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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

Music Matters

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

The stories that matter, the people that matter, the music that matters

Tom Service

John Eliot Gardiner

Music Matters: Sir John Eliot Gardiner

Discussion & Talk

Music: Classical

Sir John Eliot Gardiner

09/11/2013

BBC Radio 3 - Music Matters, Sir John Eliot Gardiner

Conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner talks to Tom Service about his book on Bach.

Conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner talks to Tom Service about his book on Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven.

Tom Service interviews one of the most influential musicians of our time - the conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner. In his new book on Bach, 'Music in the Castle of Heaven', Sir John Eliot offers a portrait of this most enigmatic musical genius. He tells Tom how a Silesian refugee arrived at his family farm in Dorset in 1936 with two items of luggage: a guitar and the celebrated portrait of Bach by Haussmann, which led to Sir John Eliot growing up 'under the Cantor's gaze'. It was the start of a lifetime's fascination with Bach, the man and his music, and Sir John Eliot recalls his frustration at the 'precious' way his music was performed during his university years at Cambridge in the 1960S. Biographical information on Bach is sparse, but Sir John Eliot tells Tom how his research paints a picture of a rebellious man, perhaps thuggish in his teenaged years, with a mania for composition. Bach's Cantatas, Passions and Motets, Sir John Eliot argues, offer the most revealing glimpses of the composer: passionate, querulous, self- castigating but also one who believed he had been selected by God to create a new and glorious music.

First broadcast in November 2013.

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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