Notre-Dame re-opens, Terry Blain names the finest recordings of a spectacular showcase by one of the cathedral’s famous former organists
4 min |