Dinara Klinton appears on BBC In Tune

Dinara Klinton performs on InTune
Tabitha McGrath, Artist Manager

Being an Artist Manager to such exciting artists such as CMF’s come with its perks – Dinara Klinton’s appearance on BBC Radio 3’s InTune programme on Tuesday proved to be exactly one of these.

At CMF, we’ve been working with Rebecca Driver Media Relations for a couple of months, ensuring our artists’ successes and progress are told in the national media. Following her album release on 4th March, and ahead of her Wigmore Hall debut on the 11th April, RDMR secured Dinara Klinton a prime time slot on BBC In Tune on Tuesday 22nd March.

The week prior saw discussion floating around of repertoire, interview talking points, press releases, the panic of needing a page turner or not and endless listening of earlier examples of artist interviews on In Tune, all in order to prepare Dinara for her time on the air.

There are two things to note about being on In Tune, is that it goes very quickly (you’re in and out of there in under an hour!) and the other is that the BBC lifts are completely ridiculous. The 8th floor is serviced by only one lift in the building, and clearly on this day, the most in demand. A rather nervy 4 minutes was spent repeatedly hitting buttons while Dinara fixated on her watch and stretched her fingers.

Twenty five minutes before she was due on, Dinara was whisked straight in to the studio, known for its unforgiving acoustics but rather nice piano, for a sound test while Murray Perahia’s recording of J.S. Bach was broadcast live to the nation. Myself and Ruth Knight from RDMR, helped ourselves to tea and reclined in the green room, whilst reading all the breaking news from the ENO.

Given In Tune’s tranquil and calm radio appearance, the production box is the proverbial swan’s legs, a team of people endlessly typing production notes, syncing trail links advertising other BBC Radio 3 shows and, for a good portion time, haranguing the news team for not yet sending through Gill Johnson’s (the newsreader) notes, which eventually arrived 12 seconds before she was due to be live on air.

Following the news, Dinara performed No. 5 of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes “Feux Follets”, receiving a round of applause from the team and tweets of admiration from listeners, before sitting with Sarah Walker to talk about how she practises this piece like she would brush her teeth “every morning, for five minutes” to remove its scariness. Dinara spoke excitedly about how she recorded the album in the Leipzig Gewandhaus and her happy memories of her first performance there in 2008, as well as the emotional range that Liszt expresses throughout the pieces, before finishing her experience on the show with the stunning Etude No. 10 “Allegro agitato”

You can listen again to Dinara on BBC In Tune here (she begins at 1:23:45)

You can purchase tickets to her next performance at Wigmore Hall here and pick up her new album Liszt: Etudes D’Execution here