Music Matters

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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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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

The stories that matter, the people that matter, the music that matters

Jiyang Chen

Music Matters: The Orpheus myth

The Orpheus myth

BBC Radio 3 - Music Matters, The Orpheus myth

The stories that matter, the people that matter, the music that matters.

Kate Molleson talks to Orlando Figes, writer of The Europeans; and mezzo-soprano, Alice Coote.

This week Kate Molleson talks to one of the great mezzo-sopranos, Alice Coote as she prepares for her role as Orpheus in Wayne McGregor’s production of Orpheus and Eurydice by Christoph Gluck at English National Opera this season. As the curtain rises on English National Opera's Orpheus season Kate explores how myth of Orpheus has resonated through time with conductor John Butt, classicist Charlotte Higgins, singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell and Netia Jones, director of Philip Glass’s opera Orphée. Orlando Figes talks about his new book "The Europeans, Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture" which tells how Europe's cultural life transformed during the course of the 19th century through the lives of the great singer Pauline Viardot, her husband Louis, and the writer Ivan Turgenev.  


Photography © Jiyang Chen

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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