Words and Music

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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: Leadership

Leadership

BBC Radio 3 - Words and Music, Leadership

Leaders, both good and bad, evoked in music, poetry and prose.

Jemima Rooper and Ewan Bailey with readings evoking leaders from Elizabeth I to Toussaint Louverture to Orwell's Napoleon the Pig with music including John Adams and Paul Robeson.

The qualities we look for in a good leader and the dire consequences of getting landed with a bad one are the focus of this week's episode.  In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the king goes around the camp on the eve of Agincourt, quelling the fears of his army, while Aeneas brings hope to his despairing followers in Virgil’s Aeneid.  Emmeline Pankhurst incites a suffragist meeting to rebellion and Elizabeth I gives a similarly rousing speech to her troops.  On a more personal scale, Grace Nichols recalls the dedicated leadership of her father in his role as headmaster.  There are disappointed leaders too – Napoleon and Toussaint Louverture – and a tyrannical pig in Orwell’s Animal Farm.  Music includes Dominic Argento’s setting of the final diary entry of the leader of a disastrous polar expedition, dedicated activist Paul Robeson singing the spiritual Go Down Moses and John Adams’s operatic evocation of President Nixon’s historic trip to meet Chairman Mao, plus brilliant drummer and notoriously exacting bandleader Buddy Rich in full flow.  The readers are Jemima Rooper and Ewan Bailey.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

READINGS:
Roger McGough – The Leader
Niyi Osundare – The Leader and the Led
Grace Nichols – Picture My Father
Alfred Lord Tennyson – The Charge of the Light Brigade
Virgil (trans. C Day-Lewis) – The Aeneid  
Robert Browning – The Lost Leader 
Elizabeth I - Speech to the Troops at Tilbury, 1588
William Shakespeare - Henry V: Act IV, prologue
Lord Byron – Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte 
George Orwell – Animal Farm
Ivan Krylov (trans. Gordon Pirie) – The Lion’s Share 
WB Yeats – To a Shade
Dylan Thomas – ‘The hand that signed the paper’ 
Siegfried Sassoon – Base Details 
Emmeline Pankhurst – I Incite This Meeting to Rebellion
John Agard – Waiting for Fidel
William Wordsworth - To Toussaint Louverture

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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