Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson approaches music without preconceptions; as he puts it, “Every note we play anywhere, any time, is a reinterpretation, a transcription.” And it’s Víkingur’s love of re-examining music through the prism of a transcription that underpins this series.

Across three episodes, Víkingur will open up a huge spread of music from electronic re-workings of Debussy to transcribed sounds of the natural world. In this first programme of the series, Víkingur focuses on the old and the new: music largely from the baroque and renaissance eras reimagined by composers from the 20th and 21st centuries. There’s Bach rearranged by Ruichi Sakamoto, Luciano Berio’s take on Henry Purcell, John Dowland transformed by Thomas Adès, and plenty more.

A Tandem Production for BBC Radio 3 Show less