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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

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Twenty Minutes

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Eclectic arts magazine programme, exploring a range of fascinating subjects

Eclectic arts magazine programme, exploring a range of fascinating people, places and events

Twenty Minutes: Bach on Screen

Bach on Screen

12/02/2010

BBC Radio 3 - Twenty Minutes, Bach on Screen

Cinema historian Professor Ian Christie explores the impact of Bach's music on film.

Cinema historian Professor Ian Christie explores the impact of Bach's music on films, from Walt Disney's Fantasia to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

The music of Bach has inspired film makers as far back as the silent era up to the present day. Film historian Professor Ian Christie traces the composer's impact on films including The Battleship Potemkin, Disney's Fantasia of 1940, which featured Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and the switched-on synthesised Bach of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

During World War Two the morale-boosting Listen To Britain short films were accompanied by Myra Hess playing Bach at the National Gallery, the nationality of the composer notwithstanding. The timelessness of the music detached viewers from its German heritage.

In 1964 Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew, an interpretation of the life of Christ based on the writings of the Apostle Matthew, combined Bach with Billie Holiday to towering effect while Daniele Huillet and Jean Marie Straub's famous film biography of the composer told through his wife's journals, Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, transported the film to soaring heights.

Christie celebrates Bach's influence on film through genres and generations and also considers how mood and performance enhance the stories on screen.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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