Music Matters - Christine Brewer, The Music of Painting, Tannhauser

Tom Service interviews the American soprano Christine Brewer about her successful, award-winning career, combining mostly big, Wagnerian-like, Romantic operatic roles with innovative recitals, like her latest project championing little-known orchestral songs by the Austrian composer Joseph Marx, which she's performing in London this Saturday. Also, 'The Music of Painting', a book exploring the links between music, the visual arts and Modernism, from the Romantics to John Cage. We talk to its author, Art historian Peter Vergo, as well as review the book. And as Wagner's Tannhauser returns this week to the Royal Opera House after more than twenty years of absence, Tom meets up with the conductor Semyon Bychkov as well as with the director Tim Albery, who's created a new production exploiting the contrast between the opera's two worlds: the sensual and seductive Venusberg and the bucolic and religious Warburg.