Spelade
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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Marguerite, Queen of Navarre (1492 – 1549), author of the Heptaméron, a major literary landmark in the French Renaissance. Published after her death, The Heptaméron features 72 short stories, many of which explore relations between the sexes. However, Marguerite’s life was more eventful than that of many writers. Born into the French nobility, she found herself the sister of the French king when her brother Francis I came to the throne in 1515. At a time of growing religious change, Marguerite was a leading exponent of reform in the Catholic Church and translated an early work of Martin Luther into French. As the Reformation progressed, she was not afraid to take risks to protect other reformers.
With
Sara Barker Associate Professor of Early Modern History and Director of the Centre for the Comparative History of Print at the University of Leeds
Emily Butterworth Professor of Early Modern French at King’s College London
And
Emma HerdmanLecturer in French at the University of St Andrews
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Reading list:
Giovanni Boccaccio (trans. Wayne A. Rebhorn), The Decameron (Norton, 2013)
Emily Butterworth, Marguerite de Navarre: A Critical Companion (Boydell &Brewer, 2022)
Patricia Cholakian and Rouben Cholakian, Marguerite de Navarre: Mother of the Renaissance (Columbia University Press, 2006)
Gary Ferguson, Mirroring Belief: Marguerite de Navarre’s Devotional Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 1992)
Gary Ferguson and Mary B. McKinley (eds.), A Companion to Marguerite de Navarre (Brill, 2013)
Mark Greengrass, The French Reformation (John Wiley & Sons, 1987)
R.J. Knecht, The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France (Fontana Press, 2008)
R.J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
John D. Lyons and Mary B. McKinley (eds.), Critical Tales: New Studies of the ‘Heptaméron’ and Early Modern Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993)
Marguerite de Navarre (trans. Paul Chilton), The Heptameron (Penguin, 2004)
Marguerite de Navarre (trans. Rouben Cholakian and Mary Skemp), Selected Writings: A Bilingual Edition (University of Chicago Press, 2008)
Marguerite de Navarre (trans. Hilda Dale), The Coach and The Triumph of the Lamb (Elm Press, 1999)
Marguerite de Navarre (trans. Hilda Dale), The Prisons (Whiteknights, 1989)
Marguerite de Navarre (ed. Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani), L’Heptaméron (Libraririe générale française, 1999)
Jonathan A. Reid, King’s Sister – Queen of Dissent: Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549) and her Evangelical Network (Brill, 2009)
Paula Sommers, ‘The Mirror and its Reflections: Marguerite de Navarre’s Biblical Feminism’ (Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 5, 1986)
Kathleen Wellman, Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France (Yale University Press, 2013)
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Last year – and for the fourth consecutive year – we asked our readers, followers and visitors to our website to vote, from a short list of 10, for our Orchestra of the Year for 2021. Thousands of votes were cast, but romping in by a long margin, was the Minnesota Orchestra. As we look back on that Award, Gramophone's Editor in Chief, James Jolly, caught up with the Minnesota Orchestra's Music Director Osmo Vänskä to talk about his 19-year tenure with the ensemble, how the relationship has changed, and the recordings they have made together.
Gramophone Podcasts are presented in association with Wigmore Hall.
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Raymond Bisha discusses a release of music by the American composer Bernard Herrmann with Joseph Horowitz, co-founder of PostClassical Ensemble, a group dedicated to stepping across normal repertoire boundaries. The album’s programme showcases Herrmann’s talents not only as a composer of film scores, but also as a consummate provider of music for the forgotten genre of radio plays, and a composer of consequence in his legacy of concert works.
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This week's episode is a little different. Instead of interviewing an artist about their new album, Gramophone's Editor Martin Cullingford, Editor-in-Chief James Jolly, and Reviews Editor Tim Parry, each choose their favourite three recordings of 2021, and explain why they were so impressed by them. Listen to the discussion - and excerpts from each album - in this week's special edition of the Gramophone Podcast.
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The BBC Proms opens this time next week - July 30 - with a packed six-week schedule of concerts in the Royal Albert Hall, as well as chamber concerts in Cadogan Hall and broadcasts on BBC Radio 3, online and on television. Editor Martin Cullingford met with the Proms' Director David Pickard to talk about some of the themes and highlights, and about the challenges of planning and staging a season in a time of Covid. Gramophone Podcasts are presented in association with Wigmore Hall.
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The 2022 Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition launches on Tuesday, April 5 with its preliminary rounds in London. Between then and April 10, some of the world's most impressive young ensembles will be performing in front of an impressive jury until one is awarded first prize, and the guarantee of a glowing future.
James Jolly went to Wigmore Hall to talk to the Hall's Director John Gilhooly and Hélène Clément, the viola-player of the Doric Quartet, to learn about the competition and how the jury reaches its verdict. We hear excerpts from the Alpha Classics recordings by the 2018 winners, the Esmé Quartet (in music by Beethoven and Bridge) and the 2015 winners, the Van Kuijk Quartet (in music by Schubert).
Gramophone Podcasts are presented in association with Wigmore Hall.
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Raymond Bisha introduces a programme of orchestral music by the Pulitzer and Erasmus Prize-winning American composer John Adams. The two works on this new album from the Nashville Symphony under Giancarlo Guerrero demonstrate why Adams is one of today’s most widely performed and recorded composers. Adams describes My Father Knew Charles Ives as “an homage and encomium to a composer whose influence on me has been huge”, while Harmonielehre expands his trademark minimalist style, retaining its energetic pulse but embracing rich tonal resources of the past.
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French composer Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) is remembered as someone who could spin melodies as easily as he breathed. Naxos is marking the centenary of his death with a 3-CD box set that comprises all his symphonies and a sequence of atmospheric and dramatic symphonic poems, including Phaéton and the ever-popular Danse macabre. Raymond Bisha presents an overview of these recordings by the Malmö Symphony Orchestra and conductor Marc Soustrot, a noted French music specialist.
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"A forgotten treasure. Marin Alsop discusses Hindemith.
This podcast features Marin Alsop in conversation with Raymond Bisha following the release of her first album for Naxos as chief conductor of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. She assumed the post in 2019 and the programme reflects that of her first public appearance in the role. Marin's advocacy of Hindemith's music is rooted in her days as a violin student and her subsequent period of tutelage under Leonard Bernstein. The educational projects she initiated during her time with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra also feature in the broadcast."
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Violinist Tianwa Yang marks her fifteenth year as one of Naxos’ leading artists with a new album featuring Prokofiev’s two violin concertos. The works’ stylistic contrasts reflect the fact that they were written some twenty years apart, but they receive the same scrupulous attention to technical and musical details that hallmark every one of Tianwa’s performances. Little wonder that they consistently attract accolades and awards. Fellow Naxos artist Jun Märkl conducts the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Raymond Bisha presents.
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While we take a pause for Christmas, we're bringing you four podcasts which we found particularly memorable conversations, and this week it's once again the turn of Martin Cullingford to choose. In October 2019, he met up with the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber to talk about a classic of the instrument’s repertoire, Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto, which was first heard exactly 100 years earlier. The excerpts are taken from from Julian Lloyd Webber's own recording of the work conducted by Yehudi Menuhin, on the Philips label.
