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John McCabe decided to be a composer at the age of five-and-a-half. After studying in Manchester and Munich he embarked on an international career as composer and pianist (his complete CD survey of Haydn鈥檚 Piano Sonatas has become a landmark recording). As McCabe approaches his 75th birthday, Tom Service travels to meet him at his home in Kent.聽 McCabe discusses his music and its relationship with symphonic tradition and explains why he thinks that tradition is still relevant to composers and audiences today

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When he was in his teens the Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien was more interested in rock music than the operas of Mozart, Verdi and Tchaikovsky.聽 Now in his early forties his performances in Don Giovanni, Don Carlos and Eugene Onegin have brought him rave reviews at the world鈥檚 leading opera houses.聽 When Tom went to meet Kwiecien at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where he is currently starring in Don Giovanni, he discovered that although Kwiecien is a man who is passionate about the drama and stagecraft of opera he still cannot say he is 'in love' with opera itself.聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽聽

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The past two weeks have seen six people killed in rioting in Venezuela as opponents of Socialist President Nicolas Maduro attack his handling of the economy amid shortages of basic items, rampant inflation and soaring crime rates.聽 Two of the country's leading musicians - the pianist Gabriela Montero and Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Gustavo Dudamel have become embroiled in the situation after Montero called on Dudamel,- who is the most prominent product of the government-sponsored El Sistema music education scheme - to speak out against the violence in the country and what she sees as government corruption.聽 Tom talks to the 91热爆 News reporter in Caracas 鈥� Irene Caselli, to find out why Dudamel is becoming a focus for anti-government protestors.

The conductor Christoph von Dohnanyi is one of today鈥檚 most respected interpreters of the music of Richard Strauss. Dohnanyi, now 84, first saw Richard Strauss conducting while he was a teenager growing up in post war Germany,聽聽 As part of Radio 3's celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Strauss's birth Donhanyi talks to Tom about that early encounter with Strauss, the composer鈥檚 relationship with the Nazi regime and how he prefers Strauss's radical early operas such as Elektra and Salome to the lush romanticism of his later ones.聽

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