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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: Tuesday - Rob Cowan with Mike Figgis

Friday - Rob Cowan with Mike Figgis

04/07/2017

Tuesday - Rob Cowan with Mike Figgis

BBC Radio 3 - Essential Classics, Tuesday - Rob Cowan with Mike Figgissearch

With Artist of the Week: Solomon Cutner, in Liszt's Fantasy on Hungarian Folk Melodies.

With Rob Cowan. Including Musical challenge; Music on Location: New York; Artist of the Week: pianist Solomon Cutner, featured in Liszt's Fantasy on Hungarian Folk Melodies.

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

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

10am 
Rob's guest this week is the film director, writer, photographer and composer Mike Figgis. Mike is best known as the director of films such as Leaving Las Vegas and Internal Affairs, but he came to film after many years in music and theatre. He plays the piano, guitar and trumpet and has played and recorded with various bands in London and France, including a 'free jazz' group. For a decade Mike was a member of the People Show, a long-running experimental theatre group based in London, and has directed operas for the Manchester International Music Festival and English National Opera. As well as discussing his life and work, Mike shares some of his favourite classical music throughout the week by composers including Ives, Zelenka and Schubert.

10.30 
Music on Location: New York 
Rob explores music by Copland written as incidental music for a play set in New York. The play was a flop, but Copland reworked his contribution to create the chamber work Quiet City. 

Double Take 
Rob explores the nature of performance by highlighting the differences in style between two recordings of Chabrier's miniature orchestral masterpiece España, one conducted by John Eliot Gardiner and the other by Neeme Järvi. 

11am 
Rob's featured artist is one of Britain's greatest pianists, Solomon Cutner - known to audiences simply as Solomon. He rose from humble beginnings to the pinnacle of his profession, and was en route to recording all of Beethoven's piano sonatas when tragedy struck; he suffered a severe stroke, and for the next 32 years Solomon the pianist was forced to become Solomon the concert-goer and listener. Solomon was a prime example of the notion that less is more; his reading of Beethoven's 'Waldstein' Sonata is perfectly proportioned, his Liszt and Chopin compelling but never sentimental, his Schubert abundantly lyrical, while in chamber music - especially with the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky - Solomon was the ideal duo partner. His performances are dignified and musically persuasive making his recordings well worth revisiting.

Liszt 
Fantasy on Hungarian Folk Melodies, S.123, for piano and orchestra 
Solomon (piano) 
Philharmonia Orchestra 
Walter Susskind (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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