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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

Kate Molleson

An informative guide to composers' lives and their music.

An informative and accessible guide to composers' lives and their music.

Composer of the Week: Gabriel Faure (1845-1924)

Composer of the Week: Gabriel Faure (1845-1924): Episode 2: Perfect Love, Doomed Love

Gabriel Faure (1845-1924)

Episode 2

Episode 2: Perfect Love, Doomed Love

Perfect Love, Doomed Love

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Gabriel Faure (1845-1924), Perfect Love, Doomed Love

Including a failed collaboration, a professorship and Faure making his mark in London.

Donald Macleod focuses on a failed collaboration, a professorship and Faure making his mark in London.

Donald Macleod follows the dramatic thread running through Gabriel Fauré's musical output. Today, a failed collaboration; a professorship; and Fauré makes his mark in London.

A 25,000-franc commission to create a music drama for the inauguration of a wealthy heiress's magnificent new music room, with one of the century's most celebrated poets as your librettist - what could possibly go wrong? In the event, the project barely got off the starting-blocks. Despite the good offices of the Princesse de Polignac - a.k.a. Winnaretta Singer, heiress to the sewing-machine fortune - Fauré couldn't even agree on a subject with the eminent but ailing Paul Verlaine. So no collaboration, but Fauré did go on to set some of Verlaine's poetry to music - his song-cycle La bonne chanson, which charts the course of a perfect, immutable love, being a marvellous example. Love of the doomed, catastrophic kind was the subject-matter of Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelléas et Mélisande, and it drew from Fauré some of his most touching music, commissioned for a London production in 1898.


Sérénade du Bourgeois Gentilhomme ('Je languis nuit et jour')
Gérard Souzay, baritone
Dalton Baldwin, piano

La bonne chanson, Op 61
Karine Deshayes, mezzo-soprano
Ensemble Contraste

Fantaisie for flute and piano, Op 79
Michel Debost, flute
Jean-Philippe Collard, piano

Pélleas et Mélisande - Suite, Op 80
Jill Gomez, soprano
Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra
David Zinman, conductor


Producer: Chris Barstow.

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 follows the dramatic thread running through Gabriel Faure's musical output.

Donald Macleod follows the dramatic thread running through Gabriel Faure's musical output

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Composer of the Week

Gabriel Faure (1845-1924)

Episode 2: Perfect Love, Doomed Love

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