Carole Hayman is a writer, director and producer best known for creating the long-running Radio 4 comedy Ladies of Letters, and for her work across theatre, film and television.

This conversation explores her fascination with understanding the motivations and actions of women who kill. When she began interviewing psychiatrists and families, a nurse warned her: “It’s a minefield — and no one escapes.”

Material from those interviews became The Hive — an opera born from years of verbatim testimony, a four-screen installation, and, by Carole’s own admission, a slightly wine-soaked rehearsal that turned into something bigger.

The Hive challenges the familiar, sensationalised image of the “female killer,” aiming instead to reconnect with the basic humanity of the people who’ve caused suffering.

The opera premieres at The Tung Auditorium, Liverpool, in partnership with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, on Saturday 8 November at 7.30 pm.

We talk about violence, laughter, and the ethics of turning other people’s pain into art — and about The Hive’s uncomfortable questions: how do we decide who’s guilty, and why do stories of murder fascinate us?

Vache Baroque didn’t start with a five-year plan. It started with a can-do attitude. In 2020, soprano-producer Betty Makharinsky and conductor Jonathan Darbourne looked at a locked-down industry and staged Purcell's Dido and Aeneas outdoors—in eleven weeks. Since then they’ve built a distinctive live experience: bold repertoire choices, playful staging, circus performers, and sound design subtle enough that you barely notice it but absolutely benefit from. In this episode, Betty charts that journey—from scratch startup to trusted aesthetic—and why serving the audience sometimes means re-thinking tradition. Bear in mind this podcast does battle with some automated announcements from the Southbank Centre.

Pianist Clare Hammond is no stranger to the Thoroughly Good Podcast. She appeared here a few years ago to talk about performing Schubert in prisons.
This time she returns with composer Michael Betteridge to discuss another prison project — one in which they co-created new music with prisoners, pieces Clare later performed.

What follows is a conversation about impact — about leadership, trust, and humanity revealed and sustained through participatory music-making.
Themes that are equally evident in Clare’s recent album of piano concertos by Britten, Walton, and Tippett.
Substance.

Thirty minutes with one of the loveliest leaders in the classical music industry.

Violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen talks candidly about the additive experience of motherhood in this podcast episode recorded on Barbican terrace in mid-September 2025.

In this episode, conductor Alice Farnham is working with English Touring Opera in September and October in performances of The Elixir of Love and Britten's Rape of Lucretia. The productions pop up in a variety of different locations across England. Visit the ETO website for more details.

When she and I met for this podcast interview, I provided a provocation. I'd seen something short and surprisingly thought-provoking on Instagram a week before inviting exploration of the definition of trust. Specifically the notion that trust is the active engagement of the unknown.

I saw connections with the work of performers of all kinds, indeed even those in the audition if you've an especially imaginative mind. I put the idea to Alice before the interview. The result was thought-prpvoking.

Here she talks candidly about what it takes to bring an opera to life — from building trust with singers and directors, to handling nerves before that very first rehearsal. She reflects on how rehearsal culture has changed, the unseen work of conductors, and the challenges of adapting Italian opera into English. We start with the mechanics and meeting the musicians for the first time.

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.