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.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

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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: Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra in Building a Library with Emily MacGregor and Andrew McGregor

Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra in Building a Library with Emily MacGregor and Andrew McGregor

BBC Radio 3 - Record Review, Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra in Building a Library with Emily MacGregor and Andrew McGregor

Emily MacGregor recommends her favourite recording of Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra.

Emily MacGregor recommends her favourite recording of Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra. Plus a round-up of the best classical new releases.

9.30
Building a Library: Emily MacGregor recommends a her favourite recording of Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra. 

For Bartók, the circumstances surrounding the composition of his Concerto for Orchestra could hardly have been more miserable. In 1940 he fled his native Hungary to escape the Nazis and spent the remaining five years of his life in the United States, those years blighted by despair, painful illness and abject poverty. But unknown to Bartók, two fellow Hungarians, violinist Joseph Szigeti and conductor Fritz Reiner, conspired to persuade Serge Koussevitzky to offer a generous commission. In 1943, the glamorous conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra visited Bartók in his New York hospital, and flamboyantly presented the composer, not only with a commission for an orchestral work but also a $500 down payment. Bartók began work in August and finished the Concerto for Orchestra just under three moths later. It spotlights, often with brilliance and playfulness, all the sections of the orchestra and perhaps only its central Elegy, which Bartók called a 'lugubrious death-song', reflects the circumstances of its composition. The work's recorded history begins at the beginning in 1944 with Koussevitzky and the Boston SO and has been much recorded ever since, a 20th-century classic by one of the century's greatest composers.

10.45
Yshani Perinpanayagam on new piano recordings.

11.25
Record of the Week: 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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Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra in Building a Library with Emily MacGregor and Andrew McGregor

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