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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

Private Passions Podcast

Private Passions

Discussion & Talk

Music: Classical

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates, and talk about the influence music has had on their lives

Private Passions: Alan Sillitoe

26/09/2010

Alan Sillitoe

BBC Radio 3 - Private Passions, Alan Sillitoe

Another chance to hear Michael Berkeley talking to renowned British writer Alan Sillitoe.

Another chance to hear a programme first broadcast in 2001. Michael Berkeley talks to Alan Sillitoe, author of 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning', who died earlier this year.

Nottingham-born Alan Sillitoe, one of the 'Angry Young Men' generation of British writers, died earlier this year at the age of 82. The author of many novels, poetry collections and an auobiography, he shot to fame in 1958 on the publication of 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning', a gritty depiction of contemporary urban working-class life in the Midlands. The novel was filmed by Karel Reisz in 1960, starring the young Albert Finney as its anti-hero. Sillitoe's other best-known book, 'The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner', appeared in 1959, and was filmed three years later by Tony Richardson, starring Tom Courtenay.

Alan Sillitoe was a keen music-lover, and his choices include Jerome Kern's 'Ol' Man River', sung by Paul Robeson; Maria Callas singing 'Casta diva' from Bellini's opera 'Norma'; Vaughan Williams' arrangement of the English folk-song 'Seventeen Come Sunday', Artur Rubinstein playing a Chopin Prelude, and two pieces by Soviet composers, reflecting Sillitoe's lifelong interest in the Soviet Union - an excerpt from Prokofiev's ballet 'Romeo and Juliet', and Shostakovich's 'The Execution of Stepan Razin'.

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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