Mariss Jansons: How to build a concert hall

Available for over a year

Tom Service talks to the renowned Latvian conductor Mariss Jansons about why Munich needs a new concert hall, which the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, his orchestra, is building, as part of an extended programme, including education in the local community; also about the importance of culture in today's life, and how a new balance, he argues, is required between the material and the spiritual life, and about how his education and his early years in Soviet Russia, where excellence in music was pursued at all costs, inform his art. Also, as we reach the first centenary of his death, a celebration of Scott Joplin, one of the most acclaimed of all Afro-American composers, dubbed 'The King of Ragtime Writers'. Susan Curtis, biographer of Joplin, explains why was he so important in the creation of an 'American music', while Jazz maestro and composer Julian Joseph, sitting at the piano, explores and illustrates how ragtime opened the door to Jazz. And we go behind the New York Philharmonic's education programme, more than five decades old now, as the ensemble set up camp in London for a short residency at the Barbican Centre, which includes concerts for kids. We talk to the Vice-President of Education at the NY Phil, Ted Wiprud, and to Jon Deak, who set up the 'Very Young Composers' scheme some 20 years ago. Also, we hear some of the compositions the scheme has helped to produce.