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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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Music: Classical

A thorough look at the week's classical music releases, plus news and recommendations.

A thorough look at the week's classical music releases, plus news and the Radio 3 Disc of the Week recommendation.

Record Review: Sounds of Shakespeare

23/04/2016

Sounds of Shakespeare

BBC Radio 3 - Record Review, Sounds of Shakespeare

Including Building a Library: Verdi's Falstaff. Plus recordings of Shakespeare's verse.

Andrew McGregor presents a special live edition from Stratford-upon-Avon. Includes Building a Library: Verdi's Falstaff; Shakespeare on Record: The bard's verse on disc.

with Andrew McGregor, live from the Royal Shakespeare's Company's The Other Place theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon as part of Radio 3's Sounds of Shakespeare weekend. 

0900 Building a Library on Verdi's opera Falstaff
Andrew is joined by Verdi expert Roger Parker to discuss the best recordings of Verdi's final opera, Falstaff, in which the giant of Italian opera pays tribute to the giant of world drama in a humane and genial comedy. Verdi admired Shakespeare all his life. He turned Macbeth and Othello into lyric dramas which are great in their own terms. Despite a burning desire to turn King Lear into an opera, that was not to be. But for the final fruit of his Indian summer, Verdi teamed up with the great librettist Arrigo Boito to create a work full of wit, dashing orchestral sonorities and quick-silver melodies. And he forged a musical language which responds the to ebb and flow of the drama in a way comparable to expressive and flexible verse of Shakespeare's greatest masterpieces.

1000 Shakespeare on Record
Andrew is joined by actor Sam West and Shakespeare scholar, Kate Kennedy to discuss the different ways in which Shakespeare's verse has been performed on disc over the years: from Frank Benson, Sybil Thorndike and John Barrymore to Laurence Olivier, Derek Jacobi and David Tennant.

BBC Radio 3 is marking the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare with a season celebrating the four centuries of music and performance that his plays and sonnets have inspired. Over the anniversary weekend, from Friday 22nd to Sunday 24th April, Radio 3 will broadcast live from Stratford-upon-Avon, from a pop-up studio at the Royal Shakespeare Companyâ.

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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