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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

Radio 3

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Composer of the Week

Music: Classical

An informative guide to composers' lives and their music.

An informative and accessible guide to composers' lives and their music.

Composer of the Week: Stephen Sondheim (1930-)

Composer of the Week: Stephen Sondheim (1930-): Episode 4: Sunday in the Park with George

Stephen Sondheim (1930-)

Episode 4

Episode 4: Sunday in the Park with George

Sunday in the Park with George

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Stephen Sondheim (1930-), Sunday in the Park with George

Donald Macleod explores Sondheim works including a musical based on a painting.

Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim joins Donald Macleod to discuss the painting that he turned into a musical, a tangled web of fairytales and the production Assassins.

Continuing our series in which Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim talks to Donald Macleod. The fourth programme features the musical that grew out of a painting; a tangled web of fairytales; and a positively murderous show about the assassins, and would-be-assassins, of US presidents. The painting in question is Seurat's hugely famous A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and the work it inspired was the Pulitzer-prize-winning Sunday in the Park with George, a deeply personal show about the joys and the costs of creation. The fairytales are the ones familiar to every child, but in Into the Woods they are woven together in an extraordinarily intricate way, before completely unraveling in the second act. Assassins caused a huge furore when it was unveiled in 1990, not least because it happened to coincide with the opening salvo of the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm - under such circumstances, a show that climaxed with the assassination of JFK was bound to be interpreted as deeply unpatriotic. Sondheim also talks about the logistics of mounting a Broadway production, and the pleasures of "trancing out" during the creative process.

Produced by Chris Barstow.

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.

Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim joins Donald Macleod to discuss his life and work

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Stephen Sondheim (1930-)

Episode 4: Sunday in the Park with George

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