BBC 100 - Celebrating Our Orchestras and Choirs

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

Music: Classical: Orchestral

A weekend of live performances from the BBC Orchestras and Choirs and the Ulster Orchestra

To celebrate the centenary of the BBC, a weekend of live performances showcasing the rich and diverse talent of the BBC Orchestras and Choirs and the Ulster Orchestra.

To celebrate the centenary of the BBC, the BBC Orchestras and Choirs and the Ulster Orchestra come together for a weekend of live performances showcasing the rich and diverse talent across the UK.

BBC 100 - Celebrating Our Orchestras and Choirs: BBC Singers

BBC Philharmonic

BBC Singers

BBC Radio 3 - BBC 100 - Celebrating Our Orchestras and Choirs, BBC Singers

Howard Goodall conducts the BBC Singers in the UK premiere of his new cantata for choir.

To mark the centenary of the BBC, the BBC Singers and Howard Goodall present a concert of music from 1922 and the present day, including the UK premiere of Unconditional Love.

As part of a weekend of music from the BBC Orchestras and Choirs celebrating the BBC Centenary in October 2022, the BBC Singers explore a programme of choral music reflecting British choral music then and now.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Mass in G minor, premiered 100 years ago in 1922, was a game-changer for English choral music – a piece whose pastoral harmonies may sound like the stuff of English soil and summertime, but whose distinctive atmosphere reconnected the country’s music with a tradition that had lain dormant for four centuries. Here, the Mass’s movements are interspersed with contemporary works that harbour the same sense of peace and spirituality.
After the interval Howard Goodall conducts the European premiere of his own Unconditional Love. Written in lockdown, the cantata was conceived as ‘a work of gratitude, of memorial and of hope for a world rebuilt’ after the pain of the pandemic. This radiant piece from one of the UK’s most communicative composers sets poetry written in times of hardship, much of it in 2020 and some by Goodall himself.

Live from Milton Court, London.  Presented by Natasha Riordan.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Mass in G minor (except Credo)
Judith Weir: Love Bade Me Welcome
Melissa Dunphy: Mourning into Dancing
Roxanna Panufnik: Child of Heaven
Philip Herbert: Agnus Dei
Errollyn Wallen: PACE
Henry Walford Davies: God be in my head
Arnold Bax: This worldes joie

Interval

Howard Goodall: Unconditional Love: A Cantata of Gratitude and Remembrance (European premiere)

BBC Singers
Howard Goodall (conductor)
Francesca Massey (organ)
Richard Pearce (piano)
Bella Tromba Brass Ensemble: Jo Harris, Becca Toft (trumpet); Anneke Scott, Jo Withers (horn); Emma Bassett, Becky Smith (trombone); Hanna Mbuya (tuba)

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

BBC 100 - Celebrating Our Orchestras and Choirs

BBC Singers

Genres

Brand

BBC Radio 3

About BBC Radio 3