How Mozart's Requiem, written when he was dying, has touched and changed people's lives. 

Crime writer Val McDermid recalls how this music helped her after the loss of her father. Hypnotist Athanasios Komianos recounts how the piece took him to the darker side of the spirit world. And a friend of ballet dancer Edward Stierle, Lissette Salgado-Lucas, explains how Eddie turned his struggle with HIV into a ballet inspired by Mozart's music.

Basement Jaxx used the Requiem in their live shows and on their album Scars - Felix Buxton reveals his love for Mozart and the divine nature of the Requiem. 

And Mozart expert Cliff Eisen takes us inside the composer's world: how the orchestra and choir conjure visions of funerals, beauty, hellfire and the confusion of death. He recounts how Mozart was commissioned to write the piece by a nobleman who may have intended to pass off the work as his own. The stern challenge faced by people trying to complete the piece are described by composer Michael Finnissy, who himself wrote a completion of the work.

The Requiem was performed at the funerals of many heroic figures - Beethoven, Napoleon and J F Kennedy, among others. Gordana Blazinovic remembers one extraordinary performance during the horrors of the Bosnian war - a show of defiance and grief from the ruins of Sarajevo City Hall.

Producer: Melvin Rickarby. Published on April 26, 2016.

Mozart's Requiem

'Feed The Birds' was written for the film Mary Poppins by Richard and Robert Sherman. Published on May 3, 2016.

Feed the Birds

Soul Music explores a song that has become synonymous with the American Civil Rights Movement, Sam Cooke's A Change Is Gonna Come released in December 1964 two weeks after he was shot dead in Los Angeles. Contributors include Sam Cooke's brother LC, singer Bettye Lavette who sang it for Barack Obama at his inaugural ceremony and civil rights activists from the Freedom Summer of 64, Jennifer Lawson and Mary King.

Producer: Maggie Ayre. Published on October 11, 2016.

A Change Is Gonna Come, by Sam Cooke

"Jerusalem" has become a quintessentially middle-class and very English song, but it is held in the hearts and memories of people from different backgrounds and cultures. 

There is a bit of cricket - Aggers discusses England's stunning and unexpected victory in the 2005 Ashes. Jerusalem reminds of that extraordinary summer. 

We hear from Pamela Davenport, the daughter of a man who felt that the words of Jerusalem highlighted inequality in society; lack of money prevented him fulfilling his academic potential and he died in a care home that didn't care well enough for him. 

For the American poet, Ann Lauterbach, the unusual and little-known Paul Robeson version was the theme-tune to her escape from the difficult years of Nixon and Vietnam to 1960s London.

The singer, Janet Shell, recalls the burial of her Great Uncle who was killed during World War One, but whose body was only discovered in 2009.

Susanne Sklar - a scholar of William Blake - discusses the inspiration behind the words of the poem. Probably, she says, he wrote them while awaiting his trial for sedition; he was in trouble for fighting with a soldier who had urinated in his garden.

The composer and writer, Paul Spicer, plays, sings and talks through the tune which was composed by Sir Hubert Parry.




Producer: Karen Gregor. Published on October 18, 2016.

Jerusalem

Memories of first love, first borns and loss are stirred by The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, the timeless love song written by Ewan MacColl for Peggy Seeger, and made famous by Roberta Flack. 

The activist and folk musician Peggy Seeger tells the story of her first meeting with Ewan MacColl, which would inspire him to write the song, and talks about what the song means to her today. MacColl's biographer Ben Harker explains why this song is so different from much of Ewan's other work. 

Julie Young talks about singing the song to her son Reagan, who had severe complex needs following a cardiac arrest as a baby, and the writer Louise Janson speaks about what the song came to mean to her as she set out on the path to becoming a mother on her own. 

Writer and academic Jason King tells the story of how Roberta Flack came to cover this ballad by a Scottish folk musician, and how it catapulted her to fame. And Kandace Springs, a singer and pianist from Nashville, Tennessee, records her version of the song and talks about why the song is one of the greatest love songs of all time. 

Produced by Mair Bosworth. Published on October 25, 2016.

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

America's national anthem was written by a lawyer, Francis Scott Key, after watching the British navy bombing Fort McHenry in 1814. It was set to an English social men's club song and recognized as the national anthem in 1889. Notoriously difficult to sing, and traditionally played at public sports events and orchestral concerts, the anthem has inspired emotion and attracted controversy. We hear from Dr John Carlos who along with Dr Tommie Smith, raised their fists on the Olympic podium in the Mexico City Olympics in 1968 as the anthem was played; Jose Feliciano who sang the anthem at the 1968 World series and provoked criticism; Conrad Netting IV who discovered the truth about his fighter pilot father's history which led him to a cemetery in Normandy; writer Crista Cloutier who associated it with Obama's election; members of the Coldstream Guards band who played the anthem at the changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace the day after 9/11 and Leon Hendrix, Jimi's brother, who was in the army at the time of Woodstock, and was put on 'potato peeling duty' because of the 'dishonourable' version his brother had played. Published on November 1, 2016.

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