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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 Georgia Mann.

Essential Classics: Wednesday - Rob Cowan with Garry Richardson

Monday - Rob Cowan with Garry Richardson

03/08/2016

Wednesday - Rob Cowan with Garry Richardson

BBC Radio 3 - Essential Classics, Wednesday - Rob Cowan with Garry Richardson

With Proms Artist of the Week: Alban Gerhardt, featured in Reger's Cello Suite No 3.

With Rob Cowan. Including My Favourite Marches; Music in Time: Schoenberg: Piano Suite; Proms Artist of the Week: cellist Alban Gerhardt, featured in Reger's Cello Suite No 3.

9am
My favourite... marches. This week Rob slips on a sturdy pair of boots and steps out to the accompaniment of some of his favourite marches - imperious Mozart, Tchaikovsky's patriotic Marche slave, the humbling Dead March from Handel's dramatic oratorio Saul, the famous Alla marcia that closes Sibelius's Karelia Suite and, most imposing of all, the grief-laden Marche funèbre from Berlioz's Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale.

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

10am 
Rob's guest this week, sharing a selection of his favourite classical music, is the journalist and presenter Garry Richardson, who has been bringing sports news to radio listeners for over thirty years. Garry currently hosts 5 Live's Sportsweek, as well as presenting the sports section of Radio 4's Today programme, and has interviewed leading personalities from Muhammad Ali and David Beckham to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bill Clinton. Garry will be talking about his career and sharing music by composers including Gershwin, Bach and Verdi every day at 10am. 

10.30am
Music in Time: Modern 
Rob places Music in Time. Today Rob looks at the Modern era and fifteen minutes that changed music - Schoenberg's Suite for Piano, Op. 25. It's the first work that Schoenberg composed entirely according to the principles of serialism, the system he had devised to bring order to the chaos that ensued after the dissolution of tonality in the early years of the 20th century. Schoenberg, though, always has one eye on the past, and despite its modernity, his suite has its roots firmly in the Baroque.

11am
Rob's Proms Artist of the Week is Alban Gerhardt, who ranks among the most sensitive cellists of the younger generation. Gerhardt appears at London's Royal Albert Hall this Wednesday as the soloist in Dvorák's Cello Concerto. Throughout the week on Essential Classics we'll hear Gerhardt perform a rich variety of Romantic cello music. The repertoire ranges from the Bachian tones of a Max Reger solo suite and a rarely heard sonata by Alkan, to the subtly-woven sound-world of Fauré's First Cello Sonata and Enescu's powerful Sinfonia Concertante. Friday's featured work is Prokofiev's Symphony-Concerto, an affirmative piece in spite of the composer's declining health and the ever-present menace of Stalin's disapproval.

Reger
Cello Suite No. 3 in A minor, Op. 131c No. 3
Alban Gerhardt, cello.

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