Stephen Johnson

Stephen Johnson is a writer, music journalist and broadcaster. He makes frequent broadcasts on BBC Radios 3 and 4, and the World Service, his major projects including fourteen programmes on the music of Bruckner (1996), and documentaries on Shostakovich (2006) and Vaughan Williams (2008). He also writes regular articles for The Independent, The Guardian, BBC Music Magazine and Gramophone. Now focused entirely on writing and talking about music, Stephen presents Radio 3’s popular Discovering Music, as well as, among other things, giving concert presentations with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and BBC Philharmonic.

www.stephen-johnson.co.uk

Misha Donat

Misha Donat was a senior music producer at BBC Radio 3 for more than 25 years. He now works as a freelance writer, lecturer and producer, and in recent years has been producing recordings for the Philharmonia Orchestra. Projects in progress include a Mahler cycle with Lorin Maazel. Misha has written many CD booklets, and he provides programme notes on a regular basis for the Edinburgh and Aldeburgh festivals, as well as for the Wigmore Hall, Royal Festival Hall and other venues. He is currently contributing to a new critical edition of the Beethoven piano sonatas edited by Jonathan Del Mar, published by Bärenreiter.

Richard Wigmore

Richard Wigmore is a distinguished music writer, broadcaster and lecturer. As professor at the Guildhall School of Music, he gives classes in Lied interpretation. His publications include Schubert: The Complete Song Texts and chapters and articles in many reference works, including The New Grove Dictionary and The Faber Pocket Guide to Haydn.

www.wigmoresworld.co.uk

Patrick Bade

Patrick Bade is an art historian, passionate collector of historic recordings and has been a lecturer for Christie’s Education for the past thirty years. He also teaches at the London Jewish Cultural Centre, and has worked in various capacities as a speaker or writer for the National Art Collections Fund, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Glyndebourne, Hamburg’s Kunsthalle, Classic FM, the Prison Service, and the French record label Malibran. His first book, Femme Fatale: Images of Evil and Fascinating Women, appeared in 1978, since when he has written monographs on many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists, including Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Burne-Jones, Beardsley and Tamara de Lempicka. Music Wars, published in 2012, examines how music was used for propaganda and morale-boosting during World War Two.

Norman Lebrecht

One of the most widely read commentators on music and culture, Norman Lebrecht is a presenter on BBC Radio 3 and contributes to The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Sinfini Music, among others. His blog, Slipped Disc, is among the most-read cultural websites, breaking stories and campaigning against abuse and injustice in the cultural industries. He has written many books, the most recent of which, Why Mahler?, is the best-selling composer biography of this century. A popular lecturer at major cultural institutions and universities, he has also worked with some of the world’s most prestigious orchestras and music festivals.

www.slippedisc.com

Philipp Blom

Philipp Blom was born in 1970 in Hamburg. After studying in Vienna and Oxford, he obtained a DPhil in Modern History. He started writing at Oxford and published a novel as well as occasional journalism. After university, he worked as an editor, translator, writer and freelance journalist, contributing to newspapers,  magazines and radio programmes in Great Britain, the US, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, and France.

In 2001 he moved to Paris to concentrate on his books. In 2007 he settled in Vienna, where he continues to write historical nonfiction as well as fiction and journalism. He presents a cultural discussion programme on Austrian national radio and has lectured on philosophy and cultural history in Europe, the US and South America.

www.philipp-blom.eu

Ruth Padel

Ruth Padel is a multi-faceted writer – poet, critic and novelist – as well as a committed conservationist. She has published eight poetry collections, a novel, and eight non-fiction works, including three of poetry criticism. She has been awarded First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition, the Cholmondeley Award from The Society of Authors, the Arts Council of England Writers’ Award, and the British Council Darwin Now Research Award for her novel Where the Serpent Lives. Ruth Padel is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in October 2013 was appointed Teaching Fellow in Poetry at King’s College, London. Music is central to Ruth’s life. She has written numerous essays on the subject, including articles on opera and on sixteenth-century madrigals for the London Review of Books.

www.ruthpadel.com

Robert Philip

Robert Philip has been a regular contributor to BBC Radio 3 music talks for forty years. He is the author of two books which pioneered the study of the history of recording and how it has influenced musicians. When his first book, Early Recordings and Musical Style, was published, Robert found himself the subject of a third leader in The Times, which declared that he had ‘dropped a bomb on musical orthodoxy.’ For many years he worked as a BBC producer of arts programmes for the Open University, and then became a music lecturer at the OU, contributing teaching material to several of its arts courses. He is currently writing a third book, a listener’s guide to orchestral music.

Nicholas Chong

Nicholas Chong is a musicologist who specializes in the music of the late Classical and Romantic eras in Germany and Austria, focusing in particular on the relationship of music to religious, political and intellectual history. He completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2016, with a dissertation on Beethoven’s religious music, and currently serves as a lecturer in Columbia’s undergraduate Core Curriculum, in which he has taught classes in both music and intellectual history. In September 2017 he takes up the position of Assistant Professor of Musicology at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. In addition to his scholarly work, he holds a master’s degree in orchestral conducting.