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

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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: Edward Elgar (1857-1934)

Composer of the Week: Edward Elgar (1857-1934): Episode 5: War and Beyond

Edward Elgar (1857-1934)

Episode 5

Episode 5: War and Beyond

War and Beyond

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Edward Elgar (1857-1934), War and Beyond

Donald Macleod focuses on Elgar's life during the First World War and beyond.

Donald Macleod focuses on Elgar's life during the First World War, as well as the death of the composer's his wife Alice and his remarkable recorded legacy.

Celebrating British Music: Donald Macleod explores the life and work of the 'quintessentially English' composer, Edward Elgar, whose musical roots lay firmly in Europe, and whose Catholicism and class background bequeathed him a lifelong sense of isolation from mainstream British society.

Today's programme charts Elgar's progress during and after World War I. The blithe bluster of Carillon, written at the beginning of the conflict, gives way to the deep melancholy of the Cello Concerto, written at the other end of the collective European nightmare. Within a year of the concerto, Elgar's wife Alice died of undiagnosed lung cancer and from that point on he completed no new works of substance. He did, however, throw himself into a major recording project, committing interpretations of much of his own orchestral output to disc - the first such undertaking by a composer.

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.

Donald Macleod explores the life and work of Edward Elgar

Donald Macleod explores the life and work of the 'quintessentially English' Edward Elgar, a composer who nevertheless had musical roots firmly in Europe

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Edward Elgar (1857-1934)

Episode 5: War and Beyond

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