BBC Music Magazine

BBC Music Magazine is a must for anyone with a passion for classical music. Classical music connoisseurs and new enthusiast alike will enjoy the fascinating features and reviews of over 120 new works in every issue.

Please Note: Our digital edition does not include the cover mount items or supplements you would normally find with printed copies

EDITORIAL ENQUIRIES

Welcome

THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS

Have your say…

LETTER of the MONTH

Record price for a violin shattered • ‘Baron Knoop’ Stradivari sells for $23m to private buyer

MAY 1849 Wagner the revolutionary flees Dresden to avoid arrest

Also in May 1849…

Music to my ears • The BBC Music Magazine team’s current favourites…

MyHero

Play it with a smile

FAREWELL TO…

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN Pick a theme… and name your seven favourite examples • Pianist Yevgeny Sudbin chooses the most gleefully ghoulish pieces inspired by death and mysticism

Richard Morrison • From frontline action to opera: my father’s musical memories of WWII

KEEP CALM AND COMPOSE • British composers played a vital role in lifting spirits in World War II, sometimes in unlikely ways. Rob Ainsley tells how they played their part with symphonies, film scores… and jam

Carols and secret codes

Putting the ‘V’ in Beethoven • How his Fifth rattled the Germans

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

Otherwise occupied • A tale of French resistance

A different picture • There’s more to Dame Myra Hess than her moraleboosting National Gallery concerts – not least her formidable piano skills, writes Jessica Duchen

Hess on record • Five fine performances

STEVREICH COLLECTED WORKS

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

Lessons with the master • Baritone Benjamin Appl remembers his important mentor

A joy to play with Pianist Alfred Brendel

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

Creative kids • Barley’s foundation

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

Collective agenda • The Blacknificent 7

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

National Arts Centre

FESTIVAL GUIDE 2025

United Kingdom

MUSIC HOLIDAYS FOR DISCERNING TRAVELLERS • Kirker Holidays offers expert-led small group tours to leading festivals such as the Rossini Festival in Pesaro and the Buxton Opera Festival, opera weekends in New York, Vienna, Milan and Venice, as well as exclusive Kirker Music Festivals with world-class musicians in unique settings.

UK Summer Opera

Europe

North America & Canada

Rest of the World

Prague Czechia • Claire Jackson visits the vibrant home of not one, but two leading Czech composers, each honoured with his own prestigious festival

Local heroWenceslaus I

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

Sibelius’s style

JEAN SIBELIUS Life&Times

Ralph Vaughan Williams Dona Nobis Pacem • Rebecca Franks explores a composer’s...