Sarah Walker was born in Barnsley and studied music at Royal Holloway College, followed by postgraduate studies in Performance and English Experimental Music at Reading University and City University. Her first work as a broadcaster dates back to 1992 when she presented Radio 3's Midnight Oil, followed soon afterwards by the flagship contemporary music programme Hear and Now.

Over the next few years Sarah went on to present a wide variety of programmes for Radio 3, BBC TV and Channel 5, including Building a Library, Discovering Music, Performance on 3, Morning on 3, Afternoon Performance, Radio 3 Lunchtime Concerts, The Proms, BBC Young Musicians and Attractions. She has appeared as a guest interviewer on Radio 4's Midweek and presented the acclaimed Radio 4 documentary Music in Airforce Blue.

Alongside her broadcasting activities, Sarah is an active pianist specialising in contemporary music, and has published several volumes of original keyboard music for young players. She lives in Egham with her husband, daughter and persian cat.

James Jolly  was editor of Gramophone, the world’s most respected classical record magazine, from 1989 to 2005. He stepped down from the role on the publication of the magazine’s 1000th issue taking on the title of editor-in-chief. He contributes a monthly column on downloading and new technologies to the magazine and  is also editor of the Classical Good CD, DVD and Download Guide. He also made many podcasts, not only for Gramophone, but with major artists such as Sir Eliot Gardiner, Maxim Vengerov and Marin Alsop as well as younger performers like Alison Balsom, Natalie Clein and Simon Trpceski.

For the last four years he has co-presented a monthly new releases programme for XM Classics, part of the US-based satellite radio network, XM Radio based in Washington DC, and also hosted Virgin Atlantic’s classical music programme. For the past two years he has co-hosted the Midem Classical Awards in Cannes. His written contributions outside Gramophone include articles for The Grove Dictionary of Opera.

James’s first professional encounter with BBC radio included a period as one of the producers of Saturday Review (the precursor of CD Review) at the end of the 1980s. Since then he has contributed not only to CD Review, most recently on downloading, but also to Aled Jones’s The Choir and, on Radio 2, to The Green Room with Mariella Frostrup.

His passion for classical music was ignited while a pupil at Bradfield College where he studied with the composer Christopher Steel and also had his ears opened to ideas of musical interpretation by his tutor, the critic, writer and broadcaster Richard Osborne.