Getting to know the new voice of Breakfast on Radio 3

If ever a musician could be said to be living their best life, it was classical guitarist and broadcaster Tom McKinney when he clocked on for work before dawn on Advent Sunday to begin BBC Radio 3’s day of Carols across the Country, presenting not from the Breakfast programme’s new state-of-the-art studio in Media City, Salford, but from a chilly bird hide at the WWT Martin Mere Wetland Centre near Ormskirk, Lancashire. As the skies outside lightened and wildfowl flocked to the mere, recordings of seasonal or bird-related music and a couple of live performances by the Kantos Chamber Choir who had joined him in the hide were interspersed with broadcasts of the soundscape. Equally passionate about both birdwatching and music, the presenter was in his element, and his enthusiasm for this experience combining the two shone through the airwaves.

© BBC Radio 3

A regular presenter of the weekend editions of Breakfast, McKinney tells me over coffee at Media City a few weeks later that he is undaunted by the early starts, partly because his father worked night shifts in a factory, so he is used to the idea of unusual working patterns. This is just as well, because in April he takes over from Petroc Trelawny as lead presenter of the weekday editions of Breakfast when the whole programme moves to Salford.

McKinney trained as a classical guitarist, with a particular interest in contemporary music, which he says was unusual in the department of Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) where he studied with Gordon Crosskey and Craig Ogden. He is particularly grateful to Clark Rundell, professor of conducting at the college, who picked up on this and gave him opportunities to perform new works, not only with RNCM groups but outside the college, for example with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s contemporary music ensemble 10:10.

His CV since then includes involvement in the premieres of works by Louis Andriessen, Alexander Goehr, Hans Werner Henze, Amber Priestley, Julia Wolfe and many more, working with the likes of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Psappha Ensemble, Britten Sinfonia and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. His name popped up regularly when I was writing premieres listings for the then-fortnightly print editions of this magazine 20 years ago.

Aside from performing, McKinney credits a ‘proper job’ programming the concert series and chamber music festival for Sheffield’s Music in the Round for expanding his musical horizons repertoire-wise and enabling him to understand – through hands-on involvement in every part of the process – how much work goes into planning, marketing and staging concerts. ‘I was intrigued to be part of a team working in an office,’ he recalls. ‘It turned out I really loved it, and although it was definitely a full-time job, my boss Jo Towler, the chief executive, was very understanding about flexible working so that I could keep other activities going.’

These included membership of the artistic advisory committee for NMC records, being an audition consultant for Live Music Now!, and succeeding composer Kate Whitley in programming the new music concert series at Kettle’s Yard gallery in Cambridge.

© BBC Radio 3

He added broadcasting to his portfolio career in 2012 when a friend asked for his opinion on an idea for a radio feature about music inspired by birds and their songs. A keen ‘birder’ since the age of nine, and with the notebooks to prove it, McKinney ended up presenting the programme. Around the same time, he started introducing concerts for the Hallé, and when the presenter of a weekend Breakfast programme on Radio 3 fell ill, someone thought of asking McKinney to step in, at ridiculously short notice.

‘I had a great time,’ he says, ‘because if anything went wrong, I couldn’t possibly be blamed! It was a bit different when I was asked to come back and do some more, properly prepared. I didn’t sleep for several nights beforehand!’

But it soon became obvious that McKinney was a natural behind the microphone, and he has since been a regular presenter for live concerts, magazine features such as ‘Building a Library’ on Record Review, the mid-morning Essential Classics programme where his weeks broadcasting from Salford alternated for several years with Georgia Mann’s from Broadcasting House in London, and currently the afternoon strand Classical Live. Radio 3’s European odyssey over New Year’s weekend gave him the chance to present the Saturday morning programme from the famous WDR studios in Cologne, where he says even the German radio engineers were a little bemused by his excitement at being in the same room as the actual mixing desk used by Stockhausen. ‘I had a poster of that on my wall when I was a student!’ he explains, still awed.

McKinney is looking forward immensely to taking over Breakfast, and will clearly relish the occasional opportunities for location broadcasts such as the week-long river journeys which have been such a hit with listeners in recent years. But he fully understands the dismay felt by many at Petroc Trelawny’s imminent departure for the early-evening In Tune programme. ‘I felt exactly the same when Sara Mohr-Pietsch stopped presenting Breakfast. She and Petroc had been our early morning companions when I was getting my baby daughters ready for the day, and it was like losing a friend... Petroc is wonderful, and it’s a huge privilege to succeed him, but I hope people will soon get used to the change.’