Gramophone Classical Music Podcast

The latest recording from the choir of St John's College, Cambridge celebrates the 150th anniversary of the consecration of its chapel, and its 100th recording. Director of Music Andrew Nethsingha talks to Gramophone Editor Martin Cullingford about the album - titled Locus Iste - and about how the extraordinary building shapes the choir's sound.

Kaija Saariaho has written a song-cycle, True Fire, for the baritone Gerald Finley, and which he has now recorded with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Hannu Lintu, for Ondine. James Jolly paid Gerald Finley a visit to talk about the score, its challenges and how he and Saariaho first encountered each other.

'Colin Currie and Steve Reich. Live at Fondation Louis Vuitton' is the third album to be released on Colin Currie's own label and captures five performances, taken live, at a Steve Reich presentation in Paris. The music ranges from Clapping Music of 1972 to Pulse of 2015. James Jolly met up with Colin to talk about his long association with Reich's music, the approach needed to perform music of mathematical precision yet at the same surprising emotional weight, and performing Clapping Music with Reich himself.

German-American violinist Augustin Hadelich talks to James Jolly about the challenge of Brahms's great Violin Concerto, which he has twinned with György Ligeti's Violin Concerto of some 110 years later for his new recording on Warner Classics.

Carolyn Sampson talks to Editor-in-Chief James Jolly about 'Reason in Madness', her new recording from BIS performed with pianist Joseph Middleton, which focuses on some of literature's heroines whose mental state has been unbalanced by sadness or tragedy, drawing on some glorious, and unsettling, music from composers including Brahms, Schumann, Richard Strauss, Chausson, Saint-Saëns and Poulenc.

Isabelle Faust, the multi-Gramophone Award-winning violinist, has recorded an album of Bach concertos, sinfonias and trio sonatas with the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin on the Harmonia Mundi label. She talks about the new recording with Editor-in-Chief James Jolly.

Grace Williams (1906-77) was one of Wales's finest composers - she left a sizeable body of work, her best-known piece being the orchestral tone-poem Penillion, as well as a lot of chamber music, much of it as yet unpublished. Madeleine Mitchell and friends have just released a recording for Naxos of her chamber music, and Editor-in-Chief James Jolly caught up with the violinist to talk about it.