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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 Beeban Kidron

Monday - Sarah Walker with Beeban Kidron

11/01/2017

Wednesday - Sarah Walker with Beeban Kidron

BBC Radio 3 - Essential Classics, Wednesday - Sarah Walker with Beeban Kidron

Artist of the Week: pianist Steven Osborne, in Schubert's Variations on an Original Theme.

With Sarah Walker. Including Music in Time: Janacek's Sinfonietta; Artist of the Week: pianist Steven Osborne, featured playing Schubert's Variations on an Original Theme, D813.

9am
Sarah sets the tone and mood of the day's programme with a range of music to intrigue, surprise and entertain.

9.30am
Take part in today's musical challenge: can you work out which two composers are associated with a particular piece?

10am 
Sarah's guest this week is the film director Beeban Kidron. Beeban came to prominence in 1989 with the BAFTA award-winning TV adaptation of Jeanette Winterson's autobiographical novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and since then she's directed television dramas, documentaries and feature films including Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. In 2006 Beeban founded the charity Filmclub, an organisation which sets up after-school film clubs in schools in England and Wales and in 2012 she was made a life peer. As well as discussing her life and career, Beeban shares some her favourite classical music, from Puccini and Mozart to Messiaen.

10.30am 
Music in Time: Modern
Sarah's shines the spotlight on the Modern period with politically-inspired music by Janacek, whose Sinfonietta was intended as a celebration of the newly liberated Czechoslovakia. According to Janacek it expresses "contemporary free man, his spiritual beauty and joy, his strength, courage and determination to fight for victory." 

11am 
Artist of the Week
Sarah's Artist of the Week is the Scottish pianist Steven Osborne. A fervent champion of 20th-century music, Osborne so impressed Messiaen's widow with a performance of Trois Petites Liturgies that she invited him to Paris to study Messiaen's larger piano works, and his recording of the epic piano cycle Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus is among the finest accounts on disc. He has also recorded the complete piano works of Tippett, including the colourful and somewhat neglected Piano Concerto. As a chamber musician, Osborne had worked with some of the world's leading musicians, and this week Sarah features him in Prokofiev's Violin Sonata No. 2 (with Alina Ibragimova) and Schubert's Variations on an Original Theme, D813 (with Paul Lewis), as well as Beethoven's 'Hammerklavier' Piano Sonata. 

Schubert
Variations on an Original Theme in A flat major, D813
Steven Osborne, Paul Lewis (piano duet).

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Wednesday - Sarah Walker with Beeban Kidron

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