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: The sounds of Christmas

The sounds of Christmas

BBC Radio 3 - Music Matters, The sounds of Christmas

Patrick Doyle, Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason, Steve Rosenberg, Rachel Portman.

Tom Service talks to two of the country's most successful composers, Patrick Doyle and Rachel Portman.

Tom Service hears from one of the most successful British film composers of all time, Patrick Doyle. With a career spanning 50 years and over 60 movies – including Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Henry V, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes – he talks to Tom about composing the Coronation March for the Coronation of Their Majesties The King and The Queen Consort earlier this year, and shares more about his innate feeling for musical drama.

Pianist, composer, and BBC’s Russia Editor, Steven Rosenberg, files a dispatch from Moscow where he reflects on the festive idyll of a song which has come to epitomise Christmas for generations of Russians, the discordant beauty of the capital’s wintery landscape with the reality of the conflict with Ukraine. He shares a specially composed piece he’s written in response to the lived experience of many this yuletide in Moscow.

Tom is also joined by the Academy Award winning composer Rachel Portman who reveals, among other things, how she goes about summoning the sound world of Christmas in the scores of TV adverts she’s penned, and how she evokes a festive mood in a matter of seconds. 

And the author, speaker, advocate for music education, and mother to seven virtuosic children, Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason, tells Music Matters how her musical family celebrates Christmas.

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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