Earlier this year the Gramophone Podcast passed 1 million downloads. Now we’ve reached another milestone: our 500th episode. Launched before podcasting’s current popularity, the series steadily built a following, which grew substantially once we adopted a weekly schedule and set formats.

Those formats include: interviews with major artists on new albums; in-depth composer discussions; reflections with senior musical figures; and conversations with a new generation of musicians rethinking the artist’s role today.

In a special celebratory edition, James Jolly, Martin Cullingford, Tim Parry and Hattie Butterworth each choose a standout: Julian Bream on a life in music; William Christie on Mondonville; Richard Wigmore on the enduring brilliance of Schubert and Fatma Said on collaboration.

Gramophone's Editor Martin Cullingford speaks to James Jolly about the 2025 Orchestra of the Year nominated orchestras, discussing the impact each of them has made to recordings and the wider musical landscape

To vote for Gramophone's Orchestra of the Year 2025, head to gramophone.co.uk/vote25

Conductor John Andrews joins Hattie Butterworth to speak about the debut recording of Sir Granville Bantock and Marjory Kennedy-Fraser’s folk opera, The Seal Woman. They explore the folk song collecting of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, as well as Andrews’s commitment to uncovering lesser-known repertoire

Kitty Whately joins Hattie Butterworth to discuss her new album on Chandos with pianist Edwige Herchenroder​ titled Horizons: French Melodies. They also explore the historic erasure of women composers, as well as Kitty's ongoing advocacy and research

The vocal ensemble VOCES8 are marking their 20th anniversay with a new release – out today – celebrating the full breadth of their creativity, and an exciting season of concerts. Editor Martin Cullingford sat down with three of the key figures behind this most innovative of ensembles – the co-founders Barnaby Smith, Artistic Director, and Paul Smith, CEO, and soprano and long-standing member of the group Andrea Haines – to look back over 20 years of creativity and achievement, and forward to the future.

This week’s Gramophone podcast is a special focus on one of the most significant of 20th century composers, Dimitri Shostakovich, the 50th anniversary of whose death we mark this year. As our guide to his music we’re privileged to have conductor Andris Nelsons, who, together with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, has just reached the end of a journey through all his symphonies, plus the concertos for cello, piano and violin, all recently released by Deutsch Grammophon.

Across half an hour of fascinating insight, he tells Editor Martin Cullingford about how he responds to Shostakovich’s music and life, and about what makes the composer’s music so distinct, and so remarkable.

The German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's 100th birthday falls on May 28. One of the most versatile singers of the last century – his operatic repertoire alone ranged from Gluck, Handel and Mozart via Verdi, Wagner and Richard Strauss to Berg, Busoni and Reimann – it's his devotion to song that remains his lasting legacy. To mark the anniversary of Fischer-Dieskau's birth, Gramophone's James Jolly spoke to song specialist and author of Schubert: The Complete Song Texts (Schirmer: 1988), Richard Wigmore.

They focused on Fischer-Dieskau's audio recordings of Schubert's greatest song-cycle Winterreise (1828) which include three with Gerald Moore, as well as versions with Klaus Billing, Hermann Reuter, Daniel Barenboim, Jörg Demus, Alfred Brendel, Murray Perahia and Maurizio Pollini.

In this week's episode, Editor Martin Cullingford met with the founder and Music Director of Bach Collegium Japan Masaaki Suzuki, along with the group's Principal Conductor Masato Suzuki, to talk about their new recording of Brahms's Ein deutsches Requiem, available now on BIS – as well as discussing Bach's St John Passion, which they had performed the day prior to the interview. The interview took place last year in, appropriately enough, London's Japan House.