The Classic! Pod

Jonathan Whiting

The podcast for all things classical music! 🎶🎻🎹

Interviews, our favourite recordings and just chatting (and rambling) about the fantastic crazy world of classical music.

Co-hosts Jonathan Whiting and Alex Maxted 🎤

New episodes bi-weekly📅

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10 episodes
fortnightly
Avg 55 min
English

Episodes 10

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#10
September 22 · 1 hr 2 min
Classical Music vs the Internet
Classical music is trying to keep up with the internet – and sometimes it’s trying a little too hard. This week: opera houses chasing social-media trends, influencers selling a fantasy of champagne and Alpine hotels, AI-generated posters, whether recordings have changed how we hear live music, and why classical music doesn’t always fit neatly into a three-second hook. Plus: Carmen gets Botox, Jonny admits he raw-dogs the Tube, Alex questions whether music is actually relaxing, Brahms induces Stockholm Syndrome, and Wagner finally finds his hook – three hours in. Episode 10 of The Classic Pod is out now 🎧
#9
September 6 · 51 min
The Mozart-to-Christina-Aguilera pipeline
The classical music quiz is back – and somehow it gets even more unhinged. This week: Saint-Saëns hiding Carnival of the Animals because it was too frivolous, Berlioz designing an orchestra of more than 800 performers, Schumann potentially destroying his hand with a finger-stretching contraption, Messiaen writing music in a prisoner-of-war camp, Christina Aguilera’s love of Amadeus and Ethel Smyth conducting imprisoned suffragettes with a toothbrush. Plus: Jonny arrives with a Wagner Pride T-shirt and a grievance from the Proms, Alex becomes classical music’s answer to Hello! magazine, and we discover just how much of our own musical knowledge we may have invented. Episode 9 of The Classic Pod is out now 🎧
#8
August 23 · 52 min
Riots, Romance & Really Bad Eye Surgery
We test each other on some of classical music history’s strangest stories. Why did Haydn make his orchestra walk off stage one by one? What happened when Beethoven’s hero Napoleon declared himself Emperor? How did Bach and Handel end up connected to the same terrifying eighteenth-century eye surgeon? And what exactly was Chopin writing to his male roommate? Along the way, we encounter Isadora Duncan dancing Wagner barefoot, the chaos surrounding the premiere of The Rite of Spring, some surprisingly operatic English queens – and take a detour to Bayreuth to ask what happens when AI enters Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk.
#7
July 18 · 59 min
Summer Opera Chaos
In this episode, we catch up on a chaotic few weeks of music, travel and opera: Glyndebourne black tie etiquette, Waitrose picky bits, Zürich Opera House, Wagner’s Swiss exile, German churches with questionable air conditioning, Hong Kong and Shanghai choral adventures, and the strange ritual of the 90-minute countryside opera interval. We also talk about what makes summer opera festivals so seductive, so expensive, and occasionally so absurd — from Glyndebourne and Longborough to Opera Holland Park and Garsington. Plus: Gerald Barry’s gloriously deranged The Importance of Being Earnest, Jorge Bolet playing Liszt, and why everybody should commission an opera immediately.
#6
June 15 · 58 min
Musical Trauma Dump
In Episode 6 of The Classic! Pod, we’re having a good ol' fashioned MTD. This week, we look back at our own musical journeys: childhood music exams, terrifying adjudicators, sight-singing nightmares, memory slips, sweaty Grade 8 violin exams, rogue piano competitions, orchestral chaos, university recitals and all the weird little formative moments that come with growing up around classical music. We also talk about what happens after studying music: job interviews, classical music media, arts work, bookbinding old scores, the strange smallness of the music world, and why being nice about other musicians should not be a controversial act. Plus, our Albums of the week take us from Rachmaninov’s choral music with Tenebrae to Mackerras’s gloriously fun Gilbert and Sullivan ballet Pineapple Poll. Expect exam trauma, career confusion, inexplicable dogs in dissertations, and probably too many things we had to edit out. Let us know your own musical highs, lows and horror stories in the comments.
#5
May 30 · 59 min
Classical Music Idols
Who were the musicians, performers and teachers who first opened the door to classical music? In this episode of Classic! Pod, Alex Maxted and Jonny Whiting talk musical idols in the broadest possible sense: not just the grand names — Callas, Pavarotti, Sondheim, Bernstein — but the performers, recordings, videos and teachers that shaped how they listen. There are formative encounters with Alicia de Larrocha’s crystalline pianism, Diana Damrau’s Queen of the Night, Joyce DiDonato’s masterclasses, Antonio Pappano’s piano-side opera explainers, Gerald Finley’s Figaro, and Stephen Sondheim in person — or, at least, in the same room. Along the way, Alex and Jonny consider the cult of the soprano, the risks of meeting your idols, the weird glamour of classical celebrity, and whether the art form might benefit from a little more screaming. Plus: dodgy conductors, accidental oboe trauma, The Magic Flute’s chaotic pacing, recommendations from Amadeus to Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, and the eternal question: who are your musical idols?
#4
May 18 · 48 min
Don't do heroin at the Royal Albert Hall
In episode 4 of The Classic! Pod, we ask whether people are really “classical music novices” — or whether classical music is already everywhere, quietly sneaking into films, adverts, TV shows, video games, McDonald’s after 11pm, and probably your childhood without you even noticing. We talk about film music, John Williams, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Brief Encounter, Kubrick, Bach in unexpected places, Lady Gaga’s extremely surprising connection to the Well-Tempered Clavier, and why film scores absolutely count as classical music. We also get into Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, video game soundtracks, Animal Crossing village tunes, Wii Music, and why composing for games deserves to be taken seriously. Along the way, there’s classical music in adverts, classical music as “fancy perfume energy”, Shostakovich in McDonald’s, MacMillan’s Seven Last Words from the Cross, and Jonny carrying a suspiciously large trombone case on the Tube. Plus, our recommendations of the week: a vivid, theatrical recording of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and Billie Holiday’s version of Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low”. Basically: you probably know more classical music than you think.
#3
May 1 · 1 hr 1 min
New Music, Old Problems
In episode 3 of The Classic! Pod, we’re talking about new music: what it is, why people are sometimes scared of it, and why “modern” classical music somehow still often means Schoenberg — despite the fact that Schoenberg is now over 100 years old.There are also detours into seeing elephants, smelling elephants, Mahler titles, whether anyone writes symphonies anymore, and the eternal question of how to get people to come back for the second performance of a new piece. Plus, our recommendations of the week: Mentor from the London Choral Sinfonia and Michael Waldron, and Iberia from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Domingo Hindoyan.
#2
April 17 · 53 min
Classical Music Hot Takes
In episode 2 of The Classic Podcast, we’re getting into our classical music hot takes — the opinions that might get us disinvited from polite concert conversation. We talk about staged overtures, children in theatre, why some productions feel a bit too eager to spell everything out, and whether opera acting has become overly physical. We also get into the composers and styles we just don’t quite click with, from Chopin and Debussy to the broader question of why some music grabs us and some simply doesn’t.Along the way, we end up talking about everything from Handel and Puccini to Bach chorales, new music, Schoenberg, and why audiences still seem far more excited by the classics than by work being written now. It’s opinionated, slightly chaotic, and very much from the heart — in other words, exactly what you’d hope for from a podcast about classical music that refuses to be too serious.🎧 Listen to The Classic! Podcast EVERY other FRIDAY on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts🔔 Don’t Forget to Subscribe!📱 Follow Us on Social Media:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theclassicpod/Facebook: @theclassic!podTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_classicpod
#1
April 3 · 50 min
This is the Opera House, not the O2
Welcome to the very first episode of The Classic Pod. We’re Jonathan and Alex, and in this episode we’re introducing ourselves, explaining why we started the podcast, and getting into the strange, funny and occasionally chaotic experience of going to classical concerts today. We talk about concert etiquette, what on earth you’re meant to wear, whether anyone is actually concentrating the whole time, and why live music still matters so much to us. There are also stories from the Proms, opera houses, student days and a few too many near-sleep incidents.

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