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Philippe Jaroussky is one of the most admired countertenors of his generation.ÌýHe has explored the vast Baroque repertoire and beyond to fin-de-siècle French song as well as premiering contemporary vocal music composed for him. Jaroussky tells Tom Service how his voice has changed and developed thus influencing the repertoire he is singing.

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The music critic and biographer Michael Kennedy sadly died on New Year’s Eve at the age of eighty-eight. Having started at the Manchester office of The Daily Telegraph as a tea boy at the age of fifteen, he worked his way up to becoming the paper’s Northern Editor.Ìý Along the way he turned his hand to music criticism relinquishing the editorship of the Telegraph in 1986 to become the paper’s joint chief music critic and then chief music critic of The Sunday Telegraph from 1989 to 2005. As a writer he wrote books on Vaughan Williams, Elgar and Strauss and edited The Oxford Dictionary of Music. Tom pays tribute to Michael Kennedy and we hear a selection of his contributions to ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 3 programmes over the years.

Continuing our series of interviews with people at the helm of the UK's most prestigious musical institutions Tom speaks to Peter Millican, the CEO and creator of King's Place, situated in London's King's Cross. Millican, a property developer and music lover (he's a keen viola player) built the £100m office building and arts complex in 2008 because he could see that this part of London needed a cultural lift. He wanted to show that a commercial development could be built providing good public spaces for art and music supported by profits from office rents. Has his plan worked?

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Minimalism is a term borrowed from the visual arts to describe the style of musical composition characterized by an intentionally simplified rhythmic, melodic and harmonic vocabulary. Flourishing in the 60s and 70s in the United States it is typified by the music of Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. As King's Place launches its year-long festival entitled Minimalism Unwrapped, Tom meets three contemporary exponents of the form - Scanner, Oliver Coates and Kerry Andrew of Juice - to discuss the meaning of minimalism, the current scene and where they want to take it in future.

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