Original version

BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

Migrated podcast image for: Composer Of The Week

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 3: AE Housman

George Butterworth and His Contemporaries

Episode 3

Episode 3: AE Housman

AE Housman

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, George Butterworth and His Contemporaries, AE Housman

How the poetry of AE Housman invoked vocal and instrumental responses from Butterworth.

Donald Macleod is joined by Dr Kate Kennedy to discuss how the poetry of AE Housman invoked vocal and instrumental responses from George Butterworth.

Distant landscapes and evocations of a lost world, in Butterworth's settings of poetry by AE Housman and RL Stevenson. 

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. This week's series also features the work of four contemporaries of Butterworth: fellow Englishmen Ernest Farrar and W 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 made an indelible mark on the face of British music.

Today Donald Macleod is joined once again by Dr Kate Kennedy, a specialist on this period of our cultural history. The poetry of AE Housman invokes vocal and instrumental responses from Butterworth. 

Frederick Kelly
Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day
Robin Tritschler, tenor
Malcolm Martineau, piano 

Ernest Farrar
Vagabond Songs, Op.10
Stephen Varcoe, baritone
Clifford Benson, piano 

George Butterworth
Bredon Hill and Other Songs 
Benjamin Luxon, baritone
David Willison, piano 

Cecil Coles
From the Scottish Highlands
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 
Martyn Brabbins, conductor 

George Butterworth
Rhapsody: A Shropshire Lad
English String Orchestra
William Boughton, 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.

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

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Composer of the Week

George Butterworth and His Contemporaries

Episode 3: AE Housman

Genres

Brand

Series

BBC Radio 3

About BBC Radio 3