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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 Vikki Stone

Monday - Rob Cowan with Vikki Stone

23/11/2016

Wednesday - Rob Cowan with Vikki Stone

BBC Radio 3 - Essential Classics, Wednesday - Rob Cowan with Vikki Stone

Includes Artist of the Week: Karel Ancerl, featured conducting Janacek's Taras Bulba.

With Rob Cowan. My Favourite Schubert Chamber Works; Music in Time: Beethoven: Fantasia in G minor; Artist of the Week: Karel Ancerl, featured conducting Janacek's Taras Bulba.

9am
My favourite... secular choral works. This week a selection of Rob's favourite secular choral works come under the spotlight, from Brahms's Goethe-inspired 'Song of the Fates', which reminds us of the consequences for mankind if the gods are disobeyed, to Bartók's 'Village Scenes', which tell the story of everyday village life - via contributions from Beethoven, Schubert and Percy Grainger.

9.30am
Take part in our daily musical challenge: can you remember the television show or film that featured this piece of classical music?

10.00am 
Rob's guest this week is the comedian, composer and actress Vikki Stone. Best known for her original comedy songs, Vikki has performed sell-out stand up shows at the Edinburgh Festival and the Soho Theatre, as well as on tour, and has made appearances on BBC One's The John Bishop Show and Radio 4's The Now Show. Earlier this year, Vikki presented the BBC Proms 'Proms Unplucked' podcast, bringing all the backstage news from the festival. Throughout the week pianist and flautist Vikki talks about mixing comedy and music and about learning how to conduct, and she shares a selection of her favourite classical music, including music for the flute by Phillipe Gaubert and Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, a work she performed in her school orchestra. 

10.30am 
Power of Three - the next episode in a 70-part daily series of pioneering sounds from the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3 archives presented by David Hendy.

Followed by
Music in Time: Classical
Rob places Music in Time. Today the spotlight is on the Classical era and Beethoven's remarkable Fantasia in G minor - a piece that's rather like we're eavesdropping on him improvising - starting this idea, swapping to another, then changing his mind again. And yet it all adds up musically. 

11am
Rob's artist of the week is the Czech conductor Karel Ancerl, one of the most gifted musicians of the last century. The Second World War interrupted Ancerl's early conducting career and, although he survived the war, forming an orchestra whilst imprisoned at Theresienstadt concentration camp, his wife Valy and young son Jan were murdered at Auschwitz. After the war ended, Ancerl returned to conducting with a renewed vigor, raising the Czech Philharmonic to its standing among the greatest orchestras in the world during the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout the week Rob shares a selection of Ancerl's many recordings with the Czech Philharmonic, including a benchmark disc of music from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, Brahms's Double Concerto with violinist Josef Suk and cellist André Navarra, and Janacek's vivid narrative Taras Bulba, as well as gripping accounts of Beethoven's 5th Symphony and Stravinsky's Petrushka. 

Janácek
Taras Bulba, rhapsody for orchestra
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra
Karel Ancerl (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.

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