Record Review

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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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Music: Classical

A thorough look at the week's classical music releases, plus news and recommendations.

A thorough look at the week's classical music releases, plus news and the Radio 3 Disc of the Week recommendation.

Record Review: Richard Strauss's Second Horn Concerto in Building a Library with Sarah Willis and Andrew McGregor

Richard Strauss's Second Horn Concerto in Building a Library with Sarah Willis and Andrew McGregor

BBC Radio 3 - Record Review, Richard Strauss's Second Horn Concerto in Building a Library with Sarah Willis and Andrew McGregor

Sarah Willis chooses her favourite recording of Richard Strauss's Second Horn Concerto.

Sarah Willis chooses her favourite recording of Richard Strauss's Second Horn Concerto, and Jeremy Sams emerges from this year's avalanche of Christmas albums mostly unscathed.

with Andrew McGregor

9.30 Building a Library
Sarah Willis chooses her favourite recording of Richard Strauss's Second Horn Concerto.

For Romantic Austro-German composers, the horn was an instrument freighted with associations of forest, folklore and heroism. But no composer knew the horn and its possibilities like Richard Strauss: throughout a career beginning in the late 19th century and spanning eight decades, Strauss's orchestral and operatic scores are littered with hundreds of wonderful horn moments, exploiting every aspect of the instrument's range and character. In 1942, 60 years after he had written his first horn concerto (for his father Franz, Europe's foremost horn virtuoso), Strauss dedicated his second 'to the memory my father'. It's a nostalgic work and, like the first concerto, fiendishly difficult to play. But it sums up Strauss's long and affectionate relationship with the horn: the heroic and rhapsodic first movement, followed by a radiant, long-breathed Andante which is capped by a rollicking finale.   

10.45
So you don't have to, Jeremy Sams has been listening to this year's crop of Christmas albums and recommends some stocking fillers for friends and family.

11.20
Record of the Week
Andrew recommends an outstanding new release.

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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Richard Strauss's Second Horn Concerto in Building a Library with Sarah Willis and Andrew McGregor

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