Today on Radio 3

DiscussieClassical Music

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Today on Radio 3

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1antimuzak
dec 9, 2007, 3:21 am

I thought that members of this group might be interested to know that BBC Radio 3 is available live or as a webcast from the BBC Radio 3 website up to 7 days after broadcast.

Today's pick of the broadcasts:

Private Passions: Michael Berkeley's guest is actress Claire Bloom, whose most famous stage roles have included Blanche in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, while on TV she memorably appeared as Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited.

Music is central to her life, and her choices reveal a passion for opera, plus Alfred Brendel playing Schubert, Heinrich Schiff playing Bach on the cello, and the radiant end of Schoenberg's Transfigured Night.

Discovering Music: Stephen Johnson is joined by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and violinist Ernst Kovacic for an in-depth exploration of Gyorgy Ligeti's Violin Concerto. Plus Jennifer Martin takes an inside look at a BBC SSO learning programme centred around another challenging work by Ligeti, his Chamber Concerto.

Drama on 3. A corker! The Homecoming by Harold Pinter. Electrifying audiences when it was first performed in 1965, The Homecoming has quickly established itself as a modern classic.

In this production for BBC Radio, Pinter himself takes on the role of Max, the head of the Hackney family to which a professor and his wife return one night from America. There, amongst the shadows of the past and the realities of the present, a compelling drama unfolds.

Words and Music: This week's Words and Music explores magic in its many shades, light and dark. Shakespeare is the starting point and the programme includes readings from 'The Tempest', 'Macbeth' and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. Ariel's Songs, or 'spells', punctuate the programme and are accompanied by the song settings of Locke, Purcell and Tippett.

The overall sequence forms an arch as the words and music darken towards the core of the programme where Shakespeare's 3 witches concoct a poisonous brew to the deathly beats of Birtwistle's Earth Dances. As the programme lightens towards its end, Oberon is joined on the 'bank where the wild thyme blows' by a shimmering chorus from Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

At the beginning and end of the programme, the mysterious words used in magic practice float above Ligeti's Atmospheres: abbazabba, alkazam, kedavra and, more familiarly, abracadabra, the meaning of which is contemplated in Ambrose Bierce's poem.

Magic has the power to transform being, like the Cheshire cat in Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland' and Martin Feinstein's poem, 'The conjuror'. Gubaidulina's quirky 'Magic Circles' from Musical Toys links the two texts together while Messiaen's angels from La Nativite du Seigneur picks up on the sinister final turn taken by Feinstein's conjuror.

Two dramatic texts about the darker side of magic flank Shakespeare's 3 plotting witches: Christopher Marlowe's 'Faust' making his pact with the devil and Derek Walcott's Odysseus slowly being lured by a potion into seductress Circe's grip to the hypnotic strains of Stockhausen's Stimmung.

There are the magic people too, like Orpheus, who tunes his lyre, or rather Cowell's Aeolian harp, at the beginning of Joseph Addison's 'Epilogue to British Enchanters' and Gilbert and Sullivan's sorcerer, who makes magic out of word play. Pushkin presents a magical 'Talisman' while Chaucer's Clerk from 'The Franklin's Tale' shows his magical powers to Salzedo's sparkling Jeux d'eau for solo harp.

The programme ends with Browning's 'The Natural Magic' before slipping back into echoes of magic words floating around Ligeti's Atmospheres.