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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 - Sarah Walker with Clare Balding

Monday - Sarah Walker with Clare Balding

28/12/2016

Wednesday - Sarah Walker with Clare Balding

BBC Radio 3 - Essential Classics, Wednesday - Sarah Walker with Clare Balding

Artists of the Week: Academy of Ancient Music, featured playing Schubert.

With Sarah Walker. Including My Favourite Beecham Lollipops; Music in Time: Bach: The Wretched Shall Eat; Artists of the Week: Academy of Ancient Music, featured playing Schubert.

9am
My favourite... 'Beecham lollipops'. This week Sarah shares a selection of orchestral encores favoured by the acclaimed British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. Beecham was a larger-than-life character whose musical gifts were matched by his acerbic wit and legendary anecdotes. Sarah chooses favourite lollipops including pieces by Chabrier, Delius, Sibelius, Grieg and Saint-Saëns. 

9.30am
Take part in our daily musical challenge. Two pieces of music are played together. Can you identify them?

10am 
Sarah's guest this week is the broadcaster and writer Clare Balding. Clare is best known for her expert coverage of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. She was the lead presenter in Rio this summer, and won the BAFTA Special Award and RTS Presenter of the Year Award for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Clare began broadcasting on radio in 1994 and became the main presenter of horse racing on BBC TV four years later. Since then her remit has broadened to cover almost every sport, from cricket and tennis to rugby and football. She is also the host of walking series Ramblings on Radio 4, and presents Good Morning Sunday on Radio 2, as well as having her own sports chat show, The Clare Balding Show. A bestselling author, Clare's autobiography My Animals and Other Family received critical and popular acclaim, and she has recently published her first children's book, The Racehorse Who Wouldn't Gallop. Clare shares some of her favourite classical music with Sarah throughout the week, including Caliban's Dream featuring Dame Evelyn Glennie, which was written for the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, Mozart's A Musical Joke, which Clare remembers as the soundtrack to the BBC showjumping coverage, and her favourite carol, In The Bleak Midwinter. 

10.30am 
Music in Time: Baroque
Sarah places Music in Time. Today the spotlight is on the Baroque era and Bach's landmark cantata 'Die Ellenden sollen essen' - The Wretched Shall Eat - which opened his first annual cantata cycle as the newly-appointed cantor of St Thomas's Church in Leipzig in 1723.

11am
Sarah's artists of the week are the trailblazing Academy of Ancient Music, founded in 1973 by Christopher Hogwood, whose rare combination of scholarship, musicianship and instrumental virtuosity shaped the orchestra's character from the start. Sarah's choices include the Academy's first recording, a disc of overtures by English composer Thomas Arne; both of their versions of Handel's Messiah, from 1980 and 2009; Mozart and Haydn's final symphonies; Schubert's 'Trout' Quintet, courtesy of The Academy of Ancient Music Chamber Ensemble and fortepianist Steven Lubin; and John Tavener's Eternity's Sunrise, written for the Academy with soprano Patricia Rozario in 1997.

Schubert
Piano Quintet in A, D667 'The Trout' 
Steven Lubin (fortepiano)
The Academy of Ancient Music Chamber Ensemble.

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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