The Gramophone Classical Music Podcast has reached a significant milestone: 1,000,000 all-time downloads. 

The concept behind the Gramophone Podcast is simple, every Friday we interview an artist about their new recording and explore their creative process. Alongside these artist interviews we also produce special extended episodes in which we ask one of Gramophone's writers to take a close look at the life and work of a particular composer. In this series there are episodes dedicated to Handel, Stanford, Mahler, Mozart, Bernstein, Schubert, Shostakovich, Liszt, and many more.

Over the years we have interviewed many exciting emerging artists as well as legendary performers, including Dame Janet Baker, the composer John Williams, Alfred Brendel, Krystian Zimerman and Evelyn Glennie. 

Interestingly, the most popular single episode of the Gramophone Podcast to date is an exploration of Bach's Cello Suites with Steven Isserlis. You can listen to that episode below:

Indeed, Bach seems to be a favourite composer for our podcast audience with many episodes dedicated to his music ('Leonidas Kavakos on Bach's solo violin suites', 'Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, with Fabio Biondi', 'Exploring the genius of JS Bach') drawing large numbers of listeners. 

We have a deep archive of nearly 500 podcast episodes to explore, the vast majority presented by Gramophone's Editor-in-Chief James Jolly or Editor and Publisher Martin Cullingford, and with new episodes every Friday the Gramophone Classical Music Podcast is certainly worth following. The podcast is freely available on all major podcasting platforms and, of course, on our website. 

As a taster, here's a selection of 10 of our most popular episodes:

Exploring Mozart

Martin Cullingford talks to Mozart expert Richard Wigmore about the composer's extraordinary life and music.

Angela Hewitt on her album, Love Songs

Angela Hewitt tells Martin Cullingford about her beautiful album 'Love Songs', transcriptions of songs by composers including Schumann, Schubert, Richard Strauss, Gluck, Grieg and De Falla - with arrangements by pianists and composers including Liszt, Godowsky, Grainger and Hewitt herself. 

Víkingur Ólafsson on 'Mozart & Contemporaries'

Víkingur Ólafsson, has recorded three critically acclaimed albums for DG, and now he adds a fourth entitled 'Mozart & Contemporaries' which gathers music by CPE Bach, Galuppi, Cimarosa and Haydn around the great Wolfgang Amadeus.

Exploring the music of Mahler

Edward Seckerson joins the Gramophone Podcast to talk to Editor Martin Cullingford about the music, recordings and greatest interpreters of Mahler.

Dame Emma Kirkby: a birthday podcast

As Dame Emma Kirkby, of the UK's most popular sopranos, reaches a milestone birthday, we caught up with her and look back over her career, with Editor-in-Chief James Jolly.

Beethoven's piano sonatas: Igor Levit

James Jolly met Igor Levit at Steinway's London showroom to talk about the sonatas, and also to find out how the pianist approached this colossal project.

Exploring Handel

In this special in-depth exploration of the music of Handel, Richard Wigmore, Gramophone writer and Handel expert, talks to Editor Martin Cullingford about the composer, one of the most dominant cultural figures of 18th-century London life. From his early years in Germany and Italy, to his success in London with both opera and, later, oratorios, we trace the development of his extraordinary career and music, and hear excerpts from some of the finest recent recordings.

Joyce DiDonato on Schubert's Winterreise

In 2019, Joyce DiDonato and Yannick Nézet-Séguin performed Schubert's great song-cycle in concert at New York's Carnegie Hall, and Erato were on hand to record it. James Jolly caught up with the multi-Gramophone Award-winning mezzo to talk about her unique approach to the work. As one of a handful of women singers who have recorded Winterreise, Joyce needed to find her own way into the cycle, as she explains from her house in Spain.

Elgar's Cello Concerto: Julian Lloyd Webber

Julian Lloyd Webber joins Martin Cullingford to explore the Elgar's Cello Concerto, its performance and recording history, and to discuss why it still speaks so powerfully to audiences today. The podcast features excerpts from Julian Lloyd Webber's own recording of the work with Yehudi Menuhin, on the Philips label.

Karajan's video legacy - with Richard Osborne

The great Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan (1908-89) was fascinated with technology from an early age, and, from the early 1960s onward, he filmed many of his performances. Deutsche Grammophon’s streaming service Stage+ has a huge archive of Karajan’s films including his Telemondial legacy – recorded with the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics during the 1980s, the conductor's last decade.

Karajan’s biographer, and long-serving Gramophone critic, Richard Osborne, discusses Karajan’s video legacy with James Jolly, and they pick some favourites from the Stage+ catalogue.