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: The Mighty Oak

The Might Oak

The Mighty Oak

BBC Radio 3 - Words and Music, The Mighty Oak

Readings by Sian Phillips and Joseph Mydell. Music by Verdi, Smetana and Britten.

Readings by Sian Phillips and Joseph Mydell. Music from Wuthering Heights, Bernard Herrmann's only opera, Butterworth's English Idyll No 1, and The Teddy Bears' Picnic.

From Pooh Bear to John Clare - if you go down to the woods today you will hear readings by Sian Phillips and Joseph Mydell and music by Berlioz, Beethoven and Butterworth.  We begin with Verdi and Smetana's operatic versions of Macbeth and a description of an American staging of Macbeth described in the novel by Richard Powers, The Overstory, which won him the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  Winnie-the-Pooh comes unstuck looking for honey in an oak tree, while Aesop’s fable contrasts the unbending oak with the more flexible reeds.  Rhapsodic oak-themed poems come from Emily Dickinson, Lord Tennyson and Joseph Enright, and one  tinged with wistful sadness from John Clare. We hear about oak wood furniture described in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, about coffins in a poem by W. Harrison Ainsworth and a passage from Samantha Harvey's novel set in the 15th century called The Western Wind where a man is woken from his sleep in an oak confession booth by news of a dead body. And as a metaphor for the end of things, the Scottish poet William Soutar’s bleak vision of the cruel death of an oak under the axeman’s gleam was set to music by Benjamin Britten in his song cycle for tenor and piano Who Are These Children?  and ends our programme.   

READINGS: 
Shakespeare:       Macbeth
Richard Powers:  The Overstory 
Anne Enright:      The Acorn 
James Frazer:      The Golden Bough
Aesop:                 The Oak and the Reeds 
Emily Dickinson:  I Robbed the Woods 
Alfred Tennyson: The Oak 
AA Milne:             Winnie the Pooh 
John Clare:           The Road Oak 
Edmund Burke:    Reflections on the French Revolution 
Samantha Harvey:  The Western Wind
Emily Brontë:        Wuthering Heights 
W Harrison Ainsworth: The Old Oak Coffin 
Thomas Carlyle:    The French Revolution

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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Words and Music

The Mighty Oak

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