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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: George Butterworth and His Contemporaries

Composer of the Week: George Butterworth and His Contemporaries: Episode 2: Love and Loss

George Butterworth and His Contemporaries

Episode 2

Episode 2: Love and Loss

Love and Loss

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, George Butterworth and His Contemporaries, Love and Loss

Why the Elizabethans' attitude to culture, poetry and the arts was admired by WD Browne.

Donald Macleod and Dr Kate Kennedy examine why the Elizabethans' attitude to culture, poetry and the arts was much admired by composer WD Browne.

FS Kelly's moving Elegy for Rupert Brooke and Butterworth's setting of AE Housman are among a rich seam of poetry explored by this set of composers. 

A close friend of Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth was killed at the age of 31, during the battle of the Somme as dawn broke on the 5th August 1916. A war hero, he was awarded the Military Cross twice. Butterworth's legacy rests on a handful of pieces, notably his much loved English Idylls and folk-song arrangements. He belongs to a generation of composers who showed great promise early on, only to be denied the chance to reach musical maturity. Over the course of the week, we'll also hear the work of four contemporaries of Butterworth: fellow Englishmen Ernest Farrar and William Denis Browne, the Scottish composer Cecil Coles and the Australian composer Frederick Septimus Kelly. All of them, like Butterworth, died on active service during the Great War. Among the musical gems, there's the first ever recording of Denis Browne's ballet "The Comic Spirit", made for the series by the BBC Philharmonic. Their musical trajectory may be short, but this lost generation of composers nonetheless has made an indelible mark on the face of British music.

Donald Macleod and Dr Kate Kennedy examine why the Elizabethans' attitude to culture, poetry and the arts was much admired by composer W Denis Browne. They also discuss how the outbreak of World War One influenced the kind of poetry that caught popular attention. 

W Denis Browne
Diaphenia 
Epitaph on Salathiel Pavy
To Gratiana Dancing and Singing 
Robin Tritschler, tenor
Malcolm Martineau, piano 

Ernest Farrar
Rhapsody No.1: The Open Road
Philharmonia Orchestra
Alasdair Mitchell, conductor 

George Butterworth
Six Songs From A Shropshire Lad
Benjamin Luxon, baritone
David Willison, piano 

Frederick Kelly 
Elegy for Strings "In Memoriam Rupert Brooke"
BBC Symphony Orchestra 
David Lloyd-Jones, conductor 

George Butterworth
Requiescat
Roderick Williams, baritone
Iain Burnside, piano.

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 music of George Butterworth and four of his contemporaries

Donald Macleod explores the music of George Butterworth and his contemporaries Ernest Farrar, W Denis Browne, Cecil Coles and Frederick Septimus Kelly, who all died in the First World War

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Composer of the Week

George Butterworth and His Contemporaries

Episode 2: Love and Loss

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