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Benjamin Britten's opera The Rape of Lucretia was first performed at Glyndebourne in 1946 and in the composer’s centenary year this opera house is revisiting the work in a new production by acclaimed actress and director Fiona Shaw. Tom Service visits Glyndebourne during final rehearsals and talks to Shaw about her vision for a piece Britten called a 'chamber opera'.

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Last Saturday the Royal Albert Hall hosted the finals of the National Brass Band Championships of Great Britain, an event which for the last hundred years has usually had a test piece written especially for it.Ìý Over the years some of the greats of British music have composed the piece including Elgar, Holst and Ireland. Tom talks about the history of test pieces with the composer of this year’s piece Edward Gregson, conductor and presenter Frank Renton gives his views about the health of competitions and he also hears from the some of the players themselves.

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The composer Robin Holloway, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British music, turns 70 on Saturday 19th October. He has composed a huge catalogue of orchestral and chamber music, an opera on Thackeray’s Clarissa and was a professor at Cambridge University. Holloway has mined the musical past to create his musical future, his works having a kind of joyful creative borrowing from composers including Schumann, Bach, Schubert and Debussy – fragments, quotations and allusions which he has transformed into his own individual language. Tom met Robin at his London home to talk about his life in music.

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