Gramophone Classical Music Podcast

As the 2025 BBC Proms season gets underway, Martin Cullingford is joined by Tim Parry and Hattie Butterworth select their top picks. From Rachmaninov with Yunchan Lim and the UK premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Cello Concerto to a late-night tribute to Arvo Pärt and a rare performance of Delius’s A Mass of Life, the team reflects on the Proms’s cultural significance, its breadth of programming, and the enduring tradition of live music at the Royal Albert Hall.

We're today continuing the theme set by last week's edition, in which we marked the 500th episode of the Gramophone Classical Music podcast by looking back over some of our most memorable interviews and episodes. The interview Editor Martin Cullingford chose to reflect on was a conversation he had with the guitarist Julian Bream all the way back in 2013, to mark his 80th birthday and also the fact that Gramophone had honoured him with our Lifetime Achievement Award. So here, for this week's podcast, we offer a retrospective edition - and a chance to hear at full length that earlier episode.

Earlier this year the Gramophone Podcast passed 1 million downloads. Now we’ve reached another milestone: our 500th episode. Launched before podcasting’s current popularity, the series steadily built a following, which grew substantially once we adopted a weekly schedule and set formats. Those formats include: interviews with major artists on new albums; in-depth composer discussions; reflections with senior musical figures; and conversations with a new generation of musicians rethinking the artist’s role today. In a special celebratory edition, James Jolly, Martin Cullingford, Tim Parry and Hattie Butterworth each choose a standout: Julian Bream on a life in music; William Christie on Mondonville; Richard Wigmore on the enduring brilliance of Schubert and Fatma Said on collaboration.

Gramophone's Editor Martin Cullingford speaks to James Jolly about the 2025 Orchestra of the Year nominated orchestras, discussing the impact each of them has made to recordings and the wider musical landscape To vote for Gramophone's Orchestra of the Year 2025, head to gramophone.co.uk/vote25 [https://www.gramophone.co.uk/static-pages/vote25]

Conductor John Andrews joins Hattie Butterworth to speak about the debut recording of Sir Granville Bantock and Marjory Kennedy-Fraser’s folk opera, The Seal Woman. They explore the folk song collecting of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, as well as Andrews’s commitment to uncovering lesser-known repertoire