BBC & R3 News
Recent news about the BBC and Radio 3 bearing upon the presentation of music and the arts.An archive of older items can be found here.
Radio 3 has discontinued producing the Controller's Monthly Note; the new style Radio 3 Newsletter is not suitably formatted for reproducing here so we are no longer updating this page.
Controller's Note, Feb 13
February 2013
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
Radio 3 listeners regularly have the chance to hear discussions of history, and, even more often, music broadcasts. In Saturday Classics, starting tomorrow afternoon, we are bringing these strands together, as four prominent historians are our guest presenters: Simon Schama, Bettany Hughes, Dan Snow and Lucy Worsley. Kicking off the series, Simon Schama gives a personal view of the period from 1913 to the eve of the Second World War, which includes the first performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The following week, Bettany Hughes travels back in time to contemplate the sounds of antiquity, and their influence on composers across time; as well as music by Beethoven, Debussy and Handel, we will hear recreations of Greek and Roman music.
OPERA
It is a big year for opera on R3 with three operatic anniversaries - Verdi, Wagner and Britten. There will be plenty of other operatic music too. Tomorrow, we return live to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, this time for Rossini's comic opera Le Comte Ory. Though it received a first New York performance in 1831, only three years after the Parisian premiere, it has been rarely heard at the Met or elsewhere. The story is one of love, disguise and mistaken identity, within a medieval setting and involving soldiers returning from the Crusades. It is a chance to hear the great singing of Juan Diego Florez in the title role.
The following week we cross the Atlantic again for Donizetti's L' Elisir d'Amore, a witty and sparkling work, starring Anna Netrebko and Matthew Polenzani. Don't also forget our Thursday international matinees. This week we hear from the Vienna State Opera, where we can hear Franz Welser-Möst conducting Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos.
Sunday's Drama on 3 also has an operatic connection. A new play by Craig Warner, inspired by Puccini's Tosca, is set against the background of an oppressive regime. Scarpia's musings on the nature of power and his love for Tosca, give way to a cat-and-mouse game. Stephen Dillane plays Scarpia, Kate Fleetwood Tosca, and Joseph Millson Cavaradossi.
COMPOSER OF THE WEEK
The English 18th-century has been dominated by the figure of Handel, sometimes to the neglect of home-grown talent. So it is good to hear from Charles Avison and John Stanley starting as joint Composers of the Week from Monday. Geographically, they represent a wide span, with Stanley working in London and Avison in Newcastle, testimony to the vitality of musical performance across the UK. Both overcame challenges to attain their respected positions; the week introduces us to their attractive music together with the disputes and polemics which characterised the period.
In the following week, starting on the 11th, we have Gershwin as our featured composer. On Wednesday, there is a rare chance to hear part of the original-cast recording of his only work for the London stage, Primrose, a comedy influenced by Gilbert and Sullivan.
THE STORY OF MUSIC
Many of you might have seen the beginning of the BBC 2 series, The Story of Music, on Saturday evening. On Radio 3, in The Story of Music in 50 Pieces, Howard Goodall, in conversation with Suzy Klein, explores his personal choice of fifty compositions that changed the course of music history.
These range from Hildegard von Bingen to Steve Reich, and you can follow them in Essential Classics on weekdays at 11am and at 5.30pm on In Tune. Each conversation is available as a download from the Radio 3 website.
Running concurrently, we have a new series of Radio 3's Question Time, as comedian Sue Perkins joins Tom Service every Monday evening in our concert interval. They are dealing with your questions about everything musical; over five episodes Sue and Tom will be considering questions such as why music makes us dance; the origins of 'major' and 'minor'; why there are eight or twelve notes in a scale, and questions of cultural differences.
THE IDEA OF SIN
Traditionally, Lent is a time in the Christian calendar when people contemplate their mortality and weakness. On our station the Rev. Richard Coles is going to take us through the darker side of human nature in a three-part series in our Sunday Feature strand called The Idea of Sin, starting on February 10th. He is going to explore ideas of sin from the dawn of ethical structures, the ideas of guilt and retribution, and tormented souls of the medieval period and Dante. He starts in Italy where you can find graphic illustrations of the consequences of sin: the Baptistery of the cathedral in Florence and Giotto's frescos of the Last Judgement in Padua. For musical and spiritual contemplation of the same theme, we have our live Choral Evensong from St John's College, Cambridge on Ash Wednesday, including Allegri's beautiful Miserere and Tallis's sombre motet In ieiunio et fletu.
And now to flag something completely different - do tune in tomorrow for what promises to be a quirky programme in Between the Ears: A is for Aardvark. Just turn to the first page in any business directory and Aardvark companies abound. Oral historian Alan Dein interviews Britain's 'Aardvarks' to see what makes them seek pride of place and at the same time he ponders the actual aardvark. Why would any business want to be named after such a creature?
Finally, Radio 3 is bringing together a number of its Newsletters to provide a more regular supply of information to subscribers, about current and future highlights of the network's output, on a new and improved mailing list management system. If you are already subscribed to one of the newsletters previously published by Radio 3 you need do nothing to receive the new weekly Radio 3 newsletter automatically. Should you wish to discontinue your subscription(s), you will be able to do so at any time from the new Newsletters. We will publish more information on this change soon.
Radio 3, the home of classical music indeed, but I hope you get chance to sample our full range of distinctive programming. Thanks as ever for your interest in the station.
With best wishes
Roger Wright
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
Radio 3 listeners regularly have the chance to hear discussions of history, and, even more often, music broadcasts. In Saturday Classics, starting tomorrow afternoon, we are bringing these strands together, as four prominent historians are our guest presenters: Simon Schama, Bettany Hughes, Dan Snow and Lucy Worsley. Kicking off the series, Simon Schama gives a personal view of the period from 1913 to the eve of the Second World War, which includes the first performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The following week, Bettany Hughes travels back in time to contemplate the sounds of antiquity, and their influence on composers across time; as well as music by Beethoven, Debussy and Handel, we will hear recreations of Greek and Roman music.
OPERA
It is a big year for opera on R3 with three operatic anniversaries - Verdi, Wagner and Britten. There will be plenty of other operatic music too. Tomorrow, we return live to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, this time for Rossini's comic opera Le Comte Ory. Though it received a first New York performance in 1831, only three years after the Parisian premiere, it has been rarely heard at the Met or elsewhere. The story is one of love, disguise and mistaken identity, within a medieval setting and involving soldiers returning from the Crusades. It is a chance to hear the great singing of Juan Diego Florez in the title role.
The following week we cross the Atlantic again for Donizetti's L' Elisir d'Amore, a witty and sparkling work, starring Anna Netrebko and Matthew Polenzani. Don't also forget our Thursday international matinees. This week we hear from the Vienna State Opera, where we can hear Franz Welser-Möst conducting Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos.
Sunday's Drama on 3 also has an operatic connection. A new play by Craig Warner, inspired by Puccini's Tosca, is set against the background of an oppressive regime. Scarpia's musings on the nature of power and his love for Tosca, give way to a cat-and-mouse game. Stephen Dillane plays Scarpia, Kate Fleetwood Tosca, and Joseph Millson Cavaradossi.
COMPOSER OF THE WEEK
The English 18th-century has been dominated by the figure of Handel, sometimes to the neglect of home-grown talent. So it is good to hear from Charles Avison and John Stanley starting as joint Composers of the Week from Monday. Geographically, they represent a wide span, with Stanley working in London and Avison in Newcastle, testimony to the vitality of musical performance across the UK. Both overcame challenges to attain their respected positions; the week introduces us to their attractive music together with the disputes and polemics which characterised the period.
In the following week, starting on the 11th, we have Gershwin as our featured composer. On Wednesday, there is a rare chance to hear part of the original-cast recording of his only work for the London stage, Primrose, a comedy influenced by Gilbert and Sullivan.
THE STORY OF MUSIC
Many of you might have seen the beginning of the BBC 2 series, The Story of Music, on Saturday evening. On Radio 3, in The Story of Music in 50 Pieces, Howard Goodall, in conversation with Suzy Klein, explores his personal choice of fifty compositions that changed the course of music history.
These range from Hildegard von Bingen to Steve Reich, and you can follow them in Essential Classics on weekdays at 11am and at 5.30pm on In Tune. Each conversation is available as a download from the Radio 3 website.
Running concurrently, we have a new series of Radio 3's Question Time, as comedian Sue Perkins joins Tom Service every Monday evening in our concert interval. They are dealing with your questions about everything musical; over five episodes Sue and Tom will be considering questions such as why music makes us dance; the origins of 'major' and 'minor'; why there are eight or twelve notes in a scale, and questions of cultural differences.
THE IDEA OF SIN
Traditionally, Lent is a time in the Christian calendar when people contemplate their mortality and weakness. On our station the Rev. Richard Coles is going to take us through the darker side of human nature in a three-part series in our Sunday Feature strand called The Idea of Sin, starting on February 10th. He is going to explore ideas of sin from the dawn of ethical structures, the ideas of guilt and retribution, and tormented souls of the medieval period and Dante. He starts in Italy where you can find graphic illustrations of the consequences of sin: the Baptistery of the cathedral in Florence and Giotto's frescos of the Last Judgement in Padua. For musical and spiritual contemplation of the same theme, we have our live Choral Evensong from St John's College, Cambridge on Ash Wednesday, including Allegri's beautiful Miserere and Tallis's sombre motet In ieiunio et fletu.
And now to flag something completely different - do tune in tomorrow for what promises to be a quirky programme in Between the Ears: A is for Aardvark. Just turn to the first page in any business directory and Aardvark companies abound. Oral historian Alan Dein interviews Britain's 'Aardvarks' to see what makes them seek pride of place and at the same time he ponders the actual aardvark. Why would any business want to be named after such a creature?
Finally, Radio 3 is bringing together a number of its Newsletters to provide a more regular supply of information to subscribers, about current and future highlights of the network's output, on a new and improved mailing list management system. If you are already subscribed to one of the newsletters previously published by Radio 3 you need do nothing to receive the new weekly Radio 3 newsletter automatically. Should you wish to discontinue your subscription(s), you will be able to do so at any time from the new Newsletters. We will publish more information on this change soon.
Radio 3, the home of classical music indeed, but I hope you get chance to sample our full range of distinctive programming. Thanks as ever for your interest in the station.
With best wishes
Roger Wright
Controller's Note, Jan 13
January 2013
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
Happy New Year I hope you have enjoyed the holiday season in the company of Radio 3. I have had the pleasure of reliving some of the 2012 BBC Proms and the Covent Garden Ring cycle, as well as hearing stimulating ideas on Belief from a variety of guests, and enjoying performances from our New Generation Artists. I hope you continue to find much to enjoy on Radio 3 in 2013. It is a big year for anniversaries and we have lots of special programming lined up.
VIVA VERDI
Opera will be a major theme with the anniversaries of Verdi, Wagner and Benjamin Britten. Our exploration of their works and significance will be a running theme throughout the year. To start with, our Sunday Feature this weekend is dedicated to Verdi 200: Viva Verdi! Verdi held a position at the heart of Italian life - 300,000 people gathered to pay their respects at his funeral. Roger Parker traces the history of Verdi's Risorgimento operas (of which Nabucco is the most famous), their role in Italian society and the building of the nation itself.
On Monday and Tuesday evenings, we are broadcasting two of his operas, starting our complete cycle of his operas throughout 2013. On Monday we have I Lombardi from the Florence Maggio Musicale 2005, conducted by Roberto Abbado, starring Erwin Schrott and Ramon Vargas. The story of fraternal strife is set against the First Crusade; when first performed, the Milanese decided that they were the Lombards, the Holy Land was Italy, and Austrians the Saracens. Against this background, further conflict arises out of a love narrative.
On Tuesday, we have I Vespri Siciliani, recorded at the Vienna State Opera and conducted by Gianandrea Noseda, with Burkhardt Fritz as Arrigo and Angela Meade as Elena. Again there is a medieval setting, this time as the background for a tale of mistaken identity.
MORE OPERA FROM THE MET
Before we arrive at the first of our Verdi operas, we have Live from the Met tomorrow night at 5pm, with Berlioz's epic opera Les Troyens. It is based on Virgil's epic Aeneid and uses the iconic image of the wooden horse - an offering to the goddess Athena or perhaps a sign of impending disaster. Deborah Voigt, Susan Graham, Marcello Giordani, and Dwayne Croft lead a starry cast, conducted by Fabio Luisi.
1913 IN PARIS
It is two hundred years since Verdi's birth, and one hundred since the first performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Our series of talks in The Essay next week considers 1913 as a particularly significant year for Paris, and a time of momentous events in literature, music and the visual arts. We look at 1913 in the company of the novelist Marcel Proust, the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire and Cubism, capturing the spirit of a civilisation which was to change dramatically the following year.
COMPOSER OF THE WEEK
Next week, our Composer of the Week is Sergey Prokofiev. Donald Macleod considers his time in Paris and how his works were received there. At the end of the week, he looks at the composer's visit to Russia in 1927, his subsequent decision to return there permanently, and the effect of that move on his life and music. In the following week, Donald is in conversation with John Williams. One of his best known film scores is Star Wars; he explains why he opted for an 'old-fashioned', Romantic style to accompany a futuristic tale of aliens and spaceships, rather than a more contemporary idiom.
LIVE IN CONCERT
After the two Verdi operas, we start again with our live evening concerts. On Friday 18th, the BBC Symphony Orchestra has an evening on the theme of London, conducted by Long Yu, Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the China Philharmonic Orchestra, making his debut with the BBC Symphony. Alongside Elgar's Cockaigne and Haydn's London Symphony, No. 104, we hear works by composers Qigang Chen and Hong-Kong born Raymond Yiu. Yiu evokes the British capital in a new work with the intriguing title, 'The London Citizen Exceedingly Injured', a 'symphonic game' drawing on Cockaigne and the nursery rhyme 'Oranges and Lemons'.
WORLD MUSIC
The same evening (18th) we also head live to Glasgow, and a special late-night performance from the Celtic Connections festival, presented by Mary Ann Kennedy. Scottish and Irish music form the centre of the festival, but it also embraces other Celtic cultures, and in recent years the range has extended still further. The line-up is always kept secret until the day of the event. It promises to be another lively evening, and there will be another on the 25th.
And this Sunday evening (6th), make sure to listen to the first of our two World Routes tributes to Ravi Shankar, who died on December 11th. Lucy Duran introduces a performance of Raga Jog, Ravi Shankar's first recording from 1956. The following week, we hear him play Raga Kaushi Kanhara, from his classic live recording at Carnegie Hall in 2000.
WAR AND COLD WAR
On Sunday (13th) Drama On 3 is Michael Frayn's award-winning play about the controversial 1941 meeting between the two great quantum physicists, Bohr and Heisenberg, meeting for the first time since the outbreak of war. The Danish physicist Bohr and his wife, Margrethe, live in Nazi-occupied Denmark; their visitor, Heisenberg, is German. Two old friends, now on opposing sides, have the ability to change the course of history. Benedict Cumberbatch, Greta Scacchi and Simon Russell Beale star in Copenhagen.
To mark a rather different anniversary - 50 years since the Profumo affair - Matthew Sweet talks to Richard Davenport-Hines in Night Waves on Monday evening (7th). His account of the scandal, An English Affair, offers a new perspective of the events in the notorious case.
So it's another varied and engaging month on Radio 3 and I hope you will be able to listen to a lot of it, either live or on demand.
As always, you'll find details of all our programmes in the Radio Times and at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3.
All best wishes
Roger Wright
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
Happy New Year I hope you have enjoyed the holiday season in the company of Radio 3. I have had the pleasure of reliving some of the 2012 BBC Proms and the Covent Garden Ring cycle, as well as hearing stimulating ideas on Belief from a variety of guests, and enjoying performances from our New Generation Artists. I hope you continue to find much to enjoy on Radio 3 in 2013. It is a big year for anniversaries and we have lots of special programming lined up.
VIVA VERDI
Opera will be a major theme with the anniversaries of Verdi, Wagner and Benjamin Britten. Our exploration of their works and significance will be a running theme throughout the year. To start with, our Sunday Feature this weekend is dedicated to Verdi 200: Viva Verdi! Verdi held a position at the heart of Italian life - 300,000 people gathered to pay their respects at his funeral. Roger Parker traces the history of Verdi's Risorgimento operas (of which Nabucco is the most famous), their role in Italian society and the building of the nation itself.
On Monday and Tuesday evenings, we are broadcasting two of his operas, starting our complete cycle of his operas throughout 2013. On Monday we have I Lombardi from the Florence Maggio Musicale 2005, conducted by Roberto Abbado, starring Erwin Schrott and Ramon Vargas. The story of fraternal strife is set against the First Crusade; when first performed, the Milanese decided that they were the Lombards, the Holy Land was Italy, and Austrians the Saracens. Against this background, further conflict arises out of a love narrative.
On Tuesday, we have I Vespri Siciliani, recorded at the Vienna State Opera and conducted by Gianandrea Noseda, with Burkhardt Fritz as Arrigo and Angela Meade as Elena. Again there is a medieval setting, this time as the background for a tale of mistaken identity.
MORE OPERA FROM THE MET
Before we arrive at the first of our Verdi operas, we have Live from the Met tomorrow night at 5pm, with Berlioz's epic opera Les Troyens. It is based on Virgil's epic Aeneid and uses the iconic image of the wooden horse - an offering to the goddess Athena or perhaps a sign of impending disaster. Deborah Voigt, Susan Graham, Marcello Giordani, and Dwayne Croft lead a starry cast, conducted by Fabio Luisi.
1913 IN PARIS
It is two hundred years since Verdi's birth, and one hundred since the first performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Our series of talks in The Essay next week considers 1913 as a particularly significant year for Paris, and a time of momentous events in literature, music and the visual arts. We look at 1913 in the company of the novelist Marcel Proust, the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire and Cubism, capturing the spirit of a civilisation which was to change dramatically the following year.
COMPOSER OF THE WEEK
Next week, our Composer of the Week is Sergey Prokofiev. Donald Macleod considers his time in Paris and how his works were received there. At the end of the week, he looks at the composer's visit to Russia in 1927, his subsequent decision to return there permanently, and the effect of that move on his life and music. In the following week, Donald is in conversation with John Williams. One of his best known film scores is Star Wars; he explains why he opted for an 'old-fashioned', Romantic style to accompany a futuristic tale of aliens and spaceships, rather than a more contemporary idiom.
LIVE IN CONCERT
After the two Verdi operas, we start again with our live evening concerts. On Friday 18th, the BBC Symphony Orchestra has an evening on the theme of London, conducted by Long Yu, Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the China Philharmonic Orchestra, making his debut with the BBC Symphony. Alongside Elgar's Cockaigne and Haydn's London Symphony, No. 104, we hear works by composers Qigang Chen and Hong-Kong born Raymond Yiu. Yiu evokes the British capital in a new work with the intriguing title, 'The London Citizen Exceedingly Injured', a 'symphonic game' drawing on Cockaigne and the nursery rhyme 'Oranges and Lemons'.
WORLD MUSIC
The same evening (18th) we also head live to Glasgow, and a special late-night performance from the Celtic Connections festival, presented by Mary Ann Kennedy. Scottish and Irish music form the centre of the festival, but it also embraces other Celtic cultures, and in recent years the range has extended still further. The line-up is always kept secret until the day of the event. It promises to be another lively evening, and there will be another on the 25th.
And this Sunday evening (6th), make sure to listen to the first of our two World Routes tributes to Ravi Shankar, who died on December 11th. Lucy Duran introduces a performance of Raga Jog, Ravi Shankar's first recording from 1956. The following week, we hear him play Raga Kaushi Kanhara, from his classic live recording at Carnegie Hall in 2000.
WAR AND COLD WAR
On Sunday (13th) Drama On 3 is Michael Frayn's award-winning play about the controversial 1941 meeting between the two great quantum physicists, Bohr and Heisenberg, meeting for the first time since the outbreak of war. The Danish physicist Bohr and his wife, Margrethe, live in Nazi-occupied Denmark; their visitor, Heisenberg, is German. Two old friends, now on opposing sides, have the ability to change the course of history. Benedict Cumberbatch, Greta Scacchi and Simon Russell Beale star in Copenhagen.
To mark a rather different anniversary - 50 years since the Profumo affair - Matthew Sweet talks to Richard Davenport-Hines in Night Waves on Monday evening (7th). His account of the scandal, An English Affair, offers a new perspective of the events in the notorious case.
So it's another varied and engaging month on Radio 3 and I hope you will be able to listen to a lot of it, either live or on demand.
As always, you'll find details of all our programmes in the Radio Times and at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3.
All best wishes
Roger Wright
Controller's Note, Dec 12
December 2012
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
Looking back over 2012, it has been a remarkable year here on Radio 3, and I trust you have been able to hear a lot of our programming. We have been pleased to bring you the Schubert season; the BBC Proms festival as a key part of our 2012 summer, including the memorable Barenboim Beethoven/Boulez cycle; our recent focus on the piano; Free Thinking, and much else besides.
Looking back just over the past weekend, on Sunday we broadcast the annual Christmas Around Europe sequence of Christmas concerts - now available on iPlayer for listening as the festive season approaches. We began in Madrid, with both ancient and modern Spanish Christmas music, before moving to Helsinki for a programme of Vivaldi. Then, live from Copenhagen, we had Advent choral music directed by Paul Hillier. We also visited Riga for rarely heard Baroque repertory; Sofia for a concert of traditional music, and then headed North for a winter choral programme from Gothenburg. We ended with Baroque and regional music from the German National Museum in Nuremberg. A truly special day and a unique musical journey!
On Saturday, you may have enjoyed a rare opportunity to hear Meyerbeer's grand opera Robert le Diable live from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, performed there for the first time since 1890. It represents a sensational battle between good and evil, including courtly entertainments, jousting, romance, the supernatural and even a ballet of nuns. It will be available on iPlayer until next Saturday - you won't be disappointed! And next week's opera comes live from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. It's Rossini's great comic opera, The Barber of Seville, a hugely popular piece which has definitely stood the test of time. The plot is not profound - competition for the hand of a beautiful girl - but it is told with great wit and charm. For the first time this year, the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts will be available on iPlayer, just like all other Radio 3 programmes, giving you a whole week to catch up with or revisit the performance.
CHRISTMAS CONCERTS
In the last week of Radio 3 Live in Concert, leading up to Christmas, we have some special seasonal performances for you. Tonight's Live in Concert takes us to Christ Church, Spitalfields and its Winter Festival for Christmas music by Corelli and Bach, performed by The English Concert. It includes Bach's joyous Magnificat, intended for performance in Leipzig at Christmas 1723, as well as a concerto grosso by Corelli, specially composed for Christmas night. On Wednesday, we have a concert of English Christmas music, given by the BBC Singers and BBC Concert Orchestra at the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich. This gives us the chance to hear Finzi's cantata Dies natalis, alongside Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on Christmas Carols. These are complemented with works by Howells and Bax's Hymn to the Virgin Mary.
On Thursday, the voices of Stile Antico perform Advent and Christmas music, centred on Tallis's mass Puer natus est nobis.. And on Friday evening, we have three cantatas from Bach's Christmas Oratorio performed by the BBC Singers and St James's Baroque, conducted by David Hill. Bach's series of Christmas cantatas is one of the classics of the Christmas repertory, and makes a splendid prelude to the holiday season.
MYSTERY PLAYS
We are presenting a new cycle of mystery plays in our late night Essay slot, starting this evening; these revisit stories from the New Testament and are set in present day pre-Christmas London. Tonight, Dawn King sets the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders in a building firm working on a private conversion, where the boss starts to cut corners. And tomorrow, we have the Good Samaritan set on the Central Line. The Rev. Dr. Giles Fraser will be setting the stories in context.
Next Monday sees the return of Belief, presented by Joan Bakewell, who will be speaking to Lord Richard Dannatt about Christmas on the front line, and also Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, about the way in which the Catholic faith has shaped his work. We will also be hearing Turkey's best-selling woman novelist, Elif Shafak, on her growing interest in Rumi, the mystic poet who features in her writing.
INTO THE NEW YEAR…
And there is much else as well: the BBC Singers have been specially recording carols for Breakfast, some of which have been requested by listeners, and we also have the Breakfast Advent Calendar, a compendium of winter music and readings. Do look out for performances by our wonderful line-up of New Generation Artists across the coming weeks, as well as some great performances from the European summer festivals. And if you are nostalgic not only for the warmth of summer, but for the exciting months we enjoyed with the 2012 BBC Proms, then you will be able to relive them, as we provide another chance to hear some of the concerts. In a suitably festive manner, we will be rebroadcasting the Last Night of the Proms as midnight approaches on December the 31st, as this year draws to a close and the Prommers sing Auld Lang Syne. A few hours later you can start 2013 in the company of Radio 3, as we go live to Vienna for the traditional celebrations there on New Year's Day.
It has been an exhilarating year for all of us here, and I hope you have shared the sense of excitement. We have lots planned for you in the New Year - you will find details of all our programming at www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 - but, for the moment, on behalf of all of us at Radio 3, I would like to wish you a peaceful festive season and every good wish for 2013.
Roger Wright
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
Looking back over 2012, it has been a remarkable year here on Radio 3, and I trust you have been able to hear a lot of our programming. We have been pleased to bring you the Schubert season; the BBC Proms festival as a key part of our 2012 summer, including the memorable Barenboim Beethoven/Boulez cycle; our recent focus on the piano; Free Thinking, and much else besides.
Looking back just over the past weekend, on Sunday we broadcast the annual Christmas Around Europe sequence of Christmas concerts - now available on iPlayer for listening as the festive season approaches. We began in Madrid, with both ancient and modern Spanish Christmas music, before moving to Helsinki for a programme of Vivaldi. Then, live from Copenhagen, we had Advent choral music directed by Paul Hillier. We also visited Riga for rarely heard Baroque repertory; Sofia for a concert of traditional music, and then headed North for a winter choral programme from Gothenburg. We ended with Baroque and regional music from the German National Museum in Nuremberg. A truly special day and a unique musical journey!
On Saturday, you may have enjoyed a rare opportunity to hear Meyerbeer's grand opera Robert le Diable live from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, performed there for the first time since 1890. It represents a sensational battle between good and evil, including courtly entertainments, jousting, romance, the supernatural and even a ballet of nuns. It will be available on iPlayer until next Saturday - you won't be disappointed! And next week's opera comes live from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. It's Rossini's great comic opera, The Barber of Seville, a hugely popular piece which has definitely stood the test of time. The plot is not profound - competition for the hand of a beautiful girl - but it is told with great wit and charm. For the first time this year, the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts will be available on iPlayer, just like all other Radio 3 programmes, giving you a whole week to catch up with or revisit the performance.
CHRISTMAS CONCERTS
In the last week of Radio 3 Live in Concert, leading up to Christmas, we have some special seasonal performances for you. Tonight's Live in Concert takes us to Christ Church, Spitalfields and its Winter Festival for Christmas music by Corelli and Bach, performed by The English Concert. It includes Bach's joyous Magnificat, intended for performance in Leipzig at Christmas 1723, as well as a concerto grosso by Corelli, specially composed for Christmas night. On Wednesday, we have a concert of English Christmas music, given by the BBC Singers and BBC Concert Orchestra at the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich. This gives us the chance to hear Finzi's cantata Dies natalis, alongside Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on Christmas Carols. These are complemented with works by Howells and Bax's Hymn to the Virgin Mary.
On Thursday, the voices of Stile Antico perform Advent and Christmas music, centred on Tallis's mass Puer natus est nobis.. And on Friday evening, we have three cantatas from Bach's Christmas Oratorio performed by the BBC Singers and St James's Baroque, conducted by David Hill. Bach's series of Christmas cantatas is one of the classics of the Christmas repertory, and makes a splendid prelude to the holiday season.
MYSTERY PLAYS
We are presenting a new cycle of mystery plays in our late night Essay slot, starting this evening; these revisit stories from the New Testament and are set in present day pre-Christmas London. Tonight, Dawn King sets the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders in a building firm working on a private conversion, where the boss starts to cut corners. And tomorrow, we have the Good Samaritan set on the Central Line. The Rev. Dr. Giles Fraser will be setting the stories in context.
Next Monday sees the return of Belief, presented by Joan Bakewell, who will be speaking to Lord Richard Dannatt about Christmas on the front line, and also Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, about the way in which the Catholic faith has shaped his work. We will also be hearing Turkey's best-selling woman novelist, Elif Shafak, on her growing interest in Rumi, the mystic poet who features in her writing.
INTO THE NEW YEAR…
And there is much else as well: the BBC Singers have been specially recording carols for Breakfast, some of which have been requested by listeners, and we also have the Breakfast Advent Calendar, a compendium of winter music and readings. Do look out for performances by our wonderful line-up of New Generation Artists across the coming weeks, as well as some great performances from the European summer festivals. And if you are nostalgic not only for the warmth of summer, but for the exciting months we enjoyed with the 2012 BBC Proms, then you will be able to relive them, as we provide another chance to hear some of the concerts. In a suitably festive manner, we will be rebroadcasting the Last Night of the Proms as midnight approaches on December the 31st, as this year draws to a close and the Prommers sing Auld Lang Syne. A few hours later you can start 2013 in the company of Radio 3, as we go live to Vienna for the traditional celebrations there on New Year's Day.
It has been an exhilarating year for all of us here, and I hope you have shared the sense of excitement. We have lots planned for you in the New Year - you will find details of all our programming at www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 - but, for the moment, on behalf of all of us at Radio 3, I would like to wish you a peaceful festive season and every good wish for 2013.
Roger Wright
Controller's Note, Nov 12
November 2012
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear all
PIANO SEASON/CHILDREN IN NEED
I trust you have been able to enjoy much of the Piano Season, which has provided a continuing theme since the BBC Proms ended. The final gala concert on Monday was a remarkable event in support of Children in Need. It was broadcast live from BBC Hoddinott Hall in Cardiff with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Grant Llewellyn. It included an appearance from the Radio 3 'piano learners' who undertook to learn the instrument in six weeks: Radio 1's Dev; BBC Breakfast's Carol Kirkwood; Tommy Sandhu from the Asian Network, and Olympic Pentathlete, Samantha Murray. You can still listen on the iPlayer, and, if you want to, you can still donate £5 to BBC Children in Need, by texting the word DONATE to 70705. Text messages will cost £5 plus your standard network charge; £5 will go to BBC Children in Need. (For full terms and conditions, visit bbc.co.uk/pudsey. You must be over 16 and ask the permission of the bill payer.)
FREE THINKING
Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival returns tomorrow evening to The Sage, Gateshead for another exciting and packed weekend of debate, talks and performance. For the first time, many events will also be video streamed live on the Radio 3 website. The festival's central theme is 'Them and Us', and speakers will debate whether the world is becoming more divided, in terms of social inequality, division and differences. It all starts tomorrow evening as Sean Rafferty broadcasts In Tune live from the venue, with music from the North East choir Voices of Hope and Northumbrian folk musician, Alistair Anderson.
This year's opening lecture will be given by Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who argues that women leaders are best placed to sort out contemporary crises. The Israeli writer Amos Oz will discuss the prospect of co-existence in the Middle East. On the eve of the US election, Michael Ignatieff, the broadcaster and novelist who recently led the Liberal Party in Canada, will focus on partisanship in politics. Theologian Mona Siddiqui and historian Tom Holland discuss the essential differences between Islam and Christianity. Journalists Kate Adie and David Aaronovitch debate the impact new technology is having on our relationships. The head of the National Theatre of Scotland, Vicky Featherstone, will talk about nationalism and the theatre. And evolutionary biologist Mark Page will discuss the future evolution of humanity.
In addition, there will be debates on immigration, social mobility and extra-terrestrial life. Radio 3's New Generation Thinkers will also be involved, giving talks on their latest research. And there are in-depth interviews with the Irish writer Colm Toibin, the best-selling historical novelist Philippa Gregory, and Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall. Ian McMillan will host his cabaret of the word The Verb with guests including the playwright and poet Tony Harrison and the Scottish poet Don Paterson. Tom Service presents Music Matters featuring the cellist Natalie Clein and opera director Graham Vick.
For the first time, Radio 1 will be joining us at the festival, hosting talks for young people and broadcasting their debate show The Big Conversation live from The Sage Gateshead. Andrew Marr will present an edition of Radio 4's Start the Week at the festival featuring Free Thinking speakers. For more information on the festival line-up, broadcast schedule, and the live streaming go to bbc.co.uk/freethinking
LONDON JAZZ FESTIVAL
The other major highlight for November is our extensive coverage of the London Jazz Festival. We start on Radio 3 with live broadcasts of the opening Jazz Voice Gala concert and a special live edition of Jazz on 3. That heralds more than 40 hours of events and related coverage on Radio 3 stretching over the next few months. You will be able to find this in our regular jazz programmes, but also involved are In Tune, Radio 3 Live in Concert, The Choir, World on 3 and World Routes. This represents really in-depth coverage of this distinctive festival, and we hope that both established jazz fans and newcomers alike will find much to enjoy.
Full details of our programmes will be available online and on the back cover of the LJF programme brochure. But to help you navigate through so many delights, let me single out a couple of events to which I am specially looking forward. On November 13th in Live in Concert, we hear the current New Generation Jazz Artist, Shabaka Hutchings performing with the BBC Concert Orchestra, and this will include a new Radio 3 commission. Another Radio 3 commission, from John Surman, will be performed by the Bolsterstone Male Voice Choir at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and you will be able to hear this in The Choir.
Aside from our two major events this month you will, of course, be able to enjoy the usual variety of programming. I am also pleased that we are now offering as downloads, interviews with many of our wonderful In Tune guests. In the past month or so, these have included Jonathan Plowright, Stephen Hough, Maxim Vengerov and Leif Ove Andsnes. Do think of signing up to receive these downloads.
Best wishes
Roger Wright
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear all
PIANO SEASON/CHILDREN IN NEED
I trust you have been able to enjoy much of the Piano Season, which has provided a continuing theme since the BBC Proms ended. The final gala concert on Monday was a remarkable event in support of Children in Need. It was broadcast live from BBC Hoddinott Hall in Cardiff with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Grant Llewellyn. It included an appearance from the Radio 3 'piano learners' who undertook to learn the instrument in six weeks: Radio 1's Dev; BBC Breakfast's Carol Kirkwood; Tommy Sandhu from the Asian Network, and Olympic Pentathlete, Samantha Murray. You can still listen on the iPlayer, and, if you want to, you can still donate £5 to BBC Children in Need, by texting the word DONATE to 70705. Text messages will cost £5 plus your standard network charge; £5 will go to BBC Children in Need. (For full terms and conditions, visit bbc.co.uk/pudsey. You must be over 16 and ask the permission of the bill payer.)
FREE THINKING
Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival returns tomorrow evening to The Sage, Gateshead for another exciting and packed weekend of debate, talks and performance. For the first time, many events will also be video streamed live on the Radio 3 website. The festival's central theme is 'Them and Us', and speakers will debate whether the world is becoming more divided, in terms of social inequality, division and differences. It all starts tomorrow evening as Sean Rafferty broadcasts In Tune live from the venue, with music from the North East choir Voices of Hope and Northumbrian folk musician, Alistair Anderson.
This year's opening lecture will be given by Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who argues that women leaders are best placed to sort out contemporary crises. The Israeli writer Amos Oz will discuss the prospect of co-existence in the Middle East. On the eve of the US election, Michael Ignatieff, the broadcaster and novelist who recently led the Liberal Party in Canada, will focus on partisanship in politics. Theologian Mona Siddiqui and historian Tom Holland discuss the essential differences between Islam and Christianity. Journalists Kate Adie and David Aaronovitch debate the impact new technology is having on our relationships. The head of the National Theatre of Scotland, Vicky Featherstone, will talk about nationalism and the theatre. And evolutionary biologist Mark Page will discuss the future evolution of humanity.
In addition, there will be debates on immigration, social mobility and extra-terrestrial life. Radio 3's New Generation Thinkers will also be involved, giving talks on their latest research. And there are in-depth interviews with the Irish writer Colm Toibin, the best-selling historical novelist Philippa Gregory, and Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall. Ian McMillan will host his cabaret of the word The Verb with guests including the playwright and poet Tony Harrison and the Scottish poet Don Paterson. Tom Service presents Music Matters featuring the cellist Natalie Clein and opera director Graham Vick.
For the first time, Radio 1 will be joining us at the festival, hosting talks for young people and broadcasting their debate show The Big Conversation live from The Sage Gateshead. Andrew Marr will present an edition of Radio 4's Start the Week at the festival featuring Free Thinking speakers. For more information on the festival line-up, broadcast schedule, and the live streaming go to bbc.co.uk/freethinking
LONDON JAZZ FESTIVAL
The other major highlight for November is our extensive coverage of the London Jazz Festival. We start on Radio 3 with live broadcasts of the opening Jazz Voice Gala concert and a special live edition of Jazz on 3. That heralds more than 40 hours of events and related coverage on Radio 3 stretching over the next few months. You will be able to find this in our regular jazz programmes, but also involved are In Tune, Radio 3 Live in Concert, The Choir, World on 3 and World Routes. This represents really in-depth coverage of this distinctive festival, and we hope that both established jazz fans and newcomers alike will find much to enjoy.
Full details of our programmes will be available online and on the back cover of the LJF programme brochure. But to help you navigate through so many delights, let me single out a couple of events to which I am specially looking forward. On November 13th in Live in Concert, we hear the current New Generation Jazz Artist, Shabaka Hutchings performing with the BBC Concert Orchestra, and this will include a new Radio 3 commission. Another Radio 3 commission, from John Surman, will be performed by the Bolsterstone Male Voice Choir at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and you will be able to hear this in The Choir.
Aside from our two major events this month you will, of course, be able to enjoy the usual variety of programming. I am also pleased that we are now offering as downloads, interviews with many of our wonderful In Tune guests. In the past month or so, these have included Jonathan Plowright, Stephen Hough, Maxim Vengerov and Leif Ove Andsnes. Do think of signing up to receive these downloads.
Best wishes
Roger Wright
Controller's Note, Oct 12
October 2012
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
I hope you enjoyed Radio 3 in September, as musical life continues with new seasons beginning after the BBC Proms. Among other things, we have visited the Leeds Piano Competition and the Edinburgh Festival, as well as beginning our own Radio 3 celebration of the piano. Some of you may have noticed that the Radio 3 website has contained a link to a 'beta' site, encouraging you to give feedback about the new look planned for BBC radio stations which goes live on Monday. You will notice that you can access more easily on-demand listening and clips of broadcasts. In addition, links across the top allow easy access to individual programmes, genres and the schedule itself. It will be clearer to see what the live programme is, and to access 'now playing' information. I hope you like the new navigation which will allow you to find our programmes, live and on demand, more easily. The site will continue to develop over the next few months.
OPERA
One of our major highlights during October is Wagner's Ring Cycle live from Covent Garden. It is a much awaited production, heralding the 200th anniversary of the composer's birth next year. The word 'epic' is often used to describe the musical cycle, and indeed it is an epic undertaking to broadcast it live. Radio 3 is delighted to be providing access to all comers for this monumental production. It is an important part of our public service to offer this chance to enjoy the 'best seat in the house' for this much discussed cycle. It starts on Tuesday, October 16th at 7pm with Das Rheingold, which sets the scene for the operas which follow – the struggle of love and power echoes through the cycle. We shall be providing lots of contextual material around the music, going behind the scenes with the artists themselves. The cast is led by Bryn Terfel, Stig Anderson and Wolfgang Koch, and the Orchestra and Chorus of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden is conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano. The remainder of the story will unfold on the Thursday 18th, Sunday 21st and Wednesday 24th, drawing in other great singers, not least the British stars Susan Bullock, Sarah Connolly and John Tomlinson. Start times will be early, so if you are unavailable to listen live, then it remains on-demand one week after transmission. And a reminder that tomorrow evening, once again, the medium of opera will convey us to another magical location, as Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducts Mozart's The Magic Flute, recorded at this summer's Salzburg Festival.
INDIA
In the next weeks, we have some programmes focussing on India. In the Sunday Feature, Jatinder Verma examines growing tension between religious life and modern society, concentrating on the place of the ascetic. Following that, we turn to another side of India, as Ibsen's ground-breaking play, A Doll's House, is transposed to Calcutta by Tanika Gupta. Nora, an Indian woman married a colonial administrator, risks her reputation to save her husband, and in the process discovers herself. Finally on Sunday, World Routes takes us to the Darbar Festival of Indian classical music with Lopa Kothari. Performed closer to home at the Purcell Room, the programme of North Indian music features ragas on the bamboo flute and the surbahar, or bass sitar. There is a second instalment of music from the Darbar Festival next weekend, and on the evening of Sunday 14th Jatinder Verma will be examining India's relationship with Kashmir, following the eruption of violence in the region in 1989.
PIANO SEASON ON THE BBC
The Piano Season on the BBC will reach its climax with a Piano Gala edition of Live in Concert on Monday 29th. It will include Bach's Triple Keyboard Concerto together with one of the most popular piano concertos - Rachmaninov's Second. The BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Grant Llewellyn are joined by Kathryn Stott, Noriko Ogawa and Nicholas McCarthy (who played in the closing ceremony of the Paralympics), as well as several of the Season's 'Piano Learners' who have spent the past six weeks studying the piano. This concert is also BBC Radio 3's contribution to the BBC's Children in Need 2012 campaign, so it is an opportunity for you to donate money in aid of the charity. We have yet to hear whether Pudsey will be tinkling the ivories... And do download the podcasts of our Piano A-Z - they are illuminating, informative and entertaining - and proving to be a very popular part of in Tune. On the subject of downloads, you might also be interested to know we have launched a podcast of some of our In Tune interviews, which have included the musicians Nigel Kennedy, Leif Ove Andsnes and Maxim Vengerov in past weeks.
AND MORE
As always there is much besides our special themes. Next week, for instance, Donald Macleod will be looking at Debussy as Composer of the Week. As usual, he will be placing the composer in the context of his time and life experience. As well as exploring his relationships, he will also draw attention to the effect on Debussy's music of the outbreak of war in 1914. We are pleased regularly to cover jazz from across the UK and beyond, and on Sunday evening Claire Martin presents music from the summer's Scarborough Jazz Festival, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this year. The programme features Alan Barnes, Gareth Williams and Dave Green, and the Peter James Trio. On Monday evening Jazz on 3 goes to Leeds for Richard Ormrod's Home of the Brave and guitarist Chris Sharkey. Later in the month, starting on the 19th, in The Essay, we have Anglo-Saxon Portraits, starting with Martin Carver recounting the unearthing of Britain's richest grave, Sutton Hoo, in 1939. All of these programmes show the distinctive range of Radio 3's programming.
I trust you will continue to find much to enjoy on Radio 3.
With best wishes
Roger Wright
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
I hope you enjoyed Radio 3 in September, as musical life continues with new seasons beginning after the BBC Proms. Among other things, we have visited the Leeds Piano Competition and the Edinburgh Festival, as well as beginning our own Radio 3 celebration of the piano. Some of you may have noticed that the Radio 3 website has contained a link to a 'beta' site, encouraging you to give feedback about the new look planned for BBC radio stations which goes live on Monday. You will notice that you can access more easily on-demand listening and clips of broadcasts. In addition, links across the top allow easy access to individual programmes, genres and the schedule itself. It will be clearer to see what the live programme is, and to access 'now playing' information. I hope you like the new navigation which will allow you to find our programmes, live and on demand, more easily. The site will continue to develop over the next few months.
OPERA
One of our major highlights during October is Wagner's Ring Cycle live from Covent Garden. It is a much awaited production, heralding the 200th anniversary of the composer's birth next year. The word 'epic' is often used to describe the musical cycle, and indeed it is an epic undertaking to broadcast it live. Radio 3 is delighted to be providing access to all comers for this monumental production. It is an important part of our public service to offer this chance to enjoy the 'best seat in the house' for this much discussed cycle. It starts on Tuesday, October 16th at 7pm with Das Rheingold, which sets the scene for the operas which follow – the struggle of love and power echoes through the cycle. We shall be providing lots of contextual material around the music, going behind the scenes with the artists themselves. The cast is led by Bryn Terfel, Stig Anderson and Wolfgang Koch, and the Orchestra and Chorus of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden is conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano. The remainder of the story will unfold on the Thursday 18th, Sunday 21st and Wednesday 24th, drawing in other great singers, not least the British stars Susan Bullock, Sarah Connolly and John Tomlinson. Start times will be early, so if you are unavailable to listen live, then it remains on-demand one week after transmission. And a reminder that tomorrow evening, once again, the medium of opera will convey us to another magical location, as Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducts Mozart's The Magic Flute, recorded at this summer's Salzburg Festival.
INDIA
In the next weeks, we have some programmes focussing on India. In the Sunday Feature, Jatinder Verma examines growing tension between religious life and modern society, concentrating on the place of the ascetic. Following that, we turn to another side of India, as Ibsen's ground-breaking play, A Doll's House, is transposed to Calcutta by Tanika Gupta. Nora, an Indian woman married a colonial administrator, risks her reputation to save her husband, and in the process discovers herself. Finally on Sunday, World Routes takes us to the Darbar Festival of Indian classical music with Lopa Kothari. Performed closer to home at the Purcell Room, the programme of North Indian music features ragas on the bamboo flute and the surbahar, or bass sitar. There is a second instalment of music from the Darbar Festival next weekend, and on the evening of Sunday 14th Jatinder Verma will be examining India's relationship with Kashmir, following the eruption of violence in the region in 1989.
PIANO SEASON ON THE BBC
The Piano Season on the BBC will reach its climax with a Piano Gala edition of Live in Concert on Monday 29th. It will include Bach's Triple Keyboard Concerto together with one of the most popular piano concertos - Rachmaninov's Second. The BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Grant Llewellyn are joined by Kathryn Stott, Noriko Ogawa and Nicholas McCarthy (who played in the closing ceremony of the Paralympics), as well as several of the Season's 'Piano Learners' who have spent the past six weeks studying the piano. This concert is also BBC Radio 3's contribution to the BBC's Children in Need 2012 campaign, so it is an opportunity for you to donate money in aid of the charity. We have yet to hear whether Pudsey will be tinkling the ivories... And do download the podcasts of our Piano A-Z - they are illuminating, informative and entertaining - and proving to be a very popular part of in Tune. On the subject of downloads, you might also be interested to know we have launched a podcast of some of our In Tune interviews, which have included the musicians Nigel Kennedy, Leif Ove Andsnes and Maxim Vengerov in past weeks.
AND MORE
As always there is much besides our special themes. Next week, for instance, Donald Macleod will be looking at Debussy as Composer of the Week. As usual, he will be placing the composer in the context of his time and life experience. As well as exploring his relationships, he will also draw attention to the effect on Debussy's music of the outbreak of war in 1914. We are pleased regularly to cover jazz from across the UK and beyond, and on Sunday evening Claire Martin presents music from the summer's Scarborough Jazz Festival, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this year. The programme features Alan Barnes, Gareth Williams and Dave Green, and the Peter James Trio. On Monday evening Jazz on 3 goes to Leeds for Richard Ormrod's Home of the Brave and guitarist Chris Sharkey. Later in the month, starting on the 19th, in The Essay, we have Anglo-Saxon Portraits, starting with Martin Carver recounting the unearthing of Britain's richest grave, Sutton Hoo, in 1939. All of these programmes show the distinctive range of Radio 3's programming.
I trust you will continue to find much to enjoy on Radio 3.
With best wishes
Roger Wright
Controller's Note, Sep 12
September 2012
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
BBC PROMS
Though the BBC Proms season is drawing to a close, this note is about beginnings rather than endings. We now look forward to the new autumn season of musical performance and Radio 3 programming.
One of the joys of new technology is that we can look forward and listen backward simultaneously! We have reached a special moment in the BBC Proms festival, framed by two performances from one of the world's great orchestras, the Vienna Philharmonic. Using the iPlayer you can access the wonderful live broadcast from yesterday evening, when Murray Perahia was soloist in Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, and Bruckner's Ninth Symphony was conducted by Bernard Haitink. If you wish to explore further, you can hear the BBC Symphony Orchestra in John Adams' groundbreaking opera Nixon in China, conducted by the composer, based on Nixon's visit to meet Chairman Mao in 1972. Tonight, we have the penultimate night of the 2012 BBC Proms, when the Vienna Philharmonic, under Haitink, present Haydn's final symphony, alongside a composer for whom the orchestra has a special affinity, Richard Strauss - his epic Alpine Symphony.
And on Saturday, we reach the final celebratory event of the BBC Proms, the Last Night, in what has been a special summer against the backdrop of the Olympics and Paralympics. Jiri Belohlavek will be conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra for the traditional festive occasion, which features two remarkable soloists, Nicola Benedetti and Joseph Calleja. Nicola has been a featured Proms artist this year and will be playing one of the best loved concertos in the violin repertory, Bruch's first Violin Concerto in G minor. We will hear also arias from Verdi, Massenet, and Puccini from Joseph, one of the great exponents of the tenor operatic repertory. For his last concert as Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Jiri Belohlavek presents two works by fellow Czechs - Dvorak and Suk. It promises to be a real musical party
EDINBURGH
I hope you have been able to enjoy our live broadcasts from Edinburgh's Queen's Hall. A new initiative this year in our Edinburgh International Festival coverage. On Monday we head back to Edinburgh for the period-instrument Orchestre des Champs-Elysées, together with Collegium Vocale Gent, directed by Philippe Herreweghe in a concert which includes Bruckner's monumental Te Deum, a piece which Mahler described as 'written for the tongues of angels'. On Wednesday (12th), also from the Edinburgh International Festival, Iván Fischer presents the Budapest Festival Orchestra playing music by Bartók - Hungarian Peasant Songs and the first Violin Concerto - as well as Mahler's fifth symphony.
JOHN CAGE
About three weeks ago, the BBC Proms featured a memorable concert of John Cage, the controversial, iconoclastic philosopher who used music as his medium. In Music Matters on Saturday 15th, Tom Service and Mark Swed examine how John Cage's ideas developed, using contributions from those who knew the composer, including John Adams. Tom asks whether his work is genuinely composition, or whether he had crossed conventional boundaries. On the same theme, our Sunday Feature looks at Cage's contribution beyond music. Contributors include sculptor Antony Gormley, visual artist Tacita Dean and cultural critic Lewis Hyde. The programme includes extracts from lectures and interviews given by Cage himself, who was born a hundred years ago in September 1912.
PIANO
Starting on Saturday, September 15 th, the BBC Piano Season is a six-week celebration of an instrument that can convey every emotion and the power of a whole orchestra. We will explore its influence from the 1700s to the present day, and the lives of the people behind the piano and its music.
The season begins with The Leeds Piano Competition including live broadcasts of the Final. Monday nights will be 'Piano Night' when Radio 3's Live in Concert offers its listeners piano recitals by international artists. Each morning there will be a focus on fifty great names from the world of the piano, while Composer of the Week explores piano composers from Clementi to Rachmaninov. Special guests include Kathryn Stott, James May, Alan Rusbridger and Benjamin Frith, speaking about their passion for the instrument. There will be online master classes, an exploration of its historical and social history and an entertaining A-Z of the piano in In Tune. Complementary television programming will be looking behind the scenes at Leeds, and following Lang Lang in the year of his 30th birthday.
MARLOWE
On Sunday (16 th) we have a new production of Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine in Drama on 3. The work is a classic, which is said to have changed the course of British drama and to have influenced the young Shakespeare, and it is the first of three Radio 3 plays portraying absolute rule. The play's plot is that of the rise of an opportunistic and ruthless young Scythian shepherd. This new Tamburlaine is played by Con O'Neill. Such was the success of this play that Marlowe wrote a sequel, but this new Radio 3 adaptation focuses on the epoch-changing drama of 1587, as it would have been experienced by the young Shakespeare. The series continues in subsequent weeks with Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart and Collaborators, the recent National Theatre success with Simon Russell Beale as Stalin.
I hope that you will find lots to enjoy in the Radio 3 autumn schedule.
With best wishes
Roger Wright
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
BBC PROMS
Though the BBC Proms season is drawing to a close, this note is about beginnings rather than endings. We now look forward to the new autumn season of musical performance and Radio 3 programming.
One of the joys of new technology is that we can look forward and listen backward simultaneously! We have reached a special moment in the BBC Proms festival, framed by two performances from one of the world's great orchestras, the Vienna Philharmonic. Using the iPlayer you can access the wonderful live broadcast from yesterday evening, when Murray Perahia was soloist in Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, and Bruckner's Ninth Symphony was conducted by Bernard Haitink. If you wish to explore further, you can hear the BBC Symphony Orchestra in John Adams' groundbreaking opera Nixon in China, conducted by the composer, based on Nixon's visit to meet Chairman Mao in 1972. Tonight, we have the penultimate night of the 2012 BBC Proms, when the Vienna Philharmonic, under Haitink, present Haydn's final symphony, alongside a composer for whom the orchestra has a special affinity, Richard Strauss - his epic Alpine Symphony.
And on Saturday, we reach the final celebratory event of the BBC Proms, the Last Night, in what has been a special summer against the backdrop of the Olympics and Paralympics. Jiri Belohlavek will be conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra for the traditional festive occasion, which features two remarkable soloists, Nicola Benedetti and Joseph Calleja. Nicola has been a featured Proms artist this year and will be playing one of the best loved concertos in the violin repertory, Bruch's first Violin Concerto in G minor. We will hear also arias from Verdi, Massenet, and Puccini from Joseph, one of the great exponents of the tenor operatic repertory. For his last concert as Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Jiri Belohlavek presents two works by fellow Czechs - Dvorak and Suk. It promises to be a real musical party
EDINBURGH
I hope you have been able to enjoy our live broadcasts from Edinburgh's Queen's Hall. A new initiative this year in our Edinburgh International Festival coverage. On Monday we head back to Edinburgh for the period-instrument Orchestre des Champs-Elysées, together with Collegium Vocale Gent, directed by Philippe Herreweghe in a concert which includes Bruckner's monumental Te Deum, a piece which Mahler described as 'written for the tongues of angels'. On Wednesday (12th), also from the Edinburgh International Festival, Iván Fischer presents the Budapest Festival Orchestra playing music by Bartók - Hungarian Peasant Songs and the first Violin Concerto - as well as Mahler's fifth symphony.
JOHN CAGE
About three weeks ago, the BBC Proms featured a memorable concert of John Cage, the controversial, iconoclastic philosopher who used music as his medium. In Music Matters on Saturday 15th, Tom Service and Mark Swed examine how John Cage's ideas developed, using contributions from those who knew the composer, including John Adams. Tom asks whether his work is genuinely composition, or whether he had crossed conventional boundaries. On the same theme, our Sunday Feature looks at Cage's contribution beyond music. Contributors include sculptor Antony Gormley, visual artist Tacita Dean and cultural critic Lewis Hyde. The programme includes extracts from lectures and interviews given by Cage himself, who was born a hundred years ago in September 1912.
PIANO
Starting on Saturday, September 15 th, the BBC Piano Season is a six-week celebration of an instrument that can convey every emotion and the power of a whole orchestra. We will explore its influence from the 1700s to the present day, and the lives of the people behind the piano and its music.
The season begins with The Leeds Piano Competition including live broadcasts of the Final. Monday nights will be 'Piano Night' when Radio 3's Live in Concert offers its listeners piano recitals by international artists. Each morning there will be a focus on fifty great names from the world of the piano, while Composer of the Week explores piano composers from Clementi to Rachmaninov. Special guests include Kathryn Stott, James May, Alan Rusbridger and Benjamin Frith, speaking about their passion for the instrument. There will be online master classes, an exploration of its historical and social history and an entertaining A-Z of the piano in In Tune. Complementary television programming will be looking behind the scenes at Leeds, and following Lang Lang in the year of his 30th birthday.
MARLOWE
On Sunday (16 th) we have a new production of Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine in Drama on 3. The work is a classic, which is said to have changed the course of British drama and to have influenced the young Shakespeare, and it is the first of three Radio 3 plays portraying absolute rule. The play's plot is that of the rise of an opportunistic and ruthless young Scythian shepherd. This new Tamburlaine is played by Con O'Neill. Such was the success of this play that Marlowe wrote a sequel, but this new Radio 3 adaptation focuses on the epoch-changing drama of 1587, as it would have been experienced by the young Shakespeare. The series continues in subsequent weeks with Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart and Collaborators, the recent National Theatre success with Simon Russell Beale as Stalin.
I hope that you will find lots to enjoy in the Radio 3 autumn schedule.
With best wishes
Roger Wright
Controller's Note, Aug 12
August 2012
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
I am sending my August note in good time, since we are at such an extremely exciting moment for BBC Radio 3 and the BBC Proms.
Later today, the 2012 Olympic Games will begin after many years of preparation. We will be marking the spirit of this unique world event with Beethoven's great universal hymn, in celebration of shared humanity and friendship, the Ninth Symphony. For anyone who has been following this cycle over the past week, this evening's performance will mark the end of a memorable journey.
We have enjoyed packed houses in the Royal Albert Hall each evening, and the performances have been electrifying. The complete cycle will be available for a limited period to see and hear on the iPlayer, so do find time if you haven't been able to so far.
I have just been reading some of the many tweets about Symphonies 7 and 8, performed on Tuesday. One audience member writes about now understanding why the original audience asked for an encore at the first performance, and another found breathtaking the way in which Barenboim treated the seventh symphony almost as a continuous movement, generating enormous energy.
The juxtaposition of Beethoven's music with the music of another epoch-making musician, Pierre Boulez, has been a remarkable ear-opening experience. It would seem that the Royal Albert Hall was almost designed with the spatial fluidity of his works in mind, as the sound moved round the enormous space like a ray of light, settling and inexorably moving on.
Returning to this evening, if you are in London, and have always wanted to learn to sing the ninth Symphony, just arrive at our Proms Plus event at the Royal College of Music at 4.45pm, and you will have the opportunity to do just that.
Youth is naturally a theme which emerges strongly from the Olympics. Throughout the Proms season, and indeed throughout the year, we celebrate the achievement of our talented New Generation Artists on Radio 3. During the coming two weekends extend this celebration even further. This coming Sunday evening, we have the Aldeburgh World Orchestra composed of musicians from every continent under the direction of Sir Mark Elder, and culminating in the unparalleled energy of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.
Next Saturday (4th), we come closer to home, as we begin to showcase the four corners of the UK with the Ulster Youth Orchestra performing with the Ulster Orchestra on Saturday afternoon - more youthful Stravinsky there too in the form of the Firebird. In the evening the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain performs a programme including Messiaen's colourful Turangalila Symphony.
On Sunday we welcome children's choirs from London boroughs and the National Youth Choir of Great Britain, and in the evening the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, together with our BBC orchestra from Scotland, with Nicola Benedetti as soloist in Bruch's Scottish Fantasy.
Monday is the turn of the Welsh, and their youth orchestra performs alongside the BBC orchestra based in Cardiff in the Bernstein Mass, together with multiple youth choirs from Wales.
During the coming week, we will be hearing from the BBC Proms Youth Choir with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Tippett's A Child of our Time.
On Tuesday (31st July), we have a late-night concert from the third of our young World Routes Academy featured artists, José Hernando Arias Noguera, a 20-year-old accordionist and singer who will be performing with his mentor, the accordionist Egidio Cuadrado with his own band from Bogotà.
As the month continues, there is much else to enjoy. We have the Hallé celebrating Ivor Novello on Thursday 9th and, in a different vein, performing Elgar's magisterial The Apostles on the following day - both conducted by Sir Mark Elder. And following up the much acclaimed performance of The Trojans at the weekend, we have another Berlioz masterpiece on Saturday 11th - the Requiem from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, joined by multiple choirs.
The following day, we have another giant of the choral repertory in Schoenberg's Gurrelieder with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and a strong line-up of soloists and choirs. We are also looking forward to the Proms debut of the São Paolo Symphony Orchestra, under Marin Alsop, including appropriately Dvořák's Symphony ‘From the New World'. This will point forward to the next Olympic nation, namely Brazil, whose cultural radio station is joining us live for the broadcast of Beethoven's ninth Symphony tonight.
Clearly, there is more than I can do justice to in a short note, so please make sure to keep up to speed with the Proms through the website, and with all the Proms related programming on Radio 3. I probably do not need to remind you, but Radio 3 is uniquely the ‘home of the BBC Proms', the only place where all the concerts can be heard live. And if you miss the live broadcast, perhaps because of your favourite sporting event, then the opportunity to catch up within the following seven days is no more than a mouse-click away on the iPlayer.
In addition to the BBC Proms, we are going to be travelling to Edinburgh for their daily concerts at 11am from the Edinburgh International Festival for three weeks, starting on August 13 th. Broadcasting the concert series live from the Queen's Hall is a new initiative this year, and once again enriches our already extensive programme of summer music–making from the festivals across the UK. Highlights of the first week include the Trio Zimmerman in Schubert and Mozart; Leif Ove Andsnes in a programme of Beethoven and Chopin, and on Friday Leonidas Kavakos is joined by Nikolai Lugansky to perform sonatas by Janácek, Brahms and Respighi.
I hope that this evening, many of us will be able to enjoy both Beethoven's ninth Symphony and whatever excitement lies in store for us at the Opening Ceremony from the Olympic Park. The Palace of Versailles was no stranger to amazing spectacles to dazzle and impress. So how appropriate then, that tomorrow on the first full day of the Olympics we are collaborating with the Baroque Music Centre of Versailles and Royal College of Music in bringing you the music of the French Court at the height of its opulence. In one of those interesting Proms juxtapositions, we will the following day be treated to the premiere of the first performance of the first-ever Proms commission by Wallace, of Wallace and Gromit fame. I just hope Wallace has managed to complete it in time
I hope you will find a great deal to enjoy at the BBC Proms and the Edinburgh Festival, uniquely on Radio 3 in the coming month.
With best wishes
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
I am sending my August note in good time, since we are at such an extremely exciting moment for BBC Radio 3 and the BBC Proms.
Later today, the 2012 Olympic Games will begin after many years of preparation. We will be marking the spirit of this unique world event with Beethoven's great universal hymn, in celebration of shared humanity and friendship, the Ninth Symphony. For anyone who has been following this cycle over the past week, this evening's performance will mark the end of a memorable journey.
We have enjoyed packed houses in the Royal Albert Hall each evening, and the performances have been electrifying. The complete cycle will be available for a limited period to see and hear on the iPlayer, so do find time if you haven't been able to so far.
I have just been reading some of the many tweets about Symphonies 7 and 8, performed on Tuesday. One audience member writes about now understanding why the original audience asked for an encore at the first performance, and another found breathtaking the way in which Barenboim treated the seventh symphony almost as a continuous movement, generating enormous energy.
The juxtaposition of Beethoven's music with the music of another epoch-making musician, Pierre Boulez, has been a remarkable ear-opening experience. It would seem that the Royal Albert Hall was almost designed with the spatial fluidity of his works in mind, as the sound moved round the enormous space like a ray of light, settling and inexorably moving on.
Returning to this evening, if you are in London, and have always wanted to learn to sing the ninth Symphony, just arrive at our Proms Plus event at the Royal College of Music at 4.45pm, and you will have the opportunity to do just that.
Youth is naturally a theme which emerges strongly from the Olympics. Throughout the Proms season, and indeed throughout the year, we celebrate the achievement of our talented New Generation Artists on Radio 3. During the coming two weekends extend this celebration even further. This coming Sunday evening, we have the Aldeburgh World Orchestra composed of musicians from every continent under the direction of Sir Mark Elder, and culminating in the unparalleled energy of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.
Next Saturday (4th), we come closer to home, as we begin to showcase the four corners of the UK with the Ulster Youth Orchestra performing with the Ulster Orchestra on Saturday afternoon - more youthful Stravinsky there too in the form of the Firebird. In the evening the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain performs a programme including Messiaen's colourful Turangalila Symphony.
On Sunday we welcome children's choirs from London boroughs and the National Youth Choir of Great Britain, and in the evening the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, together with our BBC orchestra from Scotland, with Nicola Benedetti as soloist in Bruch's Scottish Fantasy.
Monday is the turn of the Welsh, and their youth orchestra performs alongside the BBC orchestra based in Cardiff in the Bernstein Mass, together with multiple youth choirs from Wales.
During the coming week, we will be hearing from the BBC Proms Youth Choir with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Tippett's A Child of our Time.
On Tuesday (31st July), we have a late-night concert from the third of our young World Routes Academy featured artists, José Hernando Arias Noguera, a 20-year-old accordionist and singer who will be performing with his mentor, the accordionist Egidio Cuadrado with his own band from Bogotà.
As the month continues, there is much else to enjoy. We have the Hallé celebrating Ivor Novello on Thursday 9th and, in a different vein, performing Elgar's magisterial The Apostles on the following day - both conducted by Sir Mark Elder. And following up the much acclaimed performance of The Trojans at the weekend, we have another Berlioz masterpiece on Saturday 11th - the Requiem from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, joined by multiple choirs.
The following day, we have another giant of the choral repertory in Schoenberg's Gurrelieder with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and a strong line-up of soloists and choirs. We are also looking forward to the Proms debut of the São Paolo Symphony Orchestra, under Marin Alsop, including appropriately Dvořák's Symphony ‘From the New World'. This will point forward to the next Olympic nation, namely Brazil, whose cultural radio station is joining us live for the broadcast of Beethoven's ninth Symphony tonight.
Clearly, there is more than I can do justice to in a short note, so please make sure to keep up to speed with the Proms through the website, and with all the Proms related programming on Radio 3. I probably do not need to remind you, but Radio 3 is uniquely the ‘home of the BBC Proms', the only place where all the concerts can be heard live. And if you miss the live broadcast, perhaps because of your favourite sporting event, then the opportunity to catch up within the following seven days is no more than a mouse-click away on the iPlayer.
In addition to the BBC Proms, we are going to be travelling to Edinburgh for their daily concerts at 11am from the Edinburgh International Festival for three weeks, starting on August 13 th. Broadcasting the concert series live from the Queen's Hall is a new initiative this year, and once again enriches our already extensive programme of summer music–making from the festivals across the UK. Highlights of the first week include the Trio Zimmerman in Schubert and Mozart; Leif Ove Andsnes in a programme of Beethoven and Chopin, and on Friday Leonidas Kavakos is joined by Nikolai Lugansky to perform sonatas by Janácek, Brahms and Respighi.
I hope that this evening, many of us will be able to enjoy both Beethoven's ninth Symphony and whatever excitement lies in store for us at the Opening Ceremony from the Olympic Park. The Palace of Versailles was no stranger to amazing spectacles to dazzle and impress. So how appropriate then, that tomorrow on the first full day of the Olympics we are collaborating with the Baroque Music Centre of Versailles and Royal College of Music in bringing you the music of the French Court at the height of its opulence. In one of those interesting Proms juxtapositions, we will the following day be treated to the premiere of the first performance of the first-ever Proms commission by Wallace, of Wallace and Gromit fame. I just hope Wallace has managed to complete it in time
I hope you will find a great deal to enjoy at the BBC Proms and the Edinburgh Festival, uniquely on Radio 3 in the coming month.
With best wishes
Controller's Note, Jul 12
July 2012
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
The BBC Proms season is almost upon us, with the opening night on Friday. The Radio 3 and Proms teams are immensely excited by the prospect of delivering what promises to be a memorable season during an extraordinary year for the UK. 2012 will go down in history as an exceptional summer, with the recent Jubilee celebrations, and the upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games starting in around two weeks. We intend to play our part in the cultural arena. At the BBC Proms, we are pleased to form part of the London 2012 Festival, offering world-class music-making by musicians from the UK and around the world - all broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. Selecting individual events is a difficult task, but to whet your appetite here are some concerts to listen out for in the first few weeks.
We begin on July 13th, when the Opening Night will have an English flavour, reflecting both the Olympics and the Diamond Jubilee of Her Majesty the Queen. We have organised our first-ever Proms baton relay, featuring four distinguished conductors: Edward Gardner, Sir Roger Norrington, Sir Mark Elder and Martyn Brabbins, all performing with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The programme includes Elgar’s Coronation Ode from 1911 and music by Turnage, Elgar, Delius and Tippett. On Saturday, there is the first of our Proms with London as a focus, a performance of the sparkling musical My Fair Lady, given by the John Wilson Orchestra with an all-star cast, including Anthony Andrews and Annalene Beechey. This Broadway classic closely reflects a particular period of London life, and has its origins in Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. Wilson has revived and reconstructed André Previn’s orchestrations for the 1964 film. On Sunday we present another great stage work, celebrating the 150th anniversary of Debussy’s birth, with Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducting the composer’s atmospheric operatic masterpiece, Pelléas et Mélisande. This is a Proms first, since it will be performed with period instruments played by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. Philip Addis, Karen Vourc’h and Sir John Tomlinson are among the distinguished cast.
In the first week we have two significant moments recalling the musical life and spirit of Georgian London. On Wednesday (18th) we hear the Choir and Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment directed by Laurence Cummings in Handel’s great oratorio Judas Maccabaeus, written following the last battle on British soil at the end of the Jacobite rebellion. Parallels were drawn between those events and the story of the biblical figure, Judas Maccabeus, celebrating his great renown as a military hero. The tenor John Mark Ainsley sings the title role. We trust that the weather will improve by the time we arrive at our performance of Handel’s Water Music and Fireworks Music, becoming more pleasant than it was for the recent Jubilee Pageant. However, it would take a lot to dampen the infectious vitality of the music, performed by Le Concert Spirituel directed by Hervé Niquet. The ensemble will be specially augmented to capture the splendour of major open-air state occasions during Handel’s own lifetime.
When the Olympics open on July 27th, we will be reaching the climactic point of our Beethoven symphony cycle, performed by the unique West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, uniting musicians from different communities and conducted by Daniel Barenboim. They appropriately mark the opening of the London Games with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the great hymn to universal friendship. Before we arrive at that momentous evening, they will have been the orchestra-in-residence with Daniel Barenboim for the previous week, leading us through a complete Beethoven symphony cycle. We start with the first two symphonies on Friday 20th, when the Beethoven works will be paired with Boulezs Dérive 2, continuing a long association between Barenboim and the strikingly original French composer. Both composers are ground-breaking in the context of their respective eras, and the opportunity to hear them juxtaposed in this series of concerts will itself be a unique programming experience.
As I mentioned above, choosing individual concerts is an unenviable task, but one work is so imposing that it is hard to ignore it - The Trojans by Berlioz. On Sunday 22nd July, the Royal Opera House Chorus and Orchestra, conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano, will be descending on the Royal Albert Hall, accompanied by an international cast of soloists, including Anna Caterina Antonacci. This epic work brings together battles, romance, and the whole of human life and experience. Definitely one not to miss!
BBC Radio 3 is the home of the Proms, and you can hear every Prom live on Radio 3 and on demand for a week after the concert, so you have plenty of time to catch up with anything you missed. For total immersion in the unique BBC Proms experience, you can visit www.bbc.co.uk/proms, and listen to programming other than the concerts themselves on Radio 3 for context and opportunities for engagement with the festival. We will have a daily downloadable BBC Proms Music Guide, which introduces in a matter of minutes one of the key pieces from the evening Prom. To get behind the scenes and receive the latest information, you can follow us on Twitter @bbcproms. To enjoy the Proms performances in optimal sound quality, don’t forget that Radio 3 is available in HD Sound, with the best sound quality available anywhere. If you go away during the summer, we are pleased that the HD stream will exceptionally be available internationally during the Proms period.
With best wishes
Roger Wright
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
The BBC Proms season is almost upon us, with the opening night on Friday. The Radio 3 and Proms teams are immensely excited by the prospect of delivering what promises to be a memorable season during an extraordinary year for the UK. 2012 will go down in history as an exceptional summer, with the recent Jubilee celebrations, and the upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games starting in around two weeks. We intend to play our part in the cultural arena. At the BBC Proms, we are pleased to form part of the London 2012 Festival, offering world-class music-making by musicians from the UK and around the world - all broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. Selecting individual events is a difficult task, but to whet your appetite here are some concerts to listen out for in the first few weeks.
We begin on July 13th, when the Opening Night will have an English flavour, reflecting both the Olympics and the Diamond Jubilee of Her Majesty the Queen. We have organised our first-ever Proms baton relay, featuring four distinguished conductors: Edward Gardner, Sir Roger Norrington, Sir Mark Elder and Martyn Brabbins, all performing with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The programme includes Elgar’s Coronation Ode from 1911 and music by Turnage, Elgar, Delius and Tippett. On Saturday, there is the first of our Proms with London as a focus, a performance of the sparkling musical My Fair Lady, given by the John Wilson Orchestra with an all-star cast, including Anthony Andrews and Annalene Beechey. This Broadway classic closely reflects a particular period of London life, and has its origins in Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. Wilson has revived and reconstructed André Previn’s orchestrations for the 1964 film. On Sunday we present another great stage work, celebrating the 150th anniversary of Debussy’s birth, with Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducting the composer’s atmospheric operatic masterpiece, Pelléas et Mélisande. This is a Proms first, since it will be performed with period instruments played by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. Philip Addis, Karen Vourc’h and Sir John Tomlinson are among the distinguished cast.
In the first week we have two significant moments recalling the musical life and spirit of Georgian London. On Wednesday (18th) we hear the Choir and Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment directed by Laurence Cummings in Handel’s great oratorio Judas Maccabaeus, written following the last battle on British soil at the end of the Jacobite rebellion. Parallels were drawn between those events and the story of the biblical figure, Judas Maccabeus, celebrating his great renown as a military hero. The tenor John Mark Ainsley sings the title role. We trust that the weather will improve by the time we arrive at our performance of Handel’s Water Music and Fireworks Music, becoming more pleasant than it was for the recent Jubilee Pageant. However, it would take a lot to dampen the infectious vitality of the music, performed by Le Concert Spirituel directed by Hervé Niquet. The ensemble will be specially augmented to capture the splendour of major open-air state occasions during Handel’s own lifetime.
When the Olympics open on July 27th, we will be reaching the climactic point of our Beethoven symphony cycle, performed by the unique West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, uniting musicians from different communities and conducted by Daniel Barenboim. They appropriately mark the opening of the London Games with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the great hymn to universal friendship. Before we arrive at that momentous evening, they will have been the orchestra-in-residence with Daniel Barenboim for the previous week, leading us through a complete Beethoven symphony cycle. We start with the first two symphonies on Friday 20th, when the Beethoven works will be paired with Boulezs Dérive 2, continuing a long association between Barenboim and the strikingly original French composer. Both composers are ground-breaking in the context of their respective eras, and the opportunity to hear them juxtaposed in this series of concerts will itself be a unique programming experience.
As I mentioned above, choosing individual concerts is an unenviable task, but one work is so imposing that it is hard to ignore it - The Trojans by Berlioz. On Sunday 22nd July, the Royal Opera House Chorus and Orchestra, conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano, will be descending on the Royal Albert Hall, accompanied by an international cast of soloists, including Anna Caterina Antonacci. This epic work brings together battles, romance, and the whole of human life and experience. Definitely one not to miss!
BBC Radio 3 is the home of the Proms, and you can hear every Prom live on Radio 3 and on demand for a week after the concert, so you have plenty of time to catch up with anything you missed. For total immersion in the unique BBC Proms experience, you can visit www.bbc.co.uk/proms, and listen to programming other than the concerts themselves on Radio 3 for context and opportunities for engagement with the festival. We will have a daily downloadable BBC Proms Music Guide, which introduces in a matter of minutes one of the key pieces from the evening Prom. To get behind the scenes and receive the latest information, you can follow us on Twitter @bbcproms. To enjoy the Proms performances in optimal sound quality, don’t forget that Radio 3 is available in HD Sound, with the best sound quality available anywhere. If you go away during the summer, we are pleased that the HD stream will exceptionally be available internationally during the Proms period.
With best wishes
Roger Wright
Controller's Note, Jun 12
June 2012
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
DISTANT WORLDS
Some while ago there was an advertisement which asked, 'Where do you want to go today?' I remembered it as I was looking through the Radio 3 schedule for June. Each day the station takes us to places outside our normal lives, giving us the chance to become immersed in different worlds. Radio at its best can offer this experience, taking us on journeys of discovery. Tomorrow evening in Between The Ears we are going in search of the Balinese Scarecrow, finding the hidden life of this fascinating Indonesian island. Gamelan orchestras practise hidden from tourist eyes; slit gongs call the children to school, and music is offered to the Gods. Even the scarecrows make music - from bamboo chimes to rusty tin cans, shaken by the farmers and the wind. In looking for the most musical scarecrow, we encounter the sounds of gamelan and wildlife as well as the composers and choreographers who are inspired by these sounds.
Remaining in the open, in Sunday Feature next weekend (17th), we have Edward James and the Surreal Garden - the story of a magical garden and concrete surrealist masterpiece, created by an eccentric Englishman, the artist and poet Edward James. Joanna Moorhead has travelled to a remote mountain town in Mexico to visit a little artistic monument, Las Pozas. She discovers the bizarre events that brought it into being, and its struggle for survival since James died in 1984.
FESTIVALS
Closer to home, the festival season has got well under way and over the weekend The Early Music Show will be featuring the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music. On Saturday lunchtime, there is a concert of staged madrigals - essentially miniature operas - from 17 th-century Venice, reconstructed through the imagination of Ensemble Savadi. Also from Lufthansa, on Sunday , Lucie Skeaping presents the highlights of a concert of French music by Francois Couperin and his contemporaries; Musica ad Rhenum, directed by flautist Jed Wentz, is joined by Canadian soprano Andreanne Paquin.
Tuesday's Radio 3 Live in Concert is broadcast live from the Aldeburgh Festival, continuing the early music theme, as Collegium Vocale Gent performs music by Carlo Gesualdo, directed by Philippe Herreweghe. Gesualdo is known for creating some of the most innovative Renaissance music, showing the advantage of having one's own means over pleasing artistically conservative patrons! During the interval, the poet Michael Symmons-Roberts introduces his own personal reflection on the subject of shadows, drawing his theme from the sombre Holy Week music for which Gesualdo is remembered.
Thursday's Live in Concert takes us to Christ Church, Spitalfields, where the Gabrieli Consort & Players, with Paul McCreesh, imaginatively juxtapose Stravinsky's Mass and motets by Josquin, Willaert and James MacMillan. Stravinsky was very much drawn to earlier music, and this concert crosses the space of five centuries as musical styles reflect off one another. It is a unique opportunity to hear the juxtaposition of works both ancient and more recent. Sunday afternoon takes us to the opening concert in the Tilford Bach Society's 60th anniversary festival, recorded last month at Farnham Castle. The London Handel Players perform music written for Frederick the Great, including Bach's famous tribute to the King, his Musical Offering.
We also have festival coverage in In Tune on Monday, when Sean Rafferty welcomes pianist Melvyn Tan performing live in the studio, before his appearances at the Spitalfields and Cheltenham festivals. He will be telling us about Variations for Judith, a collection of works by distinguished British composers, including Richard Rodney Bennett, Michael Berkeley, Peter Maxwell Davies, Jonathan Dove, Thea Musgrave, Anthony Payne and Judith Weir.
JAZZ
I trust many of you have discovered Geoffrey Smith's Jazz, a great way of rounding off your Saturday evening. This weekend Geoffrey is going to be presenting an all-star omnibus version of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. The opera has provided jazz players and singers alike with many fantastic melodies, and we hear interpretations from Louis Armstong [sic] and Ella Fitzgerald to Sidney Bechet, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis.
On Monday evening in Jazz on 3, Jez Nelson presents American pianist Vijay Iyer in concert with his trio at The Vortex jazz club in London. He draws his influence from Indian, modern classical and pop styles, and the trio - featuring Stephan Crump on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums - has caused a stir with the release of their first album, Historicity.
ESSAYS OLD AND NEW
On Sunday we have Words and Music, in which the distinguished actor Jim Broadbent plays the French 16 th-century essayist, Michel de Montaigne, whose essays are frequently direct and witty, playful and profound. Among other things, he put forward the revolutionary idea that human beings are on a par with the animals, which deserve equal respect.
And starting on Monday in The Essay, Michael Goldfarb searches for a definition of the nation to fit the 21st century. Goldfarb has spent much time covering conflicts in Bosnia, Iraq, and Northern Ireland, and his essays contain anecdotes of real people caught up in the frequently violent confrontations. During the week, we start by looking at Ulster Protestants, and then explore the idea of nationhood by examining the situations of the Kurds, Bosnia, Germany and finally Europe.
As ever, I hope you find much to enjoy on Radio 3.
With best wishes
Roger Wright
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
DISTANT WORLDS
Some while ago there was an advertisement which asked, 'Where do you want to go today?' I remembered it as I was looking through the Radio 3 schedule for June. Each day the station takes us to places outside our normal lives, giving us the chance to become immersed in different worlds. Radio at its best can offer this experience, taking us on journeys of discovery. Tomorrow evening in Between The Ears we are going in search of the Balinese Scarecrow, finding the hidden life of this fascinating Indonesian island. Gamelan orchestras practise hidden from tourist eyes; slit gongs call the children to school, and music is offered to the Gods. Even the scarecrows make music - from bamboo chimes to rusty tin cans, shaken by the farmers and the wind. In looking for the most musical scarecrow, we encounter the sounds of gamelan and wildlife as well as the composers and choreographers who are inspired by these sounds.
Remaining in the open, in Sunday Feature next weekend (17th), we have Edward James and the Surreal Garden - the story of a magical garden and concrete surrealist masterpiece, created by an eccentric Englishman, the artist and poet Edward James. Joanna Moorhead has travelled to a remote mountain town in Mexico to visit a little artistic monument, Las Pozas. She discovers the bizarre events that brought it into being, and its struggle for survival since James died in 1984.
FESTIVALS
Closer to home, the festival season has got well under way and over the weekend The Early Music Show will be featuring the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music. On Saturday lunchtime, there is a concert of staged madrigals - essentially miniature operas - from 17 th-century Venice, reconstructed through the imagination of Ensemble Savadi. Also from Lufthansa, on Sunday , Lucie Skeaping presents the highlights of a concert of French music by Francois Couperin and his contemporaries; Musica ad Rhenum, directed by flautist Jed Wentz, is joined by Canadian soprano Andreanne Paquin.
Tuesday's Radio 3 Live in Concert is broadcast live from the Aldeburgh Festival, continuing the early music theme, as Collegium Vocale Gent performs music by Carlo Gesualdo, directed by Philippe Herreweghe. Gesualdo is known for creating some of the most innovative Renaissance music, showing the advantage of having one's own means over pleasing artistically conservative patrons! During the interval, the poet Michael Symmons-Roberts introduces his own personal reflection on the subject of shadows, drawing his theme from the sombre Holy Week music for which Gesualdo is remembered.
Thursday's Live in Concert takes us to Christ Church, Spitalfields, where the Gabrieli Consort & Players, with Paul McCreesh, imaginatively juxtapose Stravinsky's Mass and motets by Josquin, Willaert and James MacMillan. Stravinsky was very much drawn to earlier music, and this concert crosses the space of five centuries as musical styles reflect off one another. It is a unique opportunity to hear the juxtaposition of works both ancient and more recent. Sunday afternoon takes us to the opening concert in the Tilford Bach Society's 60th anniversary festival, recorded last month at Farnham Castle. The London Handel Players perform music written for Frederick the Great, including Bach's famous tribute to the King, his Musical Offering.
We also have festival coverage in In Tune on Monday, when Sean Rafferty welcomes pianist Melvyn Tan performing live in the studio, before his appearances at the Spitalfields and Cheltenham festivals. He will be telling us about Variations for Judith, a collection of works by distinguished British composers, including Richard Rodney Bennett, Michael Berkeley, Peter Maxwell Davies, Jonathan Dove, Thea Musgrave, Anthony Payne and Judith Weir.
JAZZ
I trust many of you have discovered Geoffrey Smith's Jazz, a great way of rounding off your Saturday evening. This weekend Geoffrey is going to be presenting an all-star omnibus version of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. The opera has provided jazz players and singers alike with many fantastic melodies, and we hear interpretations from Louis Armstong [sic] and Ella Fitzgerald to Sidney Bechet, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis.
On Monday evening in Jazz on 3, Jez Nelson presents American pianist Vijay Iyer in concert with his trio at The Vortex jazz club in London. He draws his influence from Indian, modern classical and pop styles, and the trio - featuring Stephan Crump on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums - has caused a stir with the release of their first album, Historicity.
ESSAYS OLD AND NEW
On Sunday we have Words and Music, in which the distinguished actor Jim Broadbent plays the French 16 th-century essayist, Michel de Montaigne, whose essays are frequently direct and witty, playful and profound. Among other things, he put forward the revolutionary idea that human beings are on a par with the animals, which deserve equal respect.
And starting on Monday in The Essay, Michael Goldfarb searches for a definition of the nation to fit the 21st century. Goldfarb has spent much time covering conflicts in Bosnia, Iraq, and Northern Ireland, and his essays contain anecdotes of real people caught up in the frequently violent confrontations. During the week, we start by looking at Ulster Protestants, and then explore the idea of nationhood by examining the situations of the Kurds, Bosnia, Germany and finally Europe.
As ever, I hope you find much to enjoy on Radio 3.
With best wishes
Roger Wright
Controller's Note, May 12
May 2012
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
Since I last sent one of my monthly notes, I have had the pleasure of announcing the plans for the 2012 BBC Proms. I can assure you that there is a great deal to look forward to during this unforgettable summer and will write more about the festival below.
But we don't need to wait until July for live concerts! Next week, as ever, we are able to bring you an exceptional selection of live events across our weekday evenings. These range from Monday night, when we have a concert featuring Tudor and Jacobean sacred music written for private performance and performed by vocal group Stile Antico, live from Merton College, Oxford to Tuesday, when - on a much larger scale - Valery Gergiev conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Oedipus Rex live from the Barbican, London, with Simon Callow as narrator. On Wednesday Sir Mark Elder conducts the Hallé in an all-Russian programme of music by Borodin and Tchaikovsky, live from the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, while on Thursday the Britten Sinfonia and tenor Mark Padmore present a programme from the Queen Elizabeth Hall including Webern's arrangements of Schubert Songs and Mahler's Ruckert Lieder. There is more early music on Friday , on this occasion from Jordi Savall and Le Concert des Nations at London's St John's Smith Square, where they perform a concert which lives up to their name, with music by Baroque masters from France, Italy and England.
From our Wigmore Hall series on Monday lunchtime, we hear the tenor Allan Clayton, accompanied by Julius Drake, in a thoughtful programme which includes Britten's Holy Sonnets of John Donne. During next week, we hear more from English musicians, as Donald Macleod takes the musicians of the Chapel Royal as his Composers of the Week. Though working for the royal chapel might have seemed a serene occupation, these musicians experienced many upheavals as different monarchs succeeded to the throne. We follow them in court entertainment, to the battlefield and also through the difficult years of the Civil War.
Staying with earlier music, tomorrow lunchtime The Early Music Show is going to feature the music of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, the leading musician of the Dutch 17th century, and a provider of entertainment to the people of Amsterdam, who flocked to hear his organ concerts. On Saturday Night, we are broadcasting a controversial Opera on 3 - The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams, which was recently produced at English National Opera. The opera deals with the hijacking of the cruise liner Achille Lauro in 1985 by the Palestinian Liberation Front, and the subsequent murder of Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer. On a number of occasions intended performances of the opera have been cancelled, and it still arouses controversy, the allegation being made that it allows a platform to the views of Palestinian terrorists. You have the chance to judge for yourselves on Saturday evening. The acclaimed performance is directed by Tom Morris and features Alan Opie in the title role.
We end the weekend with a great gala concert on Sunday at 6 pm, when the final of the BBC Young Musician 2012 is introduced by Sara Mohr-Pietsch from The Sage, Gateshead. For the last 34 years this competition has offered some remarkable musicians the path to an international performing career including Emma Johnson, Natalie Clein, Guy Johnston and Nicola Benedetti. This year’s finalists will be performing with the Northern Sinfonia under the Ukranian conductor Kiril Karabits.
I am going to touch only briefly on the BBC Proms, since there will be many more opportunities to discuss the plans in depth on Radio 3 and elsewhere in the coming months. Following the season launch in late April, I just want to reflect on what a remarkable summer we are looking forward to, with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympic and Paralympic Games - alongside these, the annual BBC Proms are key to the celebrations. All the details are now available in the annual guide, on the BBC Proms website and also through the ebook, which you can also find online. It is difficult to single out particular events from almost two months of intense music-making. Clearly, one of the highlights will be the residency of Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra who are playing the first Beethoven symphony cycle at the Proms for over 60 years, including the Ninth Symphony on the first evening of the Olympics. For the first time the Vienna Philharmonic (with Bernard Haitink) and the Berliner Philharmoniker (with Simon Rattle) give two concerts each, and the two London opera houses are each performing an opera for the first time in the same Proms. There are more commissions and premieres than ever before - 14 new commissions and 17 London and UK premieres - and also of course the story which attracted press attention, namely that Wallace & Gromit will be making their first appearance at the Proms - Wallace has been commissioned to write a new piece! Aside from that remarkable event, we are celebrating the anniversaries of Debussy, Delius and Cage, noting the birthdays of four British composers ( Oliver Knussen, Simon Bainbridge, Hugh Wood and Alexander Goehr). John Adams will be conducting his own music in two Proms, including his much acclaimed opera, Nixon in China. And the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Manze, gives us a rare opportunity to hear Vaughan Williams’s Symphonies Nos. 4, 5 and 6 all in one concert. There is all this, and much more besides!
Explore the Proms Guide or the Proms website at your leisure, and don't forget that booking opens tomorrow at 9.00am online, by phone or in person at the Royal Albert Hall. You can find more information on how to book at http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/features/how-to-book.
With all best wishes
Roger Wright
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
Since I last sent one of my monthly notes, I have had the pleasure of announcing the plans for the 2012 BBC Proms. I can assure you that there is a great deal to look forward to during this unforgettable summer and will write more about the festival below.
But we don't need to wait until July for live concerts! Next week, as ever, we are able to bring you an exceptional selection of live events across our weekday evenings. These range from Monday night, when we have a concert featuring Tudor and Jacobean sacred music written for private performance and performed by vocal group Stile Antico, live from Merton College, Oxford to Tuesday, when - on a much larger scale - Valery Gergiev conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Oedipus Rex live from the Barbican, London, with Simon Callow as narrator. On Wednesday Sir Mark Elder conducts the Hallé in an all-Russian programme of music by Borodin and Tchaikovsky, live from the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, while on Thursday the Britten Sinfonia and tenor Mark Padmore present a programme from the Queen Elizabeth Hall including Webern's arrangements of Schubert Songs and Mahler's Ruckert Lieder. There is more early music on Friday , on this occasion from Jordi Savall and Le Concert des Nations at London's St John's Smith Square, where they perform a concert which lives up to their name, with music by Baroque masters from France, Italy and England.
From our Wigmore Hall series on Monday lunchtime, we hear the tenor Allan Clayton, accompanied by Julius Drake, in a thoughtful programme which includes Britten's Holy Sonnets of John Donne. During next week, we hear more from English musicians, as Donald Macleod takes the musicians of the Chapel Royal as his Composers of the Week. Though working for the royal chapel might have seemed a serene occupation, these musicians experienced many upheavals as different monarchs succeeded to the throne. We follow them in court entertainment, to the battlefield and also through the difficult years of the Civil War.
Staying with earlier music, tomorrow lunchtime The Early Music Show is going to feature the music of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, the leading musician of the Dutch 17th century, and a provider of entertainment to the people of Amsterdam, who flocked to hear his organ concerts. On Saturday Night, we are broadcasting a controversial Opera on 3 - The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams, which was recently produced at English National Opera. The opera deals with the hijacking of the cruise liner Achille Lauro in 1985 by the Palestinian Liberation Front, and the subsequent murder of Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer. On a number of occasions intended performances of the opera have been cancelled, and it still arouses controversy, the allegation being made that it allows a platform to the views of Palestinian terrorists. You have the chance to judge for yourselves on Saturday evening. The acclaimed performance is directed by Tom Morris and features Alan Opie in the title role.
We end the weekend with a great gala concert on Sunday at 6 pm, when the final of the BBC Young Musician 2012 is introduced by Sara Mohr-Pietsch from The Sage, Gateshead. For the last 34 years this competition has offered some remarkable musicians the path to an international performing career including Emma Johnson, Natalie Clein, Guy Johnston and Nicola Benedetti. This year’s finalists will be performing with the Northern Sinfonia under the Ukranian conductor Kiril Karabits.
I am going to touch only briefly on the BBC Proms, since there will be many more opportunities to discuss the plans in depth on Radio 3 and elsewhere in the coming months. Following the season launch in late April, I just want to reflect on what a remarkable summer we are looking forward to, with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympic and Paralympic Games - alongside these, the annual BBC Proms are key to the celebrations. All the details are now available in the annual guide, on the BBC Proms website and also through the ebook, which you can also find online. It is difficult to single out particular events from almost two months of intense music-making. Clearly, one of the highlights will be the residency of Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra who are playing the first Beethoven symphony cycle at the Proms for over 60 years, including the Ninth Symphony on the first evening of the Olympics. For the first time the Vienna Philharmonic (with Bernard Haitink) and the Berliner Philharmoniker (with Simon Rattle) give two concerts each, and the two London opera houses are each performing an opera for the first time in the same Proms. There are more commissions and premieres than ever before - 14 new commissions and 17 London and UK premieres - and also of course the story which attracted press attention, namely that Wallace & Gromit will be making their first appearance at the Proms - Wallace has been commissioned to write a new piece! Aside from that remarkable event, we are celebrating the anniversaries of Debussy, Delius and Cage, noting the birthdays of four British composers ( Oliver Knussen, Simon Bainbridge, Hugh Wood and Alexander Goehr). John Adams will be conducting his own music in two Proms, including his much acclaimed opera, Nixon in China. And the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Manze, gives us a rare opportunity to hear Vaughan Williams’s Symphonies Nos. 4, 5 and 6 all in one concert. There is all this, and much more besides!
Explore the Proms Guide or the Proms website at your leisure, and don't forget that booking opens tomorrow at 9.00am online, by phone or in person at the Royal Albert Hall. You can find more information on how to book at http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/features/how-to-book.
With all best wishes
Roger Wright
Controller's Note, Apr 12
April 2012
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
I trust you have been able to enjoy The Spirit of Schubert over the past weeks. It has provided us all with a unique opportunity to discover the range and depth that he achieved in his short life, and with it the realisation that over the years we have tended to restrict ourselves to a small section of his output. There was an overwhelmingly positive response from our listeners, and a good deal of participation by way of social media, including ‘Schubert' himself giving his commentary via Twitter! So thanks for your involvement and engagement with the project. It was a landmark week in Radio 3 history. As ever with our composer festivals many of you expressed a sense of loss when it was over. The final day was very special, and I was glad to have the wonderful live Bach St Matthew Passion on Sunday as a wonderful sort of consolation: It is available on iPlayer until next Sunday. And you can find Schubert 'legacy' content by following this link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio3/2012/03/schubert-one-stop-shop.shtml.
Leading up to the Easter weekend, we have three wonderful concerts. Tonight, Petroc Trelawny will be presenting Verdi's Requiem live from the Barbican in London. This promises to be an exceptional event with Valery Gergiev conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra, Chorus and soloists from St. Petersburg. One of Verdi's few works not intended for the stage, it nonetheless has all the drama of the opera house and commemorates the great Italian poet, novelist and national hero Alessandro Manzoni. Tomorrow evening, there is the chance to hear the inaugural concert with Joshua Bell as musical director of the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields. He will be performing as soloist in Bruch's first Violin Concerto, as well as directing Beethoven's Fourth Symphony. On Friday, we're in King's College, Cambridge to hear music for Good Friday. The famous Chapel Choir is joined by the Britten Sinfonia, under the direction of Stephen Cleobury. James MacMillan's extended meditation Seven Last Words from the Cross, is based on Christ's final utterances; it is regarded as one of the composer's most important works; It is paired with John Tavener's PopuleMeus for cello and string orchestra, a reflection on the Passion narrative, written in 2009.
Over the weekend, you can hear Tippett's oratorio A Child of our Time, performed at the Barbican by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by their conductor laureate Sir Andrew Davis; it's paired with the Second Violin Concerto by Hugh Wood. The Early Music Show on Saturday and Sunday is exploring seasonal music with Catherine Bott looking at the output of OrlandusLassus, one of the composers from the Low Countries who dominated music-making in Renaissance Europe. Choral Evensong for Easter Sunday comes live from Gloucester Cathedral, including the extended anthem Inexitu Israel by Samuel Wesley, a colourful figure and son of the noted hymn writer.
As we enter Easter week, Sean Rafferty continues to host interesting guests and exclusive performance in In Tune, including La Nuova Musica who are performing at the 2012 London Handel Festival; the dynamic young vocal ensemble Voces8, and Rex Lawson who will be bringing his player-piano to the studio to celebrate the music of Conlon Nancarrow. The festival season is almost upon us, and we travel to East Neuk in Fife for a range of chamber music. Among other things, Mary Ann Kennedy will be introducing the QuatuorEbène performing early Mozart and late Beethoven, and Christian Zacharias performing Beethoven and Brahms with the Leopold String Trio.
Each evening this week we continue our occasional series of Belief, a series of conversations with Joan Bakewell. Tonight, the recent winner of the T S Eliot poetry prize, John Burnside, joins the programme to discuss his ideas on spirituality, in particular his interest in Taoism. And on Good Friday, the Reverend Rose Hudson-Wilkin, chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons, will join the programme to talk about her faith, her upbringing in Jamaica and work in Hackney.
Following Belief, next week we are going to be looking at The Case For Doubt in The Essay each evening, as the contributors make a case for doubt being more valuable than certainty. On Wednesday, journalist Madeleine Bunting promotes religious doubt as ‘a glorious reminder of our limitations as human beings, how little we can ever know, how suspicious we should be of certainty and the intolerance it breeds'. Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of A History of Doubt, says that humanity may celebrate ‘knowing' more than ‘doubting', but we should cast off fixed opinions and embrace ‘the beauty of doubt'. In conclusion, Alastair Campbell, contrasts public self-confidence with private self-doubt.
I mentioned that the festival season is imminent, and of course I am looking forward to being able to share the exciting plans we have for the 2012 Proms when we launch them on April 19th. But more of that in my next note. In the meantime, I trust many of you will be able to enjoy the forthcoming long weekend, and spend much of it in the company of Radio 3.
With best wishes
Roger Wright
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
I trust you have been able to enjoy The Spirit of Schubert over the past weeks. It has provided us all with a unique opportunity to discover the range and depth that he achieved in his short life, and with it the realisation that over the years we have tended to restrict ourselves to a small section of his output. There was an overwhelmingly positive response from our listeners, and a good deal of participation by way of social media, including ‘Schubert' himself giving his commentary via Twitter! So thanks for your involvement and engagement with the project. It was a landmark week in Radio 3 history. As ever with our composer festivals many of you expressed a sense of loss when it was over. The final day was very special, and I was glad to have the wonderful live Bach St Matthew Passion on Sunday as a wonderful sort of consolation: It is available on iPlayer until next Sunday. And you can find Schubert 'legacy' content by following this link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio3/2012/03/schubert-one-stop-shop.shtml.
Leading up to the Easter weekend, we have three wonderful concerts. Tonight, Petroc Trelawny will be presenting Verdi's Requiem live from the Barbican in London. This promises to be an exceptional event with Valery Gergiev conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra, Chorus and soloists from St. Petersburg. One of Verdi's few works not intended for the stage, it nonetheless has all the drama of the opera house and commemorates the great Italian poet, novelist and national hero Alessandro Manzoni. Tomorrow evening, there is the chance to hear the inaugural concert with Joshua Bell as musical director of the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields. He will be performing as soloist in Bruch's first Violin Concerto, as well as directing Beethoven's Fourth Symphony. On Friday, we're in King's College, Cambridge to hear music for Good Friday. The famous Chapel Choir is joined by the Britten Sinfonia, under the direction of Stephen Cleobury. James MacMillan's extended meditation Seven Last Words from the Cross, is based on Christ's final utterances; it is regarded as one of the composer's most important works; It is paired with John Tavener's PopuleMeus for cello and string orchestra, a reflection on the Passion narrative, written in 2009.
Over the weekend, you can hear Tippett's oratorio A Child of our Time, performed at the Barbican by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by their conductor laureate Sir Andrew Davis; it's paired with the Second Violin Concerto by Hugh Wood. The Early Music Show on Saturday and Sunday is exploring seasonal music with Catherine Bott looking at the output of OrlandusLassus, one of the composers from the Low Countries who dominated music-making in Renaissance Europe. Choral Evensong for Easter Sunday comes live from Gloucester Cathedral, including the extended anthem Inexitu Israel by Samuel Wesley, a colourful figure and son of the noted hymn writer.
As we enter Easter week, Sean Rafferty continues to host interesting guests and exclusive performance in In Tune, including La Nuova Musica who are performing at the 2012 London Handel Festival; the dynamic young vocal ensemble Voces8, and Rex Lawson who will be bringing his player-piano to the studio to celebrate the music of Conlon Nancarrow. The festival season is almost upon us, and we travel to East Neuk in Fife for a range of chamber music. Among other things, Mary Ann Kennedy will be introducing the QuatuorEbène performing early Mozart and late Beethoven, and Christian Zacharias performing Beethoven and Brahms with the Leopold String Trio.
Each evening this week we continue our occasional series of Belief, a series of conversations with Joan Bakewell. Tonight, the recent winner of the T S Eliot poetry prize, John Burnside, joins the programme to discuss his ideas on spirituality, in particular his interest in Taoism. And on Good Friday, the Reverend Rose Hudson-Wilkin, chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons, will join the programme to talk about her faith, her upbringing in Jamaica and work in Hackney.
Following Belief, next week we are going to be looking at The Case For Doubt in The Essay each evening, as the contributors make a case for doubt being more valuable than certainty. On Wednesday, journalist Madeleine Bunting promotes religious doubt as ‘a glorious reminder of our limitations as human beings, how little we can ever know, how suspicious we should be of certainty and the intolerance it breeds'. Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of A History of Doubt, says that humanity may celebrate ‘knowing' more than ‘doubting', but we should cast off fixed opinions and embrace ‘the beauty of doubt'. In conclusion, Alastair Campbell, contrasts public self-confidence with private self-doubt.
I mentioned that the festival season is imminent, and of course I am looking forward to being able to share the exciting plans we have for the 2012 Proms when we launch them on April 19th. But more of that in my next note. In the meantime, I trust many of you will be able to enjoy the forthcoming long weekend, and spend much of it in the company of Radio 3.
With best wishes
Roger Wright
Controller's Note, Mar 12
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
I have delayed my monthly note for March, since I was keen to share our major event at the end of the month. Following in the footsteps of our Bach, Beethoven and Mozart projects (amongst others), we are once again presenting you with in-depth programming based around the complete music of a single composer. The Spirit of Schubert starts on Friday March 23rd and will last for eight days. It will include all his performable music. I am looking forward to it enormously and feel that it might be the most revelatory of all our composer seasons to date.
For a composer who is so well known, it is really surprising to know the lengths our production teams had to go to in order to assemble the complete works. When he died in 1828, at the age of 31, Schubert left a prodigious amount of completed works, but also many incomplete pieces and insubstantial fragments. Astonishingly, some pieces, including a whole opera, only exist in a single recording, and are not commercially available. So we are grateful to other broadcasting colleagues across Europe for letting us have some of these rarely heard pieces. Other pieces we have had to record ourselves. This promises to be the most comprehensive overview of Schubert ever undertaken.
When we mount these major broadcasts, we try to match the shape and style of the programming to each composer. For Schubert there is more live music than in any of our previous broadcast festivals. Among the highlights are lunchtime Schubertiade concerts - reminiscent of the intimate performances of his own day - from venues around the UK, such as Holkham Hall in Norfolk, the Bath Assembly Rooms and St Cecilia's Hall, Edinburgh. We are excited that the 24 live performances broadcast during the period will include the world premiere of Brian Newbould's Radio 3 commission to ‘finish' Symphony D, D.708a, a symphonic fragment dating from 1821. It will be performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra with conductor Juanjo Mena. In Tune will feature a Schubert Salon presented by Suzy Klein and Sean Rafferty together with Graham Johnson, who will perform in live song recitals with some of the UK's leading singers, including Ian Bostridge and Lucy Crowe. Schubert in Concert every evening will feature some of the world's leading Schubert pianists playing live, including Imogen Cooper, Paul Lewis and Elisabeth Leonskaja. One of the world's leading experts and interpreters, Alfred Brendel, will be sharing his views on the last three Piano Sonatas.
The eight days will have different themes, ranging from Schubert and his friends, to the composer and his native city of Vienna, from nature to the events of his final year. Throughout the week Donald Mcleod will present the story of Schubert's life daily as our Composer of the Week. Each morning Essential Schubert will see guests Roger Scruton, John Tusa and Julia Neuberger talking about their favourite music. At the end of each day Play Schubert for Me will provide a space for discussion of his works, presented by Sara Mohr-Pietsch. Sara's Play Mozart for Me proved to be a real success with our listeners and this is another chance for you to offer your ongoing reflections on the featured composer and make requests for particular Schubert pieces or performances. There will be more context provided by our Sunday Feature which will explore how Schubert's legacy has been re-interpreted from generation to generation.
JOIN US IN PERSON IF YOU CAN
Do look out on our website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio3/website_ticket_availability_schubert.pdf) for chances to attend some of the events. Whether you are with us in person or on air, we look forward to your joining us on our Schubert journey which promises to be revealing and moving. We begin at 4.30 pm on the afternoon of Friday, March 23rd, with the In Tune Schubert Salon, including performances by Graham Johnson and friends, the singers Ailish Tynan (soprano), Jennifer Johnston (mezzo), Robin Tritschler (tenor), Marcus Farnsworth (baritone). What better way to start this journey of exploration? Graham Johnson will be curating his selection of live Schubert song performances throughout the week. Also performing will be the Doric Quartet and students from the Royal College of Music who'll be playing movements from the Octet and the Rosamunde Quartet. Suzy Klein will be presenting the show and previewing some of the highlights of Radio 3's celebration of Schubert and his music. Tickets are free and available from King's Place - follow this link for details of how to book tickets: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio3/website_ticket_availability_schubert.pdf
EBU HOLY WEEK DAY
By the time Schubert comes to an end, the Easter holidays will be almost upon us, so I thought I'd briefly mention Sunday 1st April when we are broadcasting a day of Holy Week music from around Europe, organised by the European Broadcasting Union. The opening event is the traditional Palm Sunday performance of one of the Bach Passions live from the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Ivan Fischer will be conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, with Mark Padmore as the Evangelist and Peter Harvey as Christus. This promises to be a special performance of this magisterial telling of the narrative of Christ's passion. Following that we visit Munich to hear the Bavarian Radio Chorus in works by Schnittke and Pärt, and then to Belgium for a setting of the Brockes-Passion by Reinhard Keiser, who was taught at the St Thomas School in Leipzig by the predecessors of Bach. Finally, we have a live concert from the BBC Singers, who take us into the Victorian era with music by Sir John Stainer. The Crucifixion was the staple fare of church choirs across Britain during this period, and it is still heard quite frequently around the UK. Professional performances are however relatively rare, and this is a chance to revive a work which sought to bring both the formal structure and the emotional response of the Bach Passions into the English church tradition.
As ever you'll find details of all our programming on the Radio 3 Website: www.bbc.co.uk/radio3
With best wishes
Roger Wright
Dear All
I have delayed my monthly note for March, since I was keen to share our major event at the end of the month. Following in the footsteps of our Bach, Beethoven and Mozart projects (amongst others), we are once again presenting you with in-depth programming based around the complete music of a single composer. The Spirit of Schubert starts on Friday March 23rd and will last for eight days. It will include all his performable music. I am looking forward to it enormously and feel that it might be the most revelatory of all our composer seasons to date.
For a composer who is so well known, it is really surprising to know the lengths our production teams had to go to in order to assemble the complete works. When he died in 1828, at the age of 31, Schubert left a prodigious amount of completed works, but also many incomplete pieces and insubstantial fragments. Astonishingly, some pieces, including a whole opera, only exist in a single recording, and are not commercially available. So we are grateful to other broadcasting colleagues across Europe for letting us have some of these rarely heard pieces. Other pieces we have had to record ourselves. This promises to be the most comprehensive overview of Schubert ever undertaken.
When we mount these major broadcasts, we try to match the shape and style of the programming to each composer. For Schubert there is more live music than in any of our previous broadcast festivals. Among the highlights are lunchtime Schubertiade concerts - reminiscent of the intimate performances of his own day - from venues around the UK, such as Holkham Hall in Norfolk, the Bath Assembly Rooms and St Cecilia's Hall, Edinburgh. We are excited that the 24 live performances broadcast during the period will include the world premiere of Brian Newbould's Radio 3 commission to ‘finish' Symphony D, D.708a, a symphonic fragment dating from 1821. It will be performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra with conductor Juanjo Mena. In Tune will feature a Schubert Salon presented by Suzy Klein and Sean Rafferty together with Graham Johnson, who will perform in live song recitals with some of the UK's leading singers, including Ian Bostridge and Lucy Crowe. Schubert in Concert every evening will feature some of the world's leading Schubert pianists playing live, including Imogen Cooper, Paul Lewis and Elisabeth Leonskaja. One of the world's leading experts and interpreters, Alfred Brendel, will be sharing his views on the last three Piano Sonatas.
The eight days will have different themes, ranging from Schubert and his friends, to the composer and his native city of Vienna, from nature to the events of his final year. Throughout the week Donald Mcleod will present the story of Schubert's life daily as our Composer of the Week. Each morning Essential Schubert will see guests Roger Scruton, John Tusa and Julia Neuberger talking about their favourite music. At the end of each day Play Schubert for Me will provide a space for discussion of his works, presented by Sara Mohr-Pietsch. Sara's Play Mozart for Me proved to be a real success with our listeners and this is another chance for you to offer your ongoing reflections on the featured composer and make requests for particular Schubert pieces or performances. There will be more context provided by our Sunday Feature which will explore how Schubert's legacy has been re-interpreted from generation to generation.
JOIN US IN PERSON IF YOU CAN
Do look out on our website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio3/website_ticket_availability_schubert.pdf) for chances to attend some of the events. Whether you are with us in person or on air, we look forward to your joining us on our Schubert journey which promises to be revealing and moving. We begin at 4.30 pm on the afternoon of Friday, March 23rd, with the In Tune Schubert Salon, including performances by Graham Johnson and friends, the singers Ailish Tynan (soprano), Jennifer Johnston (mezzo), Robin Tritschler (tenor), Marcus Farnsworth (baritone). What better way to start this journey of exploration? Graham Johnson will be curating his selection of live Schubert song performances throughout the week. Also performing will be the Doric Quartet and students from the Royal College of Music who'll be playing movements from the Octet and the Rosamunde Quartet. Suzy Klein will be presenting the show and previewing some of the highlights of Radio 3's celebration of Schubert and his music. Tickets are free and available from King's Place - follow this link for details of how to book tickets: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio3/website_ticket_availability_schubert.pdf
EBU HOLY WEEK DAY
By the time Schubert comes to an end, the Easter holidays will be almost upon us, so I thought I'd briefly mention Sunday 1st April when we are broadcasting a day of Holy Week music from around Europe, organised by the European Broadcasting Union. The opening event is the traditional Palm Sunday performance of one of the Bach Passions live from the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Ivan Fischer will be conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, with Mark Padmore as the Evangelist and Peter Harvey as Christus. This promises to be a special performance of this magisterial telling of the narrative of Christ's passion. Following that we visit Munich to hear the Bavarian Radio Chorus in works by Schnittke and Pärt, and then to Belgium for a setting of the Brockes-Passion by Reinhard Keiser, who was taught at the St Thomas School in Leipzig by the predecessors of Bach. Finally, we have a live concert from the BBC Singers, who take us into the Victorian era with music by Sir John Stainer. The Crucifixion was the staple fare of church choirs across Britain during this period, and it is still heard quite frequently around the UK. Professional performances are however relatively rare, and this is a chance to revive a work which sought to bring both the formal structure and the emotional response of the Bach Passions into the English church tradition.
As ever you'll find details of all our programming on the Radio 3 Website: www.bbc.co.uk/radio3
With best wishes
Roger Wright
Controller's Note, Feb 12
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All,
Welcome to this month's note giving you an update on some of our forthcoming wide range of programmes here on BBC Radio 3.
Coming up over the weekend, the violinist Tasmin Little will be presenting Saturday Classics, now a regular part of our Radio 3 schedule. Her theme is the music which she found inspirational in her childhood, and we hear talk about her influences from Haydn to Puccini, by way of Smetana and Wagner.
Many of our listeners make a regular appointment with CD Review, and it is an excellent way of keeping informed about the world of recordings. It gives the chance to sample new releases and hear expert recommendations. The highpoint for many is Building a Library, which has set itself the massive task of covering Verdi's opera Otello - tomorrow Christopher Cook will be the guide. Helen Wallace will be discussing new releases of chamber music by Fauré, Franck, Ravel, Shostakovich and Schubert. The disc of the week features works by Jonathan Harvey, whose music - calling on different spiritual traditions - was the subject of a BBC Symphony Orchestra Total Immersion Day at the end of January.
Tomorrow evening, Saturday 11 February, we continue our Live from the Met series with Wagner's Götterdämmerung, as Fabio Luisi conducts an impressive cast, led by Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde and Jay Hunter Morris as Siegfried in the final section of this monumental operatic cycle. For any opera lover, this promises to be an unmissable evening from one of the world's great houses.
On Sunday, in Private Passions, we hear about the importance of music to Raymond Tallis, who is a polymath, combining work as scientist, doctor, philosopher, writer and cultural critic. He discusses how music can answer the great questions of life itself.
There is a strong line-up of live concerts in the evenings next week for Live in Concert. On Monday, Camerata Salzburg will play an all-Mozart programme, with the violinist Hilary Hahn, from Cadogan Hall. Then we hear the BBC Singers in a programme of choral music for St Valentine's Day. On Thursday we bring you conductor Christoph von Dohnányi with the Philharmonia Orchestra in Beethoven and Brahms. And the week ends with Alan Gilbert conducting the New York Philharmonic in Thomas Adès' Polaris and music by Berlioz, Stravinsky and Ravel.
MUSIC NATION (March 2nd- 4th)
I thought you might like to know about our exciting plans for early March. It is an ambitious project which will take place during the first weekend of the month as part of the build-up to Festival 2012. From Friday, right through Saturday and Sunday, we are broadcasting an almost continual stream of concerts - many live - from across the UK, including Glasgow, Southampton, Belfast and Ludlow. We start on Friday evening, with the London Mozart Players live from Basingstoke in a concert which puts Mozart alongside a world premiere from Roxanna Panufnik. Her piece Four World Seasons draws its inspiration from a variety of faiths and cultures.
The following evening, the BBC Scottish Symphony is giving a concert with many Olympic references from the Clyde Auditorium, but by then we will already have visited London, Hanley and Birmingham, as well as enjoying a round-up of the many other events which we are not able to broadcast in full.
On the Sunday, we broadcast live from Belfast, Cardiff and London during the day, and in the evening we have a Shakespeare themed concert from the BBC Symphony Orchestra, after which we attend one of the innovative Night Shift concerts given by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, with music by Bach.
At the end of it all we can relax to the Julian Joseph Trio in a concert from Southampton. There will also be contemporary music from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, lighter repertory from the BBC Concert Orchestra in Plymouth, a Baroque programme from the Academy of Ancient Music in Ludlow.
This this will be one of the biggest celebrations of UK-wide music-making ever experienced. We are delighted to be the host broadcaster for the project, offering our listeners the chance to enjoy this unique moment in classical music. Please look out for the schedule, and for events happening near you: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/musicnation.shtml.
DOWNLOADS
In the past year we have massively increased our offer of programmes available for download, and twice as many programmes are being downloaded as a year ago. If you have not yet explored our offer, then do take a look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio3, where you should find something to match your taste, and start listening to Radio 3 on the move.
You will find the Specialist Classical Chart from Breakfast, the Early Music show, and much more, including a recent addition - The Essay - which complements our already much appreciated weekly round-up of our Arts and Ideas programming.
There is always far more to tell you about than I have space for, so please look out for some other exciting announcements in the next few days. I will post a blog next week about one forthcoming major project.
As ever I hope you find much to enjoy on our station.
With best wishes,
Roger Wright
www.bbc.co.uk/radio3
Dear All,
Welcome to this month's note giving you an update on some of our forthcoming wide range of programmes here on BBC Radio 3.
Coming up over the weekend, the violinist Tasmin Little will be presenting Saturday Classics, now a regular part of our Radio 3 schedule. Her theme is the music which she found inspirational in her childhood, and we hear talk about her influences from Haydn to Puccini, by way of Smetana and Wagner.
Many of our listeners make a regular appointment with CD Review, and it is an excellent way of keeping informed about the world of recordings. It gives the chance to sample new releases and hear expert recommendations. The highpoint for many is Building a Library, which has set itself the massive task of covering Verdi's opera Otello - tomorrow Christopher Cook will be the guide. Helen Wallace will be discussing new releases of chamber music by Fauré, Franck, Ravel, Shostakovich and Schubert. The disc of the week features works by Jonathan Harvey, whose music - calling on different spiritual traditions - was the subject of a BBC Symphony Orchestra Total Immersion Day at the end of January.
Tomorrow evening, Saturday 11 February, we continue our Live from the Met series with Wagner's Götterdämmerung, as Fabio Luisi conducts an impressive cast, led by Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde and Jay Hunter Morris as Siegfried in the final section of this monumental operatic cycle. For any opera lover, this promises to be an unmissable evening from one of the world's great houses.
On Sunday, in Private Passions, we hear about the importance of music to Raymond Tallis, who is a polymath, combining work as scientist, doctor, philosopher, writer and cultural critic. He discusses how music can answer the great questions of life itself.
There is a strong line-up of live concerts in the evenings next week for Live in Concert. On Monday, Camerata Salzburg will play an all-Mozart programme, with the violinist Hilary Hahn, from Cadogan Hall. Then we hear the BBC Singers in a programme of choral music for St Valentine's Day. On Thursday we bring you conductor Christoph von Dohnányi with the Philharmonia Orchestra in Beethoven and Brahms. And the week ends with Alan Gilbert conducting the New York Philharmonic in Thomas Adès' Polaris and music by Berlioz, Stravinsky and Ravel.
MUSIC NATION (March 2nd- 4th)
I thought you might like to know about our exciting plans for early March. It is an ambitious project which will take place during the first weekend of the month as part of the build-up to Festival 2012. From Friday, right through Saturday and Sunday, we are broadcasting an almost continual stream of concerts - many live - from across the UK, including Glasgow, Southampton, Belfast and Ludlow. We start on Friday evening, with the London Mozart Players live from Basingstoke in a concert which puts Mozart alongside a world premiere from Roxanna Panufnik. Her piece Four World Seasons draws its inspiration from a variety of faiths and cultures.
The following evening, the BBC Scottish Symphony is giving a concert with many Olympic references from the Clyde Auditorium, but by then we will already have visited London, Hanley and Birmingham, as well as enjoying a round-up of the many other events which we are not able to broadcast in full.
On the Sunday, we broadcast live from Belfast, Cardiff and London during the day, and in the evening we have a Shakespeare themed concert from the BBC Symphony Orchestra, after which we attend one of the innovative Night Shift concerts given by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, with music by Bach.
At the end of it all we can relax to the Julian Joseph Trio in a concert from Southampton. There will also be contemporary music from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, lighter repertory from the BBC Concert Orchestra in Plymouth, a Baroque programme from the Academy of Ancient Music in Ludlow.
This this will be one of the biggest celebrations of UK-wide music-making ever experienced. We are delighted to be the host broadcaster for the project, offering our listeners the chance to enjoy this unique moment in classical music. Please look out for the schedule, and for events happening near you: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/musicnation.shtml.
DOWNLOADS
In the past year we have massively increased our offer of programmes available for download, and twice as many programmes are being downloaded as a year ago. If you have not yet explored our offer, then do take a look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio3, where you should find something to match your taste, and start listening to Radio 3 on the move.
You will find the Specialist Classical Chart from Breakfast, the Early Music show, and much more, including a recent addition - The Essay - which complements our already much appreciated weekly round-up of our Arts and Ideas programming.
There is always far more to tell you about than I have space for, so please look out for some other exciting announcements in the next few days. I will post a blog next week about one forthcoming major project.
As ever I hope you find much to enjoy on our station.
With best wishes,
Roger Wright
www.bbc.co.uk/radio3
Controller's Note, Jan 12
January 2012
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
I trust you have been able to enjoy our Christmas and New Year programming. From the succession of Christmas concerts before Christmas Day to our revisiting the Proms, and pausing for some moments of reflection with Belief, I hope that our station has enriched your holiday season. As well as wishing you a very happy new year on behalf of Radio 3, I thought this note might draw your attention to some of our programmes in the coming weeks.
Live in Concert resumed last night evening with a concert from the BBC Maida Vale studios, featuring the BBC Singers and the St James's Baroque with German music for the Epiphany season, including two Bach cantatas. This concert is now available on the iPlayer. Tonight we visit London's Barbican to hear the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano in a suite from Thomas Adès' Powder Her Face, Elgar's First Symphony and Walton's Viola Concerto with Antoine Tamestit as soloist. Later in the week, we feature two wonderful pianists in our evening concerts. On Wednesday, we are in Liverpool for Nikolai Lugansky playing Beethoven's Fourth Concerto with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko, and on Thursday, Stephen Hough joins the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to play Rachmaninov's dynamic First Piano Concerto, with conductor Andris Nelsons.
During the course of a year, R3's arts and ideas programme Night Waves covers an extraordinary range of topical issues, providing a cultural perspective on events around the world. Just before Christmas we had four programmes on the major trends shaping the 21st century; these are still available to hear on demand through the Radio 3 site. Tonight at 10.00pm, Abi Morgan will talk about her film The Iron Lady, with Meryl Streep in the title role, which has already provoked much comment. Night Waves will explore the treatment of controversial subjects through the medium of film.
Our Composer of the Week is François Couperin, a leading master of the French Baroque. Relatively little is known about his life, but he was a wide-ranging composer of music both for church and chamber. His greatest achievement is the extensive collection of harpsichord music. Donald Macleod visits the Cobbe Collection of keyboard instruments at Hatchlands, together with harpsichordist Olivier Beaumont. Together they present a portrait of Couperin as his contemporaries would have heard him, with music specially recorded on the historic Ruckers harpsichord.
THE WEEKEND
In CD Review on Saturday morning, Andrew McGregor will be talking to Geoffrey Norris about new piano recordings, including discs from Vladimir Ashkenazy, and he will introduce the Disc of the Week, Vivaldi's opera Teuzzone. In Building a Library, Martin Cotton will offer a personal recommendation from the many recordings of Elgar's Violin Concerto.
At 3.00pm in Saturday Classics, Simon Heffer explores some lesser names of British music alongside the more familiar. On Saturday, we have Arthur Bliss's complete Colour Symphony; choral music by Peter Warlock, and orchestral works by Stanford, EJ Moeran and Cyril Scott. On the same theme, BBC Four is going to screen four programmes about British Composers during January.
We travel further afield on Sunday evening for World Routes, as Lucy Duran continues her journey around Madagascar, starting high on the central plateau and travelling to the seaside town of Tulear in the far south. As with all World Routes on location, the music is specially recorded in or near musicians' homes. The island is a place of strange dreams, ancestral worship and sorcery, all of which gave birth to an extraordinarily evocative musical tradition.
For the Radio 3 Sunday Feature (15th), Rachel Campbell-Johnston meets David Hockney in his studio on the eve of his major exhibition at the Royal Academy. His work in the East Yorkshire Wolds has led him to paint in the open air, like a 19th-century artist, but he now also uses an iPad to depict the landscape. He also looks back to his influences - Monet, Claude Lorrain, Rembrandt, and the scroll paintings of China. Julia Gardiner will be visiting the exhibition itself for Night Waves on Tuesday 17th.
NEXT WEEK
As we move into the following week, Vaughan Williams becomes our Composer of the Week and there is a particular focus on the operatic works, a less frequently encountered area of his music. His first opera, Hugh the Drover, was influenced by his work collecting folksongs. Throughout the week, Donald explores his fascination for John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress; his use of Elizabethan and Tudor themes, and the patchy performance history of his operas.
The Essay series, starting on Monday 16th, features several of our Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers, starting with Philip Roscoe, lecturer at St Andrews University; he is examining how the entrepreneur can become a figure for social movements. In subsequent programmes, Shahidha Bari reassesses the legacy of Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim in the West Eastern Divan Youth Orchestra; and Alexandra Harris explores the history of artificial light. Zoe Norridge questions the power of images of Africa in the West; and Jon Adams examines how modern-day writers are borrowing skills from the theologians of old.
I hope you have many happy and stimulating hours in the company of Radio 3 during 2012. As ever you'll find details of all our programming on the Radio 3 Website: www.bbc.co.uk/radio3
Roger Wright
Welcome to the Controller's Monthly Note
Dear All
I trust you have been able to enjoy our Christmas and New Year programming. From the succession of Christmas concerts before Christmas Day to our revisiting the Proms, and pausing for some moments of reflection with Belief, I hope that our station has enriched your holiday season. As well as wishing you a very happy new year on behalf of Radio 3, I thought this note might draw your attention to some of our programmes in the coming weeks.
Live in Concert resumed last night evening with a concert from the BBC Maida Vale studios, featuring the BBC Singers and the St James's Baroque with German music for the Epiphany season, including two Bach cantatas. This concert is now available on the iPlayer. Tonight we visit London's Barbican to hear the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano in a suite from Thomas Adès' Powder Her Face, Elgar's First Symphony and Walton's Viola Concerto with Antoine Tamestit as soloist. Later in the week, we feature two wonderful pianists in our evening concerts. On Wednesday, we are in Liverpool for Nikolai Lugansky playing Beethoven's Fourth Concerto with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko, and on Thursday, Stephen Hough joins the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to play Rachmaninov's dynamic First Piano Concerto, with conductor Andris Nelsons.
During the course of a year, R3's arts and ideas programme Night Waves covers an extraordinary range of topical issues, providing a cultural perspective on events around the world. Just before Christmas we had four programmes on the major trends shaping the 21st century; these are still available to hear on demand through the Radio 3 site. Tonight at 10.00pm, Abi Morgan will talk about her film The Iron Lady, with Meryl Streep in the title role, which has already provoked much comment. Night Waves will explore the treatment of controversial subjects through the medium of film.
Our Composer of the Week is François Couperin, a leading master of the French Baroque. Relatively little is known about his life, but he was a wide-ranging composer of music both for church and chamber. His greatest achievement is the extensive collection of harpsichord music. Donald Macleod visits the Cobbe Collection of keyboard instruments at Hatchlands, together with harpsichordist Olivier Beaumont. Together they present a portrait of Couperin as his contemporaries would have heard him, with music specially recorded on the historic Ruckers harpsichord.
THE WEEKEND
In CD Review on Saturday morning, Andrew McGregor will be talking to Geoffrey Norris about new piano recordings, including discs from Vladimir Ashkenazy, and he will introduce the Disc of the Week, Vivaldi's opera Teuzzone. In Building a Library, Martin Cotton will offer a personal recommendation from the many recordings of Elgar's Violin Concerto.
At 3.00pm in Saturday Classics, Simon Heffer explores some lesser names of British music alongside the more familiar. On Saturday, we have Arthur Bliss's complete Colour Symphony; choral music by Peter Warlock, and orchestral works by Stanford, EJ Moeran and Cyril Scott. On the same theme, BBC Four is going to screen four programmes about British Composers during January.
We travel further afield on Sunday evening for World Routes, as Lucy Duran continues her journey around Madagascar, starting high on the central plateau and travelling to the seaside town of Tulear in the far south. As with all World Routes on location, the music is specially recorded in or near musicians' homes. The island is a place of strange dreams, ancestral worship and sorcery, all of which gave birth to an extraordinarily evocative musical tradition.
For the Radio 3 Sunday Feature (15th), Rachel Campbell-Johnston meets David Hockney in his studio on the eve of his major exhibition at the Royal Academy. His work in the East Yorkshire Wolds has led him to paint in the open air, like a 19th-century artist, but he now also uses an iPad to depict the landscape. He also looks back to his influences - Monet, Claude Lorrain, Rembrandt, and the scroll paintings of China. Julia Gardiner will be visiting the exhibition itself for Night Waves on Tuesday 17th.
NEXT WEEK
As we move into the following week, Vaughan Williams becomes our Composer of the Week and there is a particular focus on the operatic works, a less frequently encountered area of his music. His first opera, Hugh the Drover, was influenced by his work collecting folksongs. Throughout the week, Donald explores his fascination for John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress; his use of Elizabethan and Tudor themes, and the patchy performance history of his operas.
The Essay series, starting on Monday 16th, features several of our Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers, starting with Philip Roscoe, lecturer at St Andrews University; he is examining how the entrepreneur can become a figure for social movements. In subsequent programmes, Shahidha Bari reassesses the legacy of Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim in the West Eastern Divan Youth Orchestra; and Alexandra Harris explores the history of artificial light. Zoe Norridge questions the power of images of Africa in the West; and Jon Adams examines how modern-day writers are borrowing skills from the theologians of old.
I hope you have many happy and stimulating hours in the company of Radio 3 during 2012. As ever you'll find details of all our programming on the Radio 3 Website: www.bbc.co.uk/radio3
Roger Wright