A new season means a whole new range of programmes coming to BBC Radio 3 as the station also helps celebrate 100 years of the BBC.
From live broadcasts at major events such as the Venice Music Biennale, The 20th Ivors Composer Awards, the EFG London Jazz Festival and Edinburgh International Festival, through to road-trips around Northern Ireland with Music Matters, world-class performances from Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Lammermuir, Dartington and Oxford Lieder Festival, West Cork Chamber Music Festival as well as Radio 3 in Concert live from cities across the UK, BBC Radio 3 is spotlighting for listeners the best of the season’s classical, jazz and contemporary music.
BBC Radio 3’s Soundscape of a century (Sunday 30 October) celebrates the BBC at 100 with a special eight-hour continuous soundscape, tracing the last 100 years of classical music and BBC archive. News events and unforgettable voices, BBC history and classical musical landmarks intertwine with the classical music of the time. The programme will be available to listen to in its entirety on BBC Sounds or decade-by-decade, with short introductions provided by a line-up of presenters.
Drama on 3: Ariel and Winter Trees (Sunday 23 October) marks what would have been Sylvia Plath’s 90th birthday with a brand new radio drama adaption of her work. Here, the explorations of womanhood in Plath’s collections of poems Ariel and Winter Trees are woven together in readings by Eva Feiler, Indira Varma, and Dame Siân Phillips, with all three voices uniting to recite this new BBC radio adaptation of Plath’s rarely performed poem Three Women. The readings are punctuated with authentic testimony from people who have been inspired by the American poet, with interviewees including author Sarah Corbett, playwright and novelist Lucy Caldwell, and writer and poet Michèle Roberts.
Ultimate Calm with Ólafur Arnalds (Monday 10 October) is a brand new series led by Grammy-nominated artist and producer Ólafur Arnalds, who takes us on a journey into calmness through contemporary, classical and ambient music. Exploring themes such as nature, cinema and sleep, and featuring safe havens of sound from guests including Odesza, Jon Hopkins and Isobel Waller-Bridge, the series will be broadcast at 9pm on BBC Radio 3 every Monday, and available to listen to on BBC Sounds.
Sunday Feature/Between the Ears: The Sonic Century (Sun 23 October – Sunday 13 November) celebrates 100 years since the first BBC radio broadcast with a four-part series focusing on history and key figures and tools in radio broadcasting.
A New Art
A New Art explores the life and experimental storytelling of radio pioneer Lance Sieveking, who headed the BBC’s Programme Research Department in 1928. Absorbing modernist theories and practices of the time, and influenced by the emerging field of psychoanalysis, he created innovative and experimental radio which fully exploited the creative potential of the new technology available to him.
Radio of the Future
A new radio poem from Paul Farley takes its inspiration from a 1921 essay by Russian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, The Radio of the Future, which imagined all the world-changing possibilities of this new invention.
A Life Refracted
This Between the Ears episode goes on a journey through a human lifetime (from conception and birth, to play and learning, puberty and rebellion, to love, marriage and beyond) and in parallel on a journey through the sound of life in Britain, as refracted through a century of BBC archive.
The Microphone
Oral historian Alan Dein explores the world-changing cultural history of an overlooked object: the microphone, an omnipresent but invisible element which we tend to forget, ignore or literally speak over when considering the last 100 years of recorded and broadcast sound.
Also marking BBC 100, Weekday Breakfast throughout November offers listeners an aural glimpse of the music broadcast by the BBC 100 years ago, in its broadcasting infancy, with specially-commissioned arrangements by Daniel Whibley performed by the BBC Philharmonic.
Opera: The Art of Emotion
In this new series, award-winning Soprano Nadine Benjamin delves into the emotional world of opera.
Content retrieved from: https://ontheradio.co.uk/2022/09/radio-3-celebrates-100-years-of-the-bbc-with-a-new-season-of-shows/.