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

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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: April

April

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The cruellest month, when sweet showers fall, or the time to be in England?

Emma Fielding and Tayla Kovacevic-Ebong with readings from writers including Anne Sexton and Caleb Femi and music by Vivaldi, Astor Piazzolla and Ella Fitzgerald among others.

Is it the cruellest month or the time when sweet showers fall?  There's an ambiguity about April with its changeable weather and promise of rebirth that's reflected in this week's programme.  Readers Tayla Kovacevic-Ebong and Emma Fielding guide us into April's more beguiling realms with poems by Anne Stevenson, Laurie Lee, Ann Sexton and Caleb Femi that are full of flowers, possibility and the warmth of sun on skin, but then TS Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Philip Larkin turn up to reveal that darker, melancholic side - the feeling of loss made starker by burgeoning new life.  That same tension and contradiction comes through in the music which includes works by Stravinsky, Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie, Cécile Chaminade, Prince (yes, sometimes it DOES snow in April), Manuel Maria Ponce, TesseracT and Astor Piazzolla.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Readings & *Music

*Gregor Joseph Werner - L’Aprile – I. Spring. Allegro
Robert Louis Stevenson - Flower god, god of the spring 
Billy Collins - Today
*Ella Fitzgerald with Count Basie and his Orchestra - April in Paris
Laurie Lee - April Rise 
*Manuel Maria Ponce - Chapultepec: I. Primavera
Robert Browning - Home Thoughts from Abroad 
*Giovanni Croce - I diporti della villa in ogni stagione – La Primavera : Nella stagion novella
Thomas Hardy - Tess of the d’Urbevilles 
*Henri Tomasi - Printemps pour sextuour a vents
Caleb Femi - Here Too Spring Comes to Us with Open Arms 
*Prince - Sometimes It Snows in April
Philip Larkin - An April Sunday brings the snow 
*Anthony Burgess - Mr Burgess’s Almanack IV. Allegretto con grazia
Basil Bunting - Weeping oaks grieve, chestnuts raise 
Edna St. Vincent Millay - Spring
*Nico Muhly - Spring Figures
*TesseracT - April 
George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four 
*Igor Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring/Le Sacre du Printemps
TS Eliot - The Waste Land – I. The Burial of the Dead
*Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - The Seasons Op. 37b – IV. April: Snowdrop
Robert Herrick - To Daffodils 
Anne Stevenson - Swifts
*Astor Piazzolla - Las 4 estaciones portenas: I. Primavera Portena 
*Antonio Vivaldi - Concerto No. 1 in E major “La Primavera” – II. Largo
Keith Douglas - Villanelle of Spring Bells 
Anne Sexton - It Is a Spring Afternoon 
*Max Beckschafer - Madrigali Veneziani: O primavera
Boris Pasternak (trans. Angela Livingstone) - Spring 
*Niklas Sivelov - Symphony No. 3 Primavera – II. Adagio
*Cecile Chaminade - Pieces romantiques Op. 55 – No. 1 Primavera 
Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales – The General Prologue
DH Lawrence - The Enkindled Spring 
William Shakespeare - Sonnet 98 
*Judy Garland - April Showers

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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