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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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Essential Classics

Music: Classical

Refresh your morning with a great selection of classical music

Refresh your morning with a great selection of classical music, presented by Suzy Klein and Ian Skelly

Essential Classics: Thursday - Rob Cowan with Tom Phillips

Wednesday - Rob Cowan with Tom Phillips

03/12/2015

Thursday - Rob Cowan with Tom Phillips

BBC Radio 3 - Essential Classics, Thursday - Rob Cowan with Tom Phillipssearch

Artist of the Week: David Willcocks, featured conducting Vaughan Williams's Epithalamion.

With Rob Cowan. Five Reasons to Love Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words; Arvo Part: Fratres; Artist of the Week: David Willcocks, featured conducting Vaughan Williams's Epithalamion.

9am
A selection of music including '5 reasons to love... Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words'. Rob explores the tonal variety, subtle poetry, drama and aria-like expression of Felix Mendelssohn's intimate miniatures, in the hands of pianists including Livia Rév, Vladimir Horowitz and Ignaz Friedman. He also showcases a pair of songs by Felix's sister Fanny, which demonstrate that her compositions matched his in their charm and originality.

9.30am
Take part in our daily musical challenge: identify a piece of music played backwards.

10am 
Rob's guest this week is the artist Tom Phillips. Tom is renowned for his portraiture, sculpture and collages, including his extraordinary ongoing project A Humument, an altered Victorian novel (the pages of which Tom paints, draws and collages over), 49 years in the making. An illustrator, set designer, librettist, composer, curator and collector, Tom is also the author of Music in Art, a survey of art inspired by music. Tom will be sharing a selection of his favourite classical music, every day at 10am.

10.30am 
Rob places Music in Time as he travels back to the Baroque to sample the ingenious counterpoint of J.S Bach's Musical Offering. Frederick the Great provided the theme and Bach worked it into one of the incomparable masterpieces of his later years. 

11am
Rob's Artist of the Week is Sir David Willcocks. Throughout the week Rob pays tribute to Sir David Willcocks: organist, composer, and the most celebrated British choral conductor of his generation, who died in September, aged 95. From 1957 until 1974 he was Director of Music at King's College, Cambridge; under his leadership and training the choir became internationally renowned for its precision, immaculate tuning and pure beauty of tone. Through their annual broadcasts of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, and Sir David's dazzling carol arrangements and descants, his name has become indelibly associated with Advent and Christmas. For 38 years he was also the musical director of the Bach Choir, conducting them in some eighty performances of the St Matthew Passion, as well as championing music by contemporary British composers. Rob surveys Sir David's glittering recorded legacy, showcasing some of his most acclaimed interpretations, and unearthing some rare gems. 

Vaughan Williams
Epithalamion
Stephen Roberts (baritone)
Howard Shelley (piano)
Jonathan Snowden (flute)
The Bach Choir
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Sir David Willcocks (conductor).

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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Essential Classics

Thursday - Rob Cowan with Tom Phillips

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