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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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Words and Music

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A journey of discovery, weaving music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

A weekly journey of discovery, weaving together a range of music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

Words and Music: Summer Nights

Summer Nights

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Music set against seasonal prose and poetry read by Sian Thomas and Simon Russell Beale.

From a Great Gatsby party to the calm of Wallace Stevens's home - the writers include Carol Ann Duffy, John Clare, AE Housman, with music from Miles Davis to Vaughan Williams.

Simon Russell Beale and Sian Thomas read prose and poetry reflecting on the final hours on a summer’s day. 

“Oh, how beautiful is the summer night, which is not night, but a sunless, yet unclouded day, descending upon earth with dews and shadows and refreshing coolness” was how the American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow described the twilight hours.  The English landscape is evoked in Vaughan Williams' setting of “The Water Mill” by Fredegond Shove and in John Clare’s “Summer Evening” in which he captures the fearful animals, insects and birds disturbed by ‘proud man’.   

American summers are evoked in the description of one of the famous parties in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” where, in Gatsby’s blue gardens, there is a “sea-change of faces and voices under the constantly changing light” heard with Miles Davis’ “Once upon a Summertime”.  The overwhelming heat of New York is brilliantly caught by Langston Hughes and by Sara Teasdale’s description of the ‘fragrant darkness’ of the Hudson river.

T.S. Eliot’s mysterious evocation of the summer midnight rituals of man and woman “in daunsinge, signifying matrimonie” is heard with Philip Glass’ “Hymn to the Sun” from Akhnaten.  Carol Ann Duffy’s” The Midsummer Night” is heard with Mendelssohn’s Notturno from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.  Wallace Stevens’ poem, ”The House was Quiet and the World was Calm”, captures the calm of the poet’s home as he sits reading a book alongside the calm of the universe on a summer night and the poet’s desire to be one “to whom The summer night is like a perfection of thought”.  The poem is heard with the American composer  Samuel Barber’s “Nocturne”, a piano setting which may well be exploring a similar ‘access of perfection’ to Stevens’ poet’s dream.

Summer Nights ends with A. E. Housman’s “When Summer’s End is Nighing”, an elegy for lost youth which ends with the hope of a new beginning.  As summer’s end nears the poet’s heart is reawakened:

‘The ear too fondly listens
For summer’s parting sighs,
And then the heart replies.’

Words and Music ends with Vaughan Williams' “The Lark Ascending”, his beautiful evocation of the English countryside, written on the eve of war in 1914 and imagining the losses to come

Readings: 

Oh, how beautiful - Henry Longfellow 
Night Drive - Seamus Heaney
Summer Evening - John Clare 
The Prelude - William Wordsworth
Moonlight, Summer Moonlight - Emily Brontë
Song - Walt Whitman
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
Summer Stars - Carl Sandburg
Summer Evening - Sara Teasdale 
The Four Quartets - TS Eliot
The House Was Quiet - Wallace Stevens
Summer Night - Langston Hughes
Midsummer Night - Carol Ann Duffy
When summer's end is nighing - AE Housman

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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