Domingo Hindoyan
Domingo Hindoyan was born in Caracas in 1980 to a violinist father and a lawyer mother. He started his musical career as a violinist in the ground-breaking Venezuelan musical education programme El Sistema. He studied conducting at Haute Ecole de Musique in Geneva, where he gained his masters, and in 2012 was invited to join the Allianz International Conductor’s Academy, through which he worked with the London Philharmonic and the Philharmonia Orchestra and with conductors like Esa-Pekka Salonen and Sir Andrew Davis.
He was appointed first assistant conductor to Daniel Barenboim at the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin in 2013, and in 2019, he took up a position as principal guest conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra. In the same year, he made his debut with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and was appointed as the Orchestra’s new Chief Conductor in 2020, taking up his position in September 2021. He has now extended his contract with the Orchestra to 2028.
Carlotta Dalia
Born in Tuscany in 1999, guitarist Carlotta Dalia is attracting attention with her passionate and deep interpretations, carried by a round and powerful tone. Since giving her first solo concert at the age of 12, she has won over 40 national and international competitions, including first prizes in Uppsala, Hong Kong, Miami, and Madrid, as well as at the International Competition Niccolò Paganini in Parma. She is now a regular guest on concert stages worldwide - tours have taken her to Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, Sweden, Russia, Ireland, Japan, Latvia, the Netherlands, various South American countries, China, and Switzerland, for example. For some time now, she has been performing repeatedly as a duo with violinist Giuseppe Gibboni, the winner of the Paganini Violin Competition in Genoa in 2021 - the two played, among other places, in Rome's Quirinal Palace at the invitation of Italian President Sergio Mattarella; the concert was broadcast live on Italian radio. Over the past two seasons, Dalia has performed in countries including Norway and Brazil, as well as in Athens, Florence, Lima, Santiago de Chile, the Soirées Musicales de Grimaud festival, and Istanbul. She interpreted Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Guitar Concerto No. 1 with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra in Uppsala. Recitals and orchestral concerts have also taken her to the Nikolaisaal in Potsdam, the Staatstheater Darmstadt, the Segovia Foundation in Linares, and, in duo with Maximilian Hornung, to Biella and Friedrichshafen. In the upcoming season, she will once again perform with the cellist at the Teatro Grande in Brescia. Further highlights include three New Year’s concerts in Jūrmala, Latvia, a recital in Toronto, and Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez in Pescara and, with the Appassionata chamber orchestra, in Verona. She released her first CD Gran Solo with works by Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Scarlatti, Bach, and Sor at the age of 16. A second recording, including compositions by Bach's contemporary Silvius Leopold Weiss, followed in 2018. In 2020, she recorded a sonatina by Angelo Gilardino dedicated to her under the title Angelus, which was released together with works by other composers; in the same year, her recording of the complete guitar works by Ida Presti appeared. For this recording she was awarded the Chitarre d'oro prize in Milan in October 2022. A solo album with works by and for Andrés Segovia including a new composition by Enrico Melozzi was released in spring 2025 on the Berlin Classics label, which previously signed the young guitarist. The next release is already planned for autumn 2026. Carlotta Dalia began playing the guitar at the age of eight and graduated with distinction in 2017 from the renowned Accademia Chigiana in Siena, where she studied with Oscar Ghiglia. She completed postgraduate studies as a student of Laura Young at the Mozarteum Salzburg in 2022 and has been a D'Addario Artist since 2016. She is supported by Classically Connected, Inc. (formerly Si-Yo Music Foundation) in New York and the Adopt a Musician Foundation in Lugano - the latter also kindly lent her the 1939 Hermann Hauser I guitar that he built for Andrès Segovia. Dalia also plays the Matthias Dammann 2023 guitar. She has been a lecturer at the Gaetano Donizetti - Politecnico delle Arti di Bergamo since 2024.
Ritula Shah
Award-winning journalist and broadcaster Ritula Shah is the presenter of Calm Classics every weekday evening on Classic FM, offering a sublime selection of relaxing classics designed to ease away the stresses and strains of the day. Shah left the BBC in April 2023, after a career spanning almost 35 years and which included work on The World Today, Woman’s Hour and Saturday PM. For the last 15 years, she was the main presenter of The World Tonight, Radio 4’s evening news programme, which has a focus on international affairs and domestic politics. She presented the programme from countries including Brazil, Jordan, India, China, the US, Guantanamo Bay, Finland and Germany. She was also the lead presenter of The Real Story, a weekly current affairs discussion programme on the BBC World Service. Shah was a judge for the British Academy Prize for Cultural Understanding 2025 and a fellow of the London Centre for the Humanities. She is on the advisory board of the defence and security think tank RUSI, a trustee of the Voice of the Listener and Viewer and an ambassador for the British Asian Trust.
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir
When the Liverpool Philharmonic Society was founded in 1840, it saw the birth not only of an orchestra but of a chorus too. The Choir added ‘royal’ to its title in 1990. In recent years, the Choir has performed Bach’s St Matthew Passion and Mass in B minor, Orff’s Carmina Burana, Mahler’s Symphony No.2, Rachmaninov’s Vespers, Poulenc’s Gloria, Karl Jenkins’ Stabat Mater, James MacMillan’s St John Passion, Beethoven’s Mass in C, and Britten’s War Requiem. It has also appeared in many of the UK’s major concert venues, including the Royal Albert Hall, and has sung on a number of foreign tours.
The Choir is led by Director of Choirs and Singing Matthew Hamilton. During the 2025/26 season, members of the Choir will perform Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. They will also lead A Choral Celebration which includes the world premiere of a new work by Rushworth Composition Prize winner, Andrew Barney.
John Williams
If you were asked to name a film composer, the chances are John Williams would be right at the top of your list. And yet, despite the New Yorker having composed some of the best-known, best-loved tunes in the business over his seven-decade career, garnering five Oscars and countless other accolades along the way, he revealed in a recent interview that in his view, film music wasn’t a patch on history’s great classical works. Fans may beg to differ of course, and they have plenty of evidence of Williams’ musical genius to offer. Born in Queens in 1932, as a teenager, Williams moved with his family to Los Angeles. The young John headed east again to study at the Julliard and Eastman School of Music before starting his career working as an orchestrator of film scores and a session pianist in Hollywood. In the 1950s he worked with greats like Henry Mancini and Elmer Bernstein and played piano on the West Side Story soundtrack. His earliest solo commission was the 1958 B movie Daddy-O, although he then spent much of the 1960s working in television and it wasn’t until 1965, and the Frank Sinatra vehicle None But the Brave, that he became a fulltime film composer. The first of his five Oscars came in 1972 for the Best Scoring: Adaptation and Original Song Score for Fiddler on the Roof. Williams forged a partnership in the 1970s with Steven Spielberg, working on the rising star director’s debut The Sugarland Express and going on to score 26 Spielberg films over more than four decades, including Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Indiana Jones movies, Jurassic Park, Catch Me if You Can, War Horse and, at the age of 90, The Fabelmans. And, of course, he also collaborated with George Lucas to create the soundtrack for a galaxy far, far away. Williams has enjoyed an astounding 54 Oscar nominations during his career, including a 2024 nod for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and in addition taking home the statuette for Fiddler on the Roof he has also triumphed with Jaws, Star Wars, ET and Schindler’s List. Meanwhile away from the big screen, he has also composed orchestral works, several concertos, elegies, chamber pieces and a musical. Listen to the main theme from Star Wars.
Edvard Grieg
Norway’s most celebrated musical son, Edvard Grieg was actually an eighth Scottish – his great-grandfather Alexander Greig having arrived in Scandinavia in the wake of the Battle of Culloden. By the time Edvard was born in Bergen in 1843, the family had swapped the ‘ei’ in the middle of its surname to ‘ie’. Bergen would remain Grieg’s home for most of his life, and the house he shared with his wife Nina – Troldhaugen – is now a museum dedicated to the composer. Taught piano by his mother as a child, at 15 Grieg became a keyboard and composition student at Leipzig Conservatory. And it was in Leipzig that he heard Clara Schumann play husband Robert’s Piano Concerto in A minor which would have a deep and lasting effect on the young student. Aged 20 he moved to Copenhagen where he studied with Niels Gade and met the young composer Rikard Nordraak who was interested in the sagas, landscapes and music of their shared homeland and who, before he died at the age of 23, composed the music that became Norway’s national anthem. Grieg was inspired to himself learn more about the traditional folk music of Norway, which would go on to influence his own compositions. The two main pillars of his career were composed within its first decade - his Piano Concerto in A minor was an instant (and, as it turns out, enduring) hit when it was premiered in 1867, while in the mid-1870s, playwright Henrik Ibsen asked for a Grieg when it came to creating the incidental music for a production of his play Peer Gynt. Among Grieg’s other best-known works are the Holberg Suite, Lyric Pieces – 66 short pieces for solo piano including Wedding Day at Troldhausen, and Violin Sonata in C minor. Grieg died of heart failure in 1907, aged 64, and was buried, aptly, in a mountain cave at his Troldhausen home. Enjoy listening to In the Hall of the Mountain King from Grieg’s Peer Gynt.
Joaquin Rodrigo
One of the leading Spanish composers of the 20th Century, Joaquin Rodrigo enjoyed great success despite a childhood trauma which had a lasting impact on his life. Rodrigo was born in the city of Sagunto, north of Valencia, in 1901, but at the age of three he fell victim to a diphtheria epidemic which left him practically blind. Despite the challenges that brought, the young Joaquin took up musical studies at the age of eight, learning piano, violin and the musical system solfa, and then at 16 he started to learn harmony and composition. His earliest pieces date from 1923, and in 1924, his first work for orchestra – Juglares – was performed in Valencia and Madrid. In 1927 he enrolled in the École Normale de Musique in Paris where he studied with Paul Dukas. It was also during his time there that he met Manuel de Falla who became the young Spaniard’s mentor. Rodrigo returned to Spain just before the outbreak of the Second World War, settling in Madrid, and it was in 1940 that the premiere of his most famous – and enduring – work, the Concierto de Aranjuez, was given in Barcelona. Despite losing what was left of his sight in 1948, Rodrigo continued to enjoy a flourishing and successful career in post-war Spain, both as a composer and as an educator, lecturer, music critic and pianist. He was also head of music broadcasts for Spanish radio. While the Concierto de Aranjuez remains his most famous work, he also composed 11 concertos, dozens of songs, choral and instrumental works and music for the cinema and theatre. In 1991, to mark his 90th birthday, he was created Marqués de los Jardines de Aranjuez by King Juan Carlos I. Rodrigo died in 1999 at the age of 97. Did you know? Rodrigo wrote all his works in braille and then dictated them to a copyist. Enjoy listening to Carlotta Dalia play Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez.
Emmanuel Chabrier
French Romantic composer and pianist Emmanuel Chabrier was born in Ambert in the Auvergne region in 1841. Despite showing early musical promise, Chabrier’s father was keen for his son to follow him as a lawyer, and a young Emmanuel initially complied, working as a civil servant in Paris. In 1879, Chabrier heard Wagner’s Tristan in Munich, and the next year he resigned his government post to become a fulltime composer. Four years later he had a major success with his symphonic poem España, inspired by a trip to Spain and which showed him to be a master orchestrator. He bookended that with two comic operas, L’étoile – or ‘the Star’ – in 1877, and a decade later, Le Roi malgré lui (King in Spite of Himself), along with the 1885 opera Gwendoline. Among his other key works was the exuberant Joyeuse marche , Pièces pittoresques and the frolicsome 1892 Bourrée fantasque, all for piano. Away from composing, he enjoyed the company of a wide circle of friends that included all the leading musicians, poets, painters and writers of the day. One of his closest friends was Edouard Manet, who painted his portrait, and during his life Chabrier accumulated a sizeable collection of Impressionist paintings, several of which can now be seen in some of the world’s leading museums and galleries. Chabrier died of a neurological disease (possibly a result of syphilis) in Paris in 1894 aged just 53. Enjoy listening to Emmanuel Chabrier’s España.
Carl Orff
Composer, conductor and innovative musical educator Carl Orff was born in Munich in 1895. His father Heinrich was an army officer who was interested in music and his mother Paula a trained pianist. Orff started learning piano at the age of five, and later also took up the cello and organ. Creative from a young age, he had short stories published in a children’s magazine and even composed small pieces of music for childhood puppet shows. In 1912 he enrolled in the Munich Academy of Music, but two years later war broke out. Orff would serve in the German Army and in 1917 he was left seriously injured by a trench collapse. After the war, Orff became interested in the idea of elemental music – combining different art forms, while in 1924 he joined the Günther-Schule at home in Munich where he began to develop music teaching methods which he later expounded in a book, Schulwerk. It was also in the 1920s that he joined the League of Contemporary Music. In 1937, Orff produced his most famous work, the dynamic secular oratorio Carmina Burana. The piece was composed against a backdrop of rising Nazi aggression and suppression, although Orff was certainly not targeted in the way many of his friends and colleagues were and continued to create under the Nazi regime. Another friend, the university professor Karl Huber, was less fortunate. A member of the resistance, in 1943 he was arrested and executed – Orff later supported Huber’s family and dedicated a work to his memory. After the Second World War, the Americans investigated whether Orff had supported the Nazis but concluded that although he had benefited during the Third Reich, he hadn’t been a vocal supporter or National Socialist party member. Orff died in Munich in 1982 at the age of 86. Watch a performance of O Fortuna from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.
Giacomo Puccini
A son of Lucca, Giacomo Puccini was born in the walled Tuscan town in 1858, the sixth of nine children of a musical dynasty. Puccini’s forebears – the male ones – had occupied the important position of maestro di cappella for almost a century-and-a-quarter. While not considered to have much musical talent, aged 22 he graduated from Lucca’s Pacini School of Music with a diploma. Puccini is said to have decided on a career as an opera composer after seeing Verdi’s Aida as a teenager. He produced his first operatic work – the one-act Le Villi (The Fairies) – aged 25, while his follow up, Edgar, was staged at La Scala in 1889 but was pulled after two performances. Puccini’s breakthrough finally came in 1893 with Manon Lescaut, which was a success across Europe, and he followed it with two more big ‘hits’, La bohème and Tosca. Away from the opera stage, Puccini was a bit of a ‘Jack the Lad’ (or, more correctly, Giacomo the lad), a bon viveur who had a wayward youth and in adulthood loved wine, women, song and chain smoking…along with fast cars. In 1903 he was lucky to survive when he turned his jalopy over in freezing fog. Puccini’s wife and child, who were travelling with him, were thrown clear as the car rolled down an embankment while the family’s chauffeur – who wasn’t driving – sustained a broken thigh. But the composer was trapped under the vehicle, seriously injured, and it took him the best part of eight months to recover. If he had died that February evening, there would have been no Madama Butterfly, no Gianni Schicchi (and therefore no O Mio Babbino Caro) and no Turandot. The composer who had cheated death on the road passed away in Brussels in November 1924 having had a heart attack caused by complications after treatment for throat cancer. His body was repatriated, and he was buried in a chapel built by his son at the Puccini family, home in Torre del Lago. Watch The Humming Chorus from Madama Butterfly performed at Glyndebourne.
Karl Jenkins
One of the world’s foremost and most performed living composers, Sir Karl Jenkins was born and brought up in Penclawdd on the Gower peninsula, where his father – a school teacher, organist and choirmaster - taught him piano. He read music at Cardiff University and went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music. Jenkins was initially a jazz musician who co-founded the group Nucleus, which won first prize at the 1970 Montreux Jazz Festival, and throughout his career he has resisted categorisation. In the 1970s he played with prog-rock group Soft Machine, and then in the 1980s he began writing music and jingles for adverts, including Levi’s, Jaguar, Speedos, and Pepsi. The allegretto from what became Palladio was inspired by the 16th Century Italian architect and originally penned as the soundtrack to a 1993 De Beers ‘Diamonds are Forever’ campaign, while a short piece he scored for a Delta Airlines commercial became the basis for The Adiemus Project. During his career he had enjoyed recording sessions with Elton John, George Harrison and Andrew Lloyd Webber, appeared on Desert Island Discs – where his favourite track was from Der Rosenkavalier and his luxury was a piano, been afforded the Freedom of the City of London and in 2015 was knighted for services to composing and crossing musical genres. Along with orchestral pieces, Jenkins has composed a number of choral works including Requiem, Gloria and Stabat Mater. His music was performed at the Coronation of King Charles III in 2023, and in the same year his seminal work The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace celebrated 1,000 weeks in the UK Classical chart. In 2025 it was named runner up in the Classic FM Hall of Fame chart. Listen to the allegretto from Karl Jenkins’ Palladio.
Pietro Mascagni
What do Pietro Mascagni, Emmanuel Chabrier, Georg Fridrich Handel and Pyotr Tchaikovsky have in common? The answer is, they were all pressured by their family to study the law rather than follow their passion for music. Although music won out in the end. Mascagni was born in the port city of Livorno in 1863, where his father Domenico ran a bakery. It was Domenico who hoped his second son would become a lawyer, but it was not to be, and the young Mascagni instead enrolled at the Milan Conservatory. Although he lived to be 81, Mascagni’s lasting and most popular operatic masterpiece, Cavalleria Rusticana, was premiered in Rome in 1890 when he was still in his mid-20s. It’s been said the composer’s wife Lina entered it in a competition for a one-act opera on his behalf – and it won! At its premiere, which was given in a half-full Teatro Costanzi, it was an immediate sensation, receiving no fewer than 60 curtain calls. While the success of the piece meant it overshadowed Mascagni’s later career, he didn’t rest on his laurels, composing a total of 15 operas, including the romantic comedy L’amico Fritz, Gothic melodrama Guglielmo Ratcliff, and Iris - a symbolist drama set in Japan, along with an operetta and orchestral, piano and vocal music. In later life he composed for cinema. Mascagni also turned his hand to conducting and in the 1930s worked at Milan’s La Scala. The composer died in Rome in August 1945. Despite being connected with Mussolini and his Fascist regime, which had led to him being stripped of his assets, a reported 200,000 people lined the streets of the Italian capital to witness his funeral cortege. Did you know? Among Mascagni’s many interests was cycling. There are several Via Pietro Mascagni cycle routes in Italy, including a climb from Cisano in the Verona region which has an average gradient of 6.4%. Listen to the Intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana.
Giuseppe Verdi
Considered one of the most important opera composers of the 19th Century, Giuseppe Verdi was born in 1813 in a village near Busseto in the Emilia-Romagna province of northern Italy. His birth came five months after that of another future opera superstar, 600 miles away in Leipzig. At the age of 18, Verdi was supported by his future father-in-law to study composition in Milan, although he was rejected by the conservatory there whose elders didn’t rate his talent! Verdi’s early career was spent as town music director in Busseto, where he also composed his first opera, Oberto, which was performed at La Scala in 1839. At the same time, in his private life Verdi suffered the devastation of the loss of his beloved wife and two children within the space of three years. When his second opera flopped, he withdrew from composing all together, only persuaded to pick up a pen again by the manager of La Scala, Bartolomeo Morelli. The result was Nabucco, premiered in 1842 to great success and propelling Verdi to national and later international fame. In all, Verdi would compose more than two dozen operas including Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La Traviata, Aida, Don Carlos, Otello and Falstaff, and bestride the century alongside his Leipzig-born contemporary Richard Wagner. As a young composer, Verdi had explored a variety of genres and away from the opera house he also produced several sacred choral works of which his Requiem remains the most famous. He composed the Requiem in 1874 in memory of the Milanese poet, novelist and patriot Alessandro Manzoni who had died the previous year. It was given its premiere in the city’s church of San Marco on the first anniversary of Manzoni’s death, with Verdi conducting. Verdi himself died from a stroke in Milan in January 1901 at the age of 87. The man whose life had been all about music requested a private burial with no flowers, music or singing. But while his wishes were followed, crowds of mourners came out to line the route of his cortege and were reported to have spontaneously started singing Nabucco’s Va, Pensiero. Watch the Triumphal March from Aida.
About the Music
John Williams Main Theme from Star Wars Grieg Morning and In the Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez Orff O Fortuna from Carmina Burana Puccini Humming Chorus from Madame Butterfly Karl Jenkins Palladio (Allegretto) Mascagni Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana Verdi Triumphal March and Gloria all’Egitto from Aida Eight very different composers, from very different backgrounds, rub shoulders here. But they all have one big thing in common: they can all write great tunes. John Williams’ scores for Jaws, E.T., Schindler’s List, Superman and others have been hummed, whistled and knocked out on keyboards all over the world, but the set of film scores that has probably conquered more hearts than any is that Williams provided for George Lucas’ space epic Star Wars. Right from its opening fanfare the Star Wars theme pins us to our seats, then sends us hurtling past planets, stars, and out into open space. In his time, the Norwegian Edvard Grieg was as popular as Williams is today, and there are still Grieg tunes everyone knows, even if they can’t think of the name. Here are two wonderful movements from the theatre music (think film music before the cinema was invented) Grieg wrote for Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt, about a roguish but likeable adventurer. Really though, this music is as much about Norway and its wonderful folk music as it is about its stage hero. In a similar, but at the same time very different way, Joaquin Rodrigo’s Guitar Concerto, Concierto de Aranjuez, is steeped in the spirit of Spain and the music of its peoples. In place of the pure fresh mountain air and dark shadowy valleys of Norway, we have sun-baked sultriness, earth-nurtured dance rhythms and melodies in which the sharp tang of Arab influence can distinctly be made out. It’s quite a leap from that to medieval Germany, and the ribald, mocking humour and raw celebration of erotic love celebrated by Bavarian monks. But such was the inspiration for Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. We hear the famous opening chorus: not a pious hymn to the Christian God but a half-fearful, half-wild celebration of Fate. Puccini’s ‘Humming Chorus’ from the opera Madam Butterfly began as an ingenious way of solving a technical problem. The Japanese geisha Butterfly waits for the long-overdue return of her American sailor husband Pinkerton. We need to see her superhuman patience, but she says nothing. So, Puccini has an offstage chorus capture her noble, trusting nature in pure melody, mouths closed. It’s an incredibly touching moment. From human vulnerability we move to the Renaissance ideal of harmony, order and proportion, expressed in the architecture of Andrea Palladio (from whom we get the term ‘Palladian’). All this appealed directly to composer Karl Jenkins, who embodied his feelings about Palladio and his ideals in a suite for string orchestra. Andrea Mascagni’s title for his opera Cavalleria rusticana (‘Rustic Chivalry’) is tartly ironic. Set in 19th century Sicily, it’s a tale of infidelity, betrayal and harsh vengeance. Mascagni’s music captures that brilliantly, yet there’s also the beautiful Intermezzo, performed by the orchestra while the Easter Service takes place, reminding us that there’s more to human beings than savage instinctual urges. As many film-goers will recognise, it performs a similar function in The Godfather III. Finally, we have two splendid numbers from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida, first performed in Cairo’s new Opera House in 1871. The original idea was for Verdi to create something to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal – something grand and patriotic. But Verdi went for something more complicated: a tragic opera set in Ancient Egypt, in which patriotism and love clash. In terms of the story, love loses, but aided by Verdi’s music, we still side with the lovers, Prince Radames and the Ethiopian slave girl Aida. Patriotism gets some splendid tunes however, none more so than the Triumphal March and ‘Glory to Egypt’.