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Tom Service pays tribute to Sir John Tavener, who died this week. Tom visited the composer at his home in Dorset just last month. In this, the last in-depth one-to-one recorded interview he ever gave, Tavener talked about his most recent compositions, how his ill health changed his attitude to his faith and his music. He also told Tom about which of his pieces he would have liked to have heard performed again and of his deep love for the music of Mozart, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky. Tom also assesses Tavener's legacy with the composer and conductor Oliver Knussen. 

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As a new production of Leonard Bernstein's satirical operetta Candide is about to open at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London, Tom visits rehearsals and asks will this be the definitive version of what has always proved to be a problematic show since it was first premiered in 1956? Setting the scene…or telling the story so far….are conductor John Mauceri, musicologist Nigel Simeone and composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim with archive comments from Bernstein himself. At the Menier Chocolate Factory Tom talks to the director of their new production Matthew White, musical supervisor David Charles Abell and Fra Fee and Scarlett Strallen who play the show’s central characters Candide and Cunegonde

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