Words and Music

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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: Temperatures Rising

Temperatures Rising

BBC Radio 3 - Words and Music, Temperatures RisingClose menu

Raad Rawi and Pearl Chanda evoke lush summer and parched deserts.

Hot landscapes of past, present and future. Raad Rawi and Pearl Chanda evoke summer idylls, parched deserts and dystopian visions through the words of John Clare and Kamala Das.

From John Clare’s white woolsack clouds to the daydreaming figure under Meleager’s plane tree, summer days have long been a time for writers to wander into fantasies and idylls.

But summer can be a time for extreme weather too - cathartic storms and raging wildfires burst forth in the music of Vivaldi and the epic accounts of Imru’ al-Qais and Cassius Dio. And the fierce sun inspires a particular vividness in the African desert of H Rider Haggard and the noontime scene in southern India that Kamala Das conjures.

These extremes may have had an exotic appeal in the past; but now, they hint at what is likely to become far more familiar, as temperatures rise. 

Pack your sunscreen and join readers Raad Rawi and Pearl Chanda in the hot landscapes of past, present and future, with music by Debussy, Orff and Jobim.

Readings:
Sonnet - John Clare
Tuck Everlasting - Natalie Babbitt
Still Life with Sea Pinks and High Tide - Maura Dooley
King Solomon’s Mines - H. Rider Haggard
Wasteland - T. S. Eliot
A Hot Noon in Malabar - Kamala Das
A Something In a Summer’s Day - Emily Dickinson
The Day-dream - Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Epigram 196 - Meleager
Unbeaten Tracks in Japan - Isabella Bird
On the Idle Hill of Summer - A. E Housman
Hyperobjects - Timothy Morton
A Mancunian Taxi-driver Foresees His Death - Michael Symmons Roberts
Sonnet - Antonio Vivaldi
Ode - Imru’ al-Qais
Roman History - Cassius Dio
In A Dark Time - Theodore Roethke

Produced by Chris Elcombe.  
A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3.

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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