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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

Words and Music

Drama

Music: Classical

A journey of discovery, weaving music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

A weekly journey of discovery, weaving together a range of music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

Words and Music: The Rhyming and the Chiming

The Rhyming and the Chiming

25/12/2011

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Texts and music on the theme of bells. Reading by Sylvestra le Touzel and David Troughton.

Words and music on the theme of bells, including poetry by Edgar Allan Poe and a variety of music. Read by Sylvestra Le Touzel and David Troughton.

Words and Music on the theme of bells. Readers Sylvestra Le Touzel and David Troughton.

This is the season for bells, joyful Christmas bells and clamorous New Year peals - and they will feature in this edition of the programme. But there will also be rhyming and chiming from other seasons of life, taking Edgar Allan Poe's onomatopoeic poem as its centrepiece. There are bells from childhood, from marriage, from the ordinary round of life as nostalgically remembered in both city and countryside by Betjeman. The sinister side of the sound of bells is brought to life by Dickens in his atmospheric story "The Chimes", and in the famous scene from "The Nine Tailors" by Dorothy L. Sayers in which Lord Peter Wimsey finds himself in the belltower as the cacophony carries on about him. There are alarums from the battlefield and the gallows humour of the bells of hell going ting-a-ling-a-ling... But this is Christmas and so Longfellow and Tennyson's "Wild Bells" will see us out on a note of celebration and hope for the future.

Music from Liszt, Henze, Loesser, Philip Feeney, Grieg and Elizabeth Poston among others.

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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