Music Matters

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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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Music Matters: Music theatre and the art of melancholy

Music theatre and the art of melancholy

BBC Radio 3 - Music Matters, Music theatre and the art of melancholy

Tom Service talks to director Netia Jones and countertenor Iestyn Davies.

Tom Service talks to director Netia Jones and the countertenor Iestyn Davies about their new project where music and theatre intersect to explore melancholy.

Presenter Tom Service visits the Pit Theatre at the Barbican to learn more about a new theatrical meditation on the bittersweet consolations of sorrow. He speaks to countertenor Iestyn Davies about the melancholy of John Dowland’s music and its power to process grief, while the director Netia Jones tells Tom how she’s weaved together creative visuals with philosophical musings of Robert Burton’s 17th-century treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy as well as those of Freud and other contemporary experts of the human condition. 

As the BBC celebrates its centenary, Music Matters is joined by composers Matthew Herbert and Anna Meredith, and Artistic Associate of the Southbank Gillian Moore, to discuss the corporation’s role as a commissioner of contemporary repertoire during the past 100 years. 

Tom catches-up with composer Tom Floyd, singer Sophie Goldrick, and Professor Marion Thain during rehearsals of a new opera, Veritable Michael, which charts the creative life and love affair of two women who operated together under the pseudonym Michael Field – a 19th century fictional author whose work was celebrated by the likes of Oscar Wilde and Robert Browning. 

And Tom takes a trip to the Victoria and Albert Museum where he’d joined by Harriet Reed, the co-curator of Re:Imagining Musicals – a new display of glittering costumes and musical memorabilia – to explore the craftmanship, creative renewal, and evolutionary impetus behind some of the most iconic musicals of the past seven decades.

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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Music Matters

Music theatre and the art of melancholy

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