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: Swimming

Swimming

BBC Radio 3 - Words and Music, Swimming

From deep ocean fish to Hampstead ponds and EM Forster's pool party in Room with a View.

Shaun Evans and Rebekah Murrell dip into the waters, reading from EM Forster, Bryon and Stevie Smith alongside music by Max Richter, Anna Calvi, Fanny Mendelssohn and Smetana.

Yeats brings us fish; Emily Dickinson mermaids:, Marriott Edgar Channel swimming; and Lewis Carroll a pool of tears. We visit the Ladies pond at Hampstead in a poem by Linda Gregerson and are transported to the East Coast of America in John Cheever's short story The Swimmer, brought alive by Marvin Hamlisch’s haunting score from the film version.  But swimming can also bring perils and we look back to Stevie Smith’s Not Waving, but Drowning and observe ponds and lakes as places where bodies are on display in EM Forster's Room With a View and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. Our music comes from composers including Max Richter, Fanny Mendelssohn, Bedřich Smetana and also from Marvin Hamlisch, Anna Calvi and REM. Our readers are Shaun Evans and Rebekah Murrell.

Producer: Belinda Naylor

You can find a Sunday Feature from Radio 3 in which Alice Roberts explored wild-swimming and the legacy of Waterlog by Roger Deakin still available on BBC Sounds 
and a Free Thinking episode featuring the poet Elizabeth Jane Burnett and writer Philip Hoare

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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