Saturday Classics

In the second of two programmes Rachel Podger, described by The Sunday Times as "Queen of the Baroque violin", shares the music that has helped to define her musical personality - much of it encountered during her childhood years in Kassel. Rachel's choices range from Tallis to Stravinsky via Monteverdi, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms and Vaughan Williams, and not forgetting her beloved Bach, of whose music she says "I don't think a day goes by when I don't play some or listen to some'. She talks engagingly about singing in her father's choir, The William Byrd Singers, where she absorbed Renaissance polyphony "by osmosis"; a memorable school-chamber orchestra trip round Eastern Europe in the declining years of the Ostblock; her love of Glenn Gould's idiosyncratic approach to the performance of Bach's music; her revelatory first encounter with 'authentic' performance practice; and much more.