In this programme
Download the complete programme on this week's Music Matters podcast.*
Labeque sisters
French sisters Katia and Marielle Labeque have been performing piano duets on one and two pianos since the sixties. Through commissions and arrangements, they have extended the repertoire and their latest projects continue to break boundaries on their own record label, KML Recordings. As well as playing the piano duos of Ravel, Mozart and Schubert, they have also branched out to avant-garde video art by Tal Rosner for their performances of Stravinsky and Debussy and to rethinking the Beatles with Katia's new band, B for Bang.
Tom caught up with the siblings just before their Cadogan Hall debut in London, to find out about their exceptional partnership. With specially recorded performance.
Earth Machine Music
Finnish musician Kimmo Pohjonen has been playing the accordion for so long that he's constantly in search of new and bizarre ways to perform. His most recent experiment involves sampling and performing alongside the rhythmic sounds of farm machinery - tractors, milking machines and threshers. Kimmo has intrigued the farmers by transforming agricultural mechanics into music and now he's ready to share the curious results with audiences across the UK.
Earth Machine Music tour: 11th - 17th May 2008
Philippe Herreweghe
![Philippe Herreweghe and Tom Service look at a Bruckner score]()
Belgian conductor Philippe Herreweghe trained as a pianist and later qualified as a psychiatrist, but his first love was for choral music. Of the many groups he has founded, Collegium Vocale Gent has remained at the heart of his musical life, but the more recently established Orchestre de Champs-Elysees has enabled him to extend his repertoire to Mahler and Bruckner on period instruments. Tom talked with Herreweghe in his Brussels home and asked him about his current passion for Romantic repertoire.
Philippe Herreweghe performs with Collegium Vocale Ghent at this year's Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music at St. John's Smith Square, London on 16th May at 7.30pm, and you can hear the concert on BBC Radio 3's Performance on 3 on 20th May at 7pm.
Jonathan Harvey
Composer Jonathan Harvey has been at the forefront of music technology for years, starting in the States, then in Paris at IRCAM. His most recent work will be premiered at this year's BBC Proms in a new piece for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra: Speaking Orchestra, which uses technology from IRCAM, melding voices into instruments. For Harvey, electronic techniques are used as a tool to transport the listener beyond the self. He explains this to Tom, and two of his closest collaborators, conductor Martyn Brabbins and sound designer Ian Dearden reveal what it's like to work with the composer.
You can hear Jonathan Harvey's 4th String Quartet, performed by the Diotima Quartet in Radio 3's Hear and Now on Saturday 10th May at 10.30pm.
Jonathan Harvey works with Sound Intermedia at Aldeburgh's New Music New Media project, 4th-13th May 2008.
