BROADCASTS.com

b'

Presenter Tom Service visits the Pit Theatre at the Barbican to learn more about a new theatrical meditation on the bittersweet consolations of sorrow. He speaks to countertenor Iestyn Davies about the melancholy of John Dowland\\u2019s music and its power to process grief, while the director Netia Jones tells Tom how she\\u2019s weaved together creative visuals with philosophical musings of Robert Burton\\u2019s 17th-century treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy as well as those of Freud and other contemporary experts of the human condition.

As the BBC celebrates its centenary, Music Matters is joined by composers Matthew Herbert and Anna Meredith, and Artistic Associate of the Southbank Gillian Moore, to discuss the corporation\\u2019s role as a commissioner of contemporary repertoire during the past 100 years.

Tom catches-up with composer Tom Floyd, singer Sophie Goldrick, and Professor Marion Thain during rehearsals of a new opera, Veritable Michael, which charts the creative life and love affair of two women who operated together under the pseudonym Michael Field \\u2013 a 19th century fictional author whose work was celebrated by the likes of Oscar Wilde and Robert Browning.

And Tom takes a trip to the Victoria and Albert Museum where he\\u2019d joined by Harriet Reed, the co-curator of Re:Imagining Musicals \\u2013 a new display of glittering costumes and musical memorabilia \\u2013 to explore the craftmanship, creative renewal, and evolutionary impetus behind some of the most iconic musicals of the past seven decades.