John Humphrys, one of Britain’s best-known broadcasters, joins the Classic FM team to share his own stories and reflections of his favourite composers and their music, every Sunday, 4pm to 7pm.
With a successful career spanning six decades, John has presented on both radio and TV, and has anchored many of the country’s flagship news programmes, including the Today Programme.
The young British-Italian tenor Freddie de Tommaso has been described as a “vocal phenomenon”, and last year his first album was a huge number one hit in the classical charts. John features his latest single; a performance of ‘E lucevan le stelle’ from Puccini’s Tosca.
Then, there’s more new music as John chooses a track from the latest album by clarinettist Michael Collins, who has teamed up with the Philharmonia Orchestra and the newly founded Wigmore Soloists for a recording of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto.
As we reach the end of May, John takes us on a musical trip to Italy with a piece by Tchaikovsky that has its origins in a European holiday the great composer took. He features a new recording of Capriccio Italien, from the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich under Paavo Järvi.
Then, John chooses a work by a composer who not only rose to be one of the most prominent musicians of the 19th century, but was also a leading figure in the movement for women’s suffrage. He plays the overture from Ethel Smyth’s 1906 opera, The Wreckers.
