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Front Row: Composer Gavin Bryars, Isabella Hammad, Opera singers sing pop

Composer Gavin Bryars, Isabella Hammad, Opera singers sing pop

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Composer Gavin Bryars, Isabella Hammad, Opera singers sing pop

Gavin Bryars on a 12-hour performance of his 1971 piece Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet

Gavin Bryars on a new 12-hour performance of his 1971 classic piece Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet; can opera singers sing pop, and vice versa?; debut novelist Isabella Hammad

The contemporary classical composer Gavin Bryars talks about the latest incarnation of his acclaimed 1971 work, Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet – a 12-hour overnight rendition at Tate Modern in London. The piece is based on a fragment of tape of a homeless man singing, and this performance combines the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Bryars’s own ensemble, the Southbank Sinfonia, and the participation of several homeless people.

Gavin Bryars also contributes his thoughts to the question: can opera singers sing pop and vice versa? What are the main differences between a trained bel canto voice and what some would call the more natural approach taken by folk, jazz or rock singers?  Music critic Anna Picard and Christopher Purves, opera singer and former member of jazz vocal group Harvey and the Wallbangers, discuss.

Hailed by Zadie Smith as 'uncommonly poised and truly beautiful', the debut novelist Isabella Hammad discusses her 500-page epic The Parisian, set around the Palestinian struggle for independence in the early twentieth century. 

Presenter Janina Ramirez
Producer Jerome Weatherald

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