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.
As the nights draw in, the week before the clocks change, John attempts to bring back the warm sunshine with Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo’s best-known work, the Concierto de Aranjuez. He plays a performance by the famed classical guitarist, Milos Karadaglic.
Then, John unveils a new recording of Leonard Bernstein’s popular overture to his operetta based on Voltaire’s 1759 novella, Candide. Marin Alsop conducts the London Symphony Orchestra.
Sunday 31 October
John marks Halloween with a piece that was poorly received at its premiere, by a superstitious audience. But now Danse Macabre by Saint-Saëns is amongst the composer’s most celebrated works.
Then, on the day the nation’s clocks were wound back an hour, John features a Haydn symphony famous for the tick-tock rhythms of its second movement; Symphony no.101, known as ‘Clock’.
Sunday 7 November
John features the music of a composer who became the first African-American woman to have a composition played by a major orchestra. Florence Price’s Symphony No.3 was written at the height of the Great Depression, and John includes a recent recording by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
Then, he chooses one of his all time favourite pieces of music; Beethoven’s one and only Violin Concerto, performed in sparkling fashion by Classic FM’s Artist-in-Residence, Maxim Vengerov.
