Music Matters

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

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

The stories that matter, the people that matter, the music that matters

Music Matters: Bertrand Chamayou; Michael Barenboim

Bertrand Chamayou; Michael Barenboim

BBC Radio 3 - Music Matters, Bertrand Chamayou; Michael Barenboim

Tom Service speaks to the pianist Bertrand Chamayou and violinist Michael Barenboim

Tom Service speaks to the pianist Bertrand Chamayou about his new album, and violinist Michael Barenboim explains why the West-Eastern Divan orchestra is more important than ever.

As his new album Letter(s) to Erik Satie is set to be released, the French pianist Bertrand Chamayou talks to presenter Tom Service about the connections he sees between the visionary composers it features, including John Cage, James Tenney and Erik Satie, and how the project took him to places he’d never been before. He tells Tom how collaborating with the soprano Barbara Hannigan opened the door for this Satie project, about the unpredictability of the recording process, and how he’d like classical music performance to become more like visual art. 

Tom travels to Bristol’s The Galleries shopping centre, home of Bristol’s Eye Hospital Assessment centre, to visit a new installation featuring the testimony of 100 voices from across 12 NHS hospitals - including doctors, porters, nurses, consultants, and patients - which have been curated into an hour-long immersive experience. Providing a therapeutic space for contributors to express themselves, and an opportunity for audiences to contemplate the lived experience of hospital communities, Tom learns how the project’s composer, Hannah Conway, and librettist, Hazel Gould, created four arias around common themes they encountered, and hears how they’ve become creatively projected into a bespoke structure that will tour Bristol, London, Preston and Addenbrooke over the coming weeks. With contributions, too, from Manager at NHS Lancashire Teaching Hospitals, Dipa Dave, and Head of Arts at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Natalie Ellis.

Also today, as the West-Eastern Divan Ensemble prepares to perform a concert including Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Carter at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London this weekend, the violinist Michael Barenboim tells Music Matters how, despite the situation in the Middle-East, the collaborative principles behind his father’s and Edward Said’s orchestra – which seek to bring together Arab, Palestinian and Israeli musicians – are more important than ever.  

And the composer Jack van Zandt - author of a new book, Alexander Goehr, Composing a Life - speaks to Tom about the ongoing teacher-pupil relationship he’s developed under the tutelage of Alexander - Sandy - Goehr, and how Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, and among others, Richard Hall, have in turn provided tuition and inspiration across Sandy’s musical life.

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

Music Matters

Bertrand Chamayou; Michael Barenboim

Genres

Brand

BBC Radio 3

About BBC Radio 3