In this episode, composer Julian Anderson discusses his new work Life Cycle, to be premiered by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in September 2025. Conducted by Stephan Meier, and featuring soprano Anna Dennis, the concert also includes Charlotte Bray’s Reflections in Time and the premiere of Serpentine by Birmingham composer Marcus Rock.

At the heart of this conversation, though, is Anderson’s Life Cycle: eight songs that span English, French, Spanish, German and Gaelic traditions, exploring themes of identity, memory, belonging, life and death. For Julian, it’s both a deeply personal project – shaped by family, friendship, and loss – and a vision of music that travels freely beyond nationality. It’s also a project that began life in an unusually unexpected way.

We also talk about the early encouragement that set him on the path to composing, how musicology sharpened his creativity, and why he believes memory and play sit at the core of everything he writes.

Our conversation was recorded on a hot Bank Holiday Monday in August, at a busy Southbank Centre in London.

Trumpeter Matilda Lloyd releases her third album on the Chandos Label featuring four premiere recordings by Roxanna Panufnik, Richard Barbard, Deborah Pritchard and Owain Park, alongside transcriptions of music by Johan Sebastian Bach, Martini, and Johann Ludwig Kreps. Matilda is an invigorating presence on the classical music scene, combining her craft with an astute eye for social media content that avoids aesthetics, pays deference, and is useful all at the same time. It takes a certain kind of person to achieve all of that. You'll get a sense of what that is in this interview recorded in May 2025.

Audiences. Strategy. Credibility. What does cultural leadership in classical music look like when credibility is tested by data? Sam Jackson - Radio 3 Controller and BBC Proms Director - talks to Jon Jacob about Radio 3's new sound, recent listening figures (have they been spun or are they actually improving?), strategy, and his role as an audience-facing leader in a changing BBC challenged by funding, budget cuts, and future monetisation plans.