Words and Music

Original version

BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

Drama

Music: Classical

A journey of discovery, weaving music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

A weekly journey of discovery, weaving together a range of music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

Words and Music: Mirrors and Reflections

Mirrors and Reflections

BBC Radio 3 - Words and Music, Mirrors and ReflectionsClose menu

Readings by Henry Goodman and Lisa Dillon. Music includes Haydn, Lalo Schifrin, Arvo Pärt.

From Alice's Looking Glass, Whitman's hand mirror and Rilke's Lady at the Mirror to Captain Beefheart's Mirror Man, Britten's Narcissus and Machaut's Ma fin est mon commencement.

Readings by Henry Goodman and Lisa Dillon as we peer at our reflections and think about what the mirror tells us. From the topsy-turvy world in Alice's Looking Glass to the corrupted image in Walt Whitman's hand mirror, the cracked shaving mirror in Joyce's Ulysses and Rilke's languid Lady at the Mirror, and Captain Beefheart's Mirror Man to Britten's version of the Greek myth of Narcissus. We begin with Guillaume de Machaut's Ma fin est mon commencement and end with Jackson Hill's version.  On the way we'll encounter the music written by Lalo Schifrin for a Bruce Lee film in which Lee confronts his enemy in a mirrored room, Haydn’s Symphony No. 47 - sometimes called ‘The Palindrome’ because of its third movement, the Menuet al Roverso in which the second part of the Minuet is the same as the first, but backwards and Arvo Pärt's infinity mirror Spiegel Im Spiegel in which the tonic triads are endlessly repeated with small variations as if reflected back and forth.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Readings 

Sylvia Plath - Mirror  
Walt Whitman  - A Hand Mirror  
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge -  The Other Side of the Mirror
Charles Simic -  Mirrors At 4am
Lewis Carroll -  Alice Through the Looking Glass
Louis MacNeice -  Reflections
Seamus Heaney -  Personal Helicon
Charles Baudelaire trans. Roy Campbell - Man and the Sea
Thomas Traherne -  Shadows in the Water
James Joyce -  Ulysses 
Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Edward Snow -  Lady at the Mirror
Thomas Hardy -  Moments of Vision

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.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Words and Music

Mirrors and Reflections

Genres

Brand

BBC Radio 3

About BBC Radio 3