´óÏó´«Ã½

Stephen Hough talks to presenter Kate Molleson about his new memoir, Enough, a candid exploration of his love for the piano. He discusses growing-up in a household with little music, through his education in Cheetham’s School in Manchester as a young teenager, to his experience studying as a young man at the Juilliard in New York. He tells Kate about his experiences with teachers – some encouraging and others emotionally challenging – and describes the almost confessional nature of revealing his inner soul to the public as both a composer and performer.

Following a collective statement issued last week by the boards of several opera houses, which called on Arts Council England to develop a strategy for opera provision, Tom Service hears from Aidan Lang, general director of Welsh National Opera; general director of Opera North, Richard Mantle; and Robin Norton-Hale, general director of English Touring Opera, about what they’d like to see in the analysis ACE has promised. They tell Tom how new audiences and productions are helping the genre to thrive, despite the difficult cultural environment at present.

The singer and TV presenter Elzara Batalova left her homeland in Crimea after Russia’s 2014 annexation, and fled Kyiv last year for the safety of Scotland. As she prepares for a concert to mark the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh later this month, she tells Kate about her roots in Tatar culture, how she finds it difficult to sing after fleeing Ukraine, and the ways in which she’s discovering new ways to make her voice heard for the benefit of fellow Ukrainians.

Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize, emeritus professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews, and notching-up a quarter century as poetry editor at Picador Macmillan, Kate speaks to the Scottish poet and author Don Paterson, whose memoir Toy Fights is hot off the press. He describes the crucial influence of his father who was himself a respected musician, how he got into Jazz, how the guitar proved crucial during a time of mental breakdown, and the parallels between music and poetry.