This is an excellent new series pairing words and music. Today:

From London to Paris
Sunday 25 February 2007 22:15-0:00 (Radio 3)

Sophie Okonedo and Kenneth Cranham read a selection of poetry and prose around the theme of two great cities, from Samuel Johnson, Wordsworth and Verlaine to George Orwell and Fleur Adcock. The programme includes music by Gibbons, Noel Coward, Elgar, Pierre Boulez and Yves Montand.

Producer's Note

In putting together this sequence of words and music around London and Paris, I've chosen poems and prose which bind both cities together: the beauty and ugliness, the majestic and the mundane, the city as a symbol of decay, but also a place of love, a place of fear and intimidation or a refuge for immigrants.

But, the sound of the cities is very different - from Francaix's Galop, the grainy chanson La Grande Cite from Yves Montand, to Vaughan Williams' atmospheric London Symphony and Elgar's grand Cockaigne Overture.

I selected music to complement the readings: TS Eliot reading from 'The Wasteland' with the spare music of Meredith Monk, Stefan Zweig's description of Paris as a city of youth with the exuberant music of Django Reinhardt, and Reich's Piano Phase which reflected the repetitive momentum of the London underground in Seamus Heaney's 'District and Circle'.

Jessica Isaacs (producer)

Message edited by its author, Apr 29, 2007, 7:35am.

Oh, I listened to the latest Words and Music that follows man's development from infant joy to old age. It was breathtaking and so well-designed. I heard Pem in Alium for the very first time in the program and was in transport.

Also an Emily Dickinson I've not come across was read:

Experience is the angled Road
Preferred against the Mind
By -- Paraodox -- the Mind itself -
Presuming it to lead

Quite Opposite -- How complicate
The Discipline of Man -
Compelling Him to choose Himself
His Preapponted Pain

Reminds me a little of Alexander Pope....

Transfigured Night
Sunday 11 March 2007 22:15-0:00 (Radio 3)

An unpresented sequence of poetry and music that takes Richard Dehmel's poem Transfigured Night as a starting point for a theme around night and dreams.

Simon Russell Beale and Emma Fielding read a selection from Longfellow, Poe, Milton, Gerald Manley Hopkins with archive readings from Dylan Thomas and Michael Longley.

Music includes Schoenberg's Verklaerte Nacht, Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit and Takemitsu's Dreamtime.

Producer's note

This sequence starts and ends with Schoenberg's Verklaerte Nacht (Transfigured Night). Night becomes the thread for the programme which is at times a comfort (as in Longfellow's 'Hymn to the Night'), terrifying (Grave's 'A Child's Nightmare'), threatening ('Macbeth'), mysterious (Auden's 'This lunar beauty'). But it is also at night that the truth will out (Larkin's 'Lying in bed' and Richard Dehmel's poem 'Transfigured Night').

I selected music which for me complemented the poetry. Lawes' hymn-like fantasy seemed to match Longfellow's praise of night and the purity of Holborne's lullaby for cittern reflected William Blake's 'Cradle Song'. The menacing nature of night (Pushkin's 'Rememberance') and the "dark agents" of 'Macbeth' are reflected in Honneger's brooding third symphony. Restless sleep (as in Whitman's poem) seemed to lead naturally to the ebb and flow of Bach's solo violin sonata and the seductive poem of Auden, 'This lunar beauty', reminded me of Miles Davis' dark and smokey Round Midnight. Finally, I ended with the rich orchestral version of Verklaerte Nacht with Richard Dehmel's programme and you hear in words and music a man and woman walking off into the moonlight.

Jessica Isaacs (producer)

Details of Readings and Music
Times are from start of programme

00:00:00
SCHOENBERG
Verklaerte Nacht (string sextet version)
Members of Ensemble Intercontemporain
Pierre Boulez (director)
SONY SMK 48 465
Track 5

00:02:11
LAWES
Fantasy (Consort Sett a 6 in F major)
Concordia
Mark Levy (director)
METRONOME MET CD 1045
Track 1

00:02:28
HENRY LONGFELLOW
Hymn to the night
Simon Russell Beale (reader)

00:06:05
BERG
Nacht (7 early songs)
Brigitte Balleys (soprano)
German Symphony Orchestra Berlin
Vladimir Ashkenazy (conductor)
DECCA 436 567-2
Track 1

00:09:40
WILLIAM BLAKE
Cradle Song
Emma Fielding (reader)

00:10:13
HOLBORNE
Lullaby
Dowland Consort
Jakob Lindberg (director)
BIS CD 469
Track 18

00:12:41
ARTIE SHAW
Nightmare
Artie Shaw and his Orchestra
NIMBUS NI 2008
Track 2

00:13:12
ROBERT GRAVES
A Child's nightmare
Simon Russell Beale (reader)

00:14:58
MESSIAEN
Canyon des etoiles (extract)
Orchestre Philharmonique de France
Myung-Whun Chung (conductor)
DG 471 617-2
Track 1

00:16:58
RACHMANINOV
Night is sorrowful (Op.26 No.12)
Joan Rodgers (soprano)
Howard Shelley (piano)
CHANDOS CHAN 9644
Track 17

00:19:18
PUSHKIN
Remembrance
Emma Fielding (reader)

00:20:26
SHAKESPEARE
Come seeling night.(extract from Arden edition of Macbeth)
Simon Russell Beale (reader)

00:21:01
HONEGGER
Symphony No.3 'Liturgique' (last movement)
Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra
Mario Klemens (conductor)
HARMONIA MUNDI PR 250 000
Track 7

00:30:41
CHOPIN
Nocturne in F major (Op.15 No.1)
Murray Perahia (piano)
SONY SK 64399
Track 7

00:31:30
POE
Dream within a dream
Emma Fielding (reader)

00:36:08
DYLAN THOMAS
In my craft and my art
Dylan Thomas (reader)

00:37:27
MILTON
Methought I saw
Simon Russell Beale (reader)

00:38:29
HANDEL
Oh Sleep why dost though leave me? (Semele, HWV 58)
Kathleen Battle (Semele)
English Chamber Orchestra
John Nelson (conductor)
DG 435 782-2
CD 2 Track 6

00:41:39
MICHAEL LONGLEY
Insomnia
Michael Longley (reader)

00:42:03
LIGETI
En suspens (Etudes pour piano)
Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)
SONY SK 62308
Track 11

00:43:10
WHITMAN
In midnight sleep
Emma Fielding (reader)

00:44:35
BACH
Adagio (Violin Sonata in C major, BWV.1005)
Thomas Zehetmair (violin)
TELDEC 9031 76138-2
CD 2 Track 6

00:48:07
SIDNEY
With how sad steps, O moon
Simon Russell Beale (reader)

00:49:06
SCHUBERT
An den Mond (D.259)
Matthias Goerne (baritone)
Andreas Haefliger (piano)
DECCA 452 917-2
Track 8

00:51:46
AUDEN
This lunar beauty
Emma Fielding (reader)

00:52:50
MILES DAVIS
Round Midnight (extract)
Miles Davis (trumpet)
John Coltrane (tenor saxophone)
Red Garland (piano)
Paul Chambers (bass)
Philly Joe Jones (drums)
PRESTIGE OJCCD 347-2
Track 3

00:54:53
BYRON
So, we'll go no more a roving
Simon Russell Beale (reader)

00:55:21
LAWES
Drink tonight on the moonshine
Hilliard Ensemble
HARMONIA MUNDI HMC 901153
Track 4

00:57:13
SHAKESPEARE
Sonnet 27
Simon Russell Beale (reader)

00:58:12
GERALD MANLEY HOPKINS
I wake and feel the fall of dark
Emma Fielding (reader)

00:59:30
IVES
The Unanswered Question
Michael Sachs (trumpet)
The Cleveland Orchestra
Christoph von Dohnanyi (conductor)
DECCA 443 172-2
Track 6

01:05:29
BRAHMS
Ballade in B major (Andante con moto) (Op.10 No.4)
Daniel Barenboim (piano)
ELATUS 0927 49562-2
Track 4

01:12:48
WORDSWORTH
The Prelude (extract)
Simon Russell Beale (reader)

01:14:02
MARGARET ATTWOOD
Night Poem
Emma Fielding (reader)

01:15:30
TAKEMITSU
Dreamtime (extract)
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Hiroyuki Iwaki (conductor)
ABC 8.77000 6
Track 1

01:18:57
RAVEL
Le Gibet (Gaspard de la nuit)
Artur Pizarro (piano)
LINN CKD 290
Track 3

01:25:55
COWARD
The Dream is over
Noel Coward (singer)
Carroll Gibbons (piano)
ASV CD AJA 5126
Track 5

01:29:30
LARKIN
Lying in bed
Emma Fielding (reader)

01:30:34
LORCA (trans. MERRYN WILLIAMS)
Ballad of the moon
Simon Russell Beale (reader)

01:32:02
SCHOENBERG
Verklaerte Nacht (arr. for string orchestra)
Norwegian Chamber Orchestra
Iona Brown (director)
CHANDOS CHAN 9616
Track 1

01:34:26
RICHARD DEHMEL (trans. DAVID GALLAGHER)
Transfigured Night
Simon Russell Beale (reader)

Words and music is rapidly becoming one of the most interesting programmes on Radio 3.

Message edited by its author, Apr 29, 2007, 7:39am.

By the Sea
Sunday 18 March 2007 22:30-0:00 (Radio 3)

Fiona Shaw and Alex Jennings read a selection of poetry and prose on a sea theme from Elizabeth Bishop, Michael Longley, Charles Dickens, John Masefieldand Hugo Williams, with music inspired by the sea by Charles Trenet, Benjamin Britten, Mozart and Mendelssohn.

Producer's note

In putting together this sequence I began by thinking of the hymn 'Eternal Father Strong to Save'. When I was growing up in West Cornwall we sang this at school every time there was a disaster at sea - it's a song that's very familiar to any one who lives near the coast.

In the programme you'll hear Benjamin's Britten's interpretation in 'Noye's Fludd'. The different moods of the sea thread through the sequence - Rimsky Korsakov's 'Scheherazade' around readings from 'David Copperfield', John Adams' 'Harmonium' around Elizabeth Bishop's mystic poem 'At the Fishhouses', Charles Trenet's 'La Mer' with Billy Collins' poem about the joys of the sea, 'Walking the Atlantic' and John Surman's 'The Road to St Ives' with a recording of the Cornish poet Charles Causley reading 'Morwenstow'.

Fiona McLean (producer)

Details of Readings and Music
Times are from start of programme

00:00:00
HUGO WILLIAMS
The Sea
Alex Jennings (reader)

00:00:08
CHARLES TRENET
La Mer
The Extraordinary Garden
EMI CDP7944642
Track 20

00:01:07
BILLY COLLINS
Walking the Atlantic
Fiona Shaw (reader)

00:01:43
ARNOLD BAX
Mediterranean
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Bryden Thomson (conductor)
CHAN 8494

00:05:32
OGDEN NASH
Pretty Halcyon Days
Alex Jennings (reader)

00:07:10
STEPHEN SONDHEIM
By the Sea
Sweeney Todd - Original Cast
Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou
Disc 2 Track 3
RCA 33792RC

00:10:42
TORU TAKEMITSU
Toward the Sea: The Night
London Sinfonietta
Esa-Pekka Salonen
John Williams (guitar)
Sebastian Bell (alto flute)
Gareth Hulse (oboe d'amore)
SONY CLASSICAL SK 46720

00:12:39
TED HUGHES
Relic
Fiona Shaw (reader)

00:14:46
CHARLES IVES
A Sea Dirge
Complete Songs Volume IV
ALBANY TROY 080

00:16:57
ALICE OSWALD
Sea Sonnet
Fiona Shaw (reader)

00:17:04
PHILIP GLASS
Glassworks: Floe
Michael Riesman (conductor)
SONY CLASSICAL SMK87968

00:17:50
JOHN KEATS
On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer
Alex Jennings (reader)

00:17:39
MOZART
Cosi Fan Tutte: Soave sia il vento
Philharmonia Orchestra
Karl Bohm (conductor)
Elizabeth Schwarzkopf
EMI CMS 7 69330 2

00:21:43
JOHN SURMAN
Road To St Ives: Marazion
Track 11
ECM 1418 843 849-2

00:24:19
CHARLES CAUSLEY
Morwenstow
Alex Jennings (reader)

00:24:01
JOHN ADAMS
Harmonium: Wild Nights
San Francisco Symphony Orchestra
Vance George (director)
NONESUCH 7559795492

00:30:58
ELIZABETHBISHOP
At the Fishhouses
Fiona Shaw (reader)

00:33:36
JOHN IRELAND
Songs: Sea Fever
Jonathan Lemalu (bass baritone)
Roger Vignoles (piano)
EMI 7243 575203 2

00:35:42
EWAN MacCOLL
Blow, Boys, Blow
Banks of Newfoundland
TRADITION TCD 1024

00:38:04
TOM PAULIN
Sea Wind
Alex Jennings (reader)

00:40:08
RIMSKY KORSAKOV
Scheherazade, Suite Symphonique
London Symphony Orchestra
Sir Charles Mackerras (conductor)
Kees Hulsmann (solo violin)
TELARC CD-80208

00:40:15
CHARLES DICKENS
David Copperfield
Alex Jennings (reader)

00:50:23
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Tempest
Alex Jennings and Fiona Shaw (readers)

00:51:49
BENJAMIN BRITTEN
Noye's Fludd
English Opera Group Orchestra
Norman Del Mar
LONDON 436 397-2

00:54:38
SEAMUS HEANEY
Lovers on Aran
Fiona Shaw (reader)

00:53:19
FREDERICK KEEL
Trade Winds
Jonathan Lemalu (bass baritone)
Roger Vignoles (piano)
EMI 7243 5 75203 2

00:57:36
DEBUSSY
Preludes: Voiles
Krystian Zimerman (piano)
Deutsche Grammophon 435 773-2

01:01:58
WALT WHITMAN
The World Below the Brine
Fiona Shaw (reader)

01:03:07
DEBUSSY
The Nocturnes: Sirenes
The Cleveland Orchestra
Vladimir Ashkenazy (conductor)
DECCA 467 428-2

01:13:06
JOHN MASEFIELD
Sea Fever
Alex Jennings (reader)

01:14:11
SIBELIUS
The Tempest
Suite No 2: Prospero
Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra
Neeme Jarvi (conductor)
BIS CD 448

01:15:53
T.S. ELIOT
Four Quartets
Fiona Shaw (reader)

01:16:40
PETER MAXWELL DAVIES
Choral Works: Sea Runes
BBC Singers
Simon Joly (conductor)
COLLINS 14632

01:18:33
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Dover Beach
Alex Jennings (reader)

01:21:50
FRANK BRIDGE
The Sea - Suite for Orchestra
Seascape
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
Sir Charles Grove (conductor)
EMI 7243 566855 2

Slavery and Freedom
Sunday 25 March 2007 22:30-0:00 (Radio 3)

The poet and novelist Jackie Kay introduces a selection of poetry and prose on the theme of slavery and freedom including work by Langston Hughes, Fred D'Aguiar, Emily Dickinson, Robert Burns and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Including music inspired by slavery and freedom by Bessie Smith, Paul Robeson, Beethoven and The Blind Boys of Alabama.

Presenter's Note

In my edition of Poetry of the Negro, edited by Langston Hughes, there is a section entitled Poetry by Non-negroes. I liked the idea of that. I wanted to choose poems by black and white writers to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade.
I've chosen Robert Burns, The Slave's Lament, and an extract from Walt Whitman's wonderful Song of Myself, as well as early brilliant black writers like James Weldon Johnson and Paul Laurence Dunbar. I chose African writers like Wole Soyinka - whose Telephone Conversation I remembering making a huge impact on me at school. I chose the American poet Audre Lorde who I was so excited to discover in the early eighties. I wanted a mixture of contemporary poets and poets from the past to carry us through these two hundred years. I chose the Kreutzner Sonata because it was originally written for a black violinist to play.
Music and poetry for me walk like twins through my life.
The music and poetry we love forms part of our own biographies. Someone else is singing your story. There's a mixture of blues and jazz as well as Scottish folk and African music here. Music is one way that we all can really value our freedom. We can lose ourselves and find ourselves again in the music. I like the sassiness of Nina Simone's Mississippi Goddam and the raw unplugged voice of Bessie Smith and the bringing it all together voice of Bob Marley with his moving Redemption Song. Ah. I was spoilt for choice.

Hi! I'm a new group member and fairly new BBC Radio 3 listener as well. I only got into it after Tom Paulin's William Blake article was featured in the Guardian, and it mentioned "The Essay" programme. Now I am truly hooked and "Words & Music" has fast become one of my favourites.

The last one I caught up on was the one on the sea and I truly enjoyed it, even though the poetry selection was a wee bit predictable. My favourite poetry selections were the Shakespeare, the Causley and the reading of the Masefield (of course). For music it was the Mozart and MacColl. I'm really looking forward to listening to the latest one.

I agree Amarate. The fusion of words and music is an inspired idea and appeals to the heart and brain. This series is rapidly becoming my one f my favourites.

Today's programme:

William Hope and Yolanda Vasquez read poetry and prose on a theme of Two Americas, North and South including work by Walt Whitman, TS Eliot, Robert Frost, Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda. With music inspired by the Americas from Villa-Lobos, Aaron Copland, Astor Piazzolla and Charles Ives.

The idea behind this edition of Words and Music is to show some of the faces - musical and poetic - of the two Americas, North and South.

I've chosen poems and prose which illuminate the beauty and the underside of the countries, the natural beauty of the landscape and the industrialised cities.

The sounds of the countries are very different - from Carlos Chavez's imagined Aztec music in 'Xochopilli', Aaron Copland's evocative 'Letter from Home', the chants and dances of Native Americans, Astor Piazzolla's Nuevo tangos, Randy Newman's 'Louisiana 1927' and Samuel Barber's 'Adajio for Strings'.

From the South you'll hear Pablo Neruda's beautiful love poem 'Every Day you Play' and Emma Sepulveda-Pulvirenti's 'September 11th 1973, Santiago Chile' and from the North Allen Ginsberg's 'Who Runs America?' alongside Walt Whitman's 'Prairie Sunset' and the closing passage of 'The Great Gatsby', F.Scott Fitzgerald's story of the disintegration of the American Dream.

Running Order

00:00:00
PABLO NERUDA
Discovers of Chile
Yolanda Vasquez (reader)

00:01:09
VILLA-LOBOS
Bachianas Brasileiras
Villa-Lobos Par Lui-Meme
Choeurs et Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion
Hector Villa-Lobos - conductor
EMI CZS 767229 2A

00:02:55
T.S. ELIOT
Virginia
William Hope (reader)

00:03:32
AARON COPLAND
Nature the Gentlest Mother
Barbara Hendricks - soprano
London Symphony Orchestra
Michael Tilson Thomas - conductor

00:07:44
CARLOS CHAVEZ
Xochipilli - An Imagined Aztec Music
La Camerata (Panamerican Chamber Players)
Eduardo Mata - conductor
DORIAN DOR90215

00:10:32
OCTAVIO PAZ
Sunstone
Yolanda Vasquez (reader)

00:13:54
THE FEARSOME BRAVE
Sacred Spirit - Heal the Soul
VIRGIN CDVX 2753

00:14:56
ALLEN GINSBERG
Who Runs America?
William Hope (reader)

00:16:12
LEONARD BERNSTEIN
America
West Side Story
New York Philharmonic Orchestra
Leonard Bernstein - conductor
COLUMBIA SK 60724

00:20:47
AUGUST KLEINZAHLER
Trolley
August Kleinzahler (reader)

00:21:46
STEVE REICH
Different Trains
America Before the War
Kronos Quartet
ELEKTRA/NONESUCH 7559791762

00:24:27
ee cummings
next to god america i
William Hope (reader)

00:25:14
RANDY NEWMAN
Louisiana 1927
Good Old Boys
REPRISE 927 214-2

00:28:08
MANUEL PONCE
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra
Second Movement
Music Mexicana
Henryk Szeryng - violin
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Enrique Batiz - conductor
ASV CDDCA866

00:35:31
EMMA SEPULVEDA-PULVIRENTI
September 11th, 1973
Yolanda Vasquez (reader)

00:36:17
SAMUEL BARBER
Adajio for Strings
London Symphony Orchestra
Michael Tilson Thomas - conductor

00:44:44
THOM GUNN
The J Car
Thom Gunn (reader)

00:47:28
VILLA-LOBOS
Prelude in A-Minor
Julian Bream Plays Villa-Lobos
RCA 89813

00:52:53
PABLO NERUDA
Every Day You Play
William Hope (reader)

00:54:53
CARLOS CHAVEZ
Sinfonia Romantica
New York Stadium Symphony Orchestra
Carlos Chavez - conductor
PHILIPS 422 305-2

01:00:07
AARON COPLAND
Letter from Home
Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra
Leonard Slatkin - conductor
EMI CDC-7 49766 2

01:00:18
WALT WHITMAN
A Prairie Sunset
William Hope (reader)

01:06:47
ROBERT FROST
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Yolanda Vasquez (reader)

01:07:20
CHARLES IVES
Fugue in Four Keys on 'The Shining Shore'
Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra
Leonard Slatkin - conductor
RCA 09026-61222-2

01:10:59
VIRGINIA RODRIGUES
Raca Negra - Nos
HANNIBAL HNCD1448

01:14:40
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
New England
William Hope (reader)

01:15:24
ELLIOTT CARTER
Figment
Chamber Music
Arditti String Quartet
MONTAIGNE MO782091

01:20:29
OCTAVIO PAZ
Along Galeana Street
William Hope (reader)

01:21:15
HECTOR VILLA-LOBOS
Bachianas Brasileiras
Villa-Lobos Par Lui-Meme
Choeurs et Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion
Hector Villa-Lobos - conductor
EMI CZS 767229 2A

01:23:28
GABRIELA MISTRAL
Night
Yolanda Vasquez (reader)

01:24:03
ASTOR PIAZZOLLA
Milonga del Angel
Luna
The New Tango Sex-tet
HEMISPHERE
CDEMC3723

01:30:12
JOHN ADAMS
Tromba Lontana
BBC Symphony Orchestra
John Adams - conductor
BBCLJ30012

01:34:19
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
The Great Gatsby
William Hope (reader)

01:34:58
AARON COPLAND
Silent City
Mark Hill - English Horn
Neil Baum - Trumpet
New York Chamber Symphony
Gerard Schwarz - conductor
EMI CDC 7 49095

Tonight:

To tie in with the Sunday Feature on Akram Khan, Words and Music is an uninterrupted sequence of music, poetry and prose on the theme of dance. Including works by Thomas Moore, Laurence Binyon, Rainer Maria Rilke, Philip Larkin, Roger McGough and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and music by Johann Strauss, Claude Debussy and Louis Andriessen.

Dance is all embracing, and yet also a very personal affair. From the intimacy of Laurence Binyon's vignette, Little Dancers, to the sweaty, pulsating, grime of Alicia Oistriker's Saturday Night, the words and music included in this sequence trace a line starting with Thomas Moore's international celebration of dance and Lully's Grand March from Le Bourgois Gentilhomme, through the more esoteric spots of sunshine dancing on the water in Amy Lowell's Bath, to the horror of A Square Dance by Roger McGough.

The musical journey echoes that of the poems. Rather than literal interpretations of the words, or always using music written for dance, in many cases I've chosen music that conjures up the atmosphere created by the poetry. Philip Glass's hypnotic score to the film Koyaanisqatsi originally accompanied the movie's repeated patterns of motion. I've used it to create a lyricism of movement suggested by the poetry of Binyon and Larkin. Bach accompanies Yeats' girl dancing on the "leaf sown, new mown, smooth grass plot of the garden" where all is not as it seems, and it's the abject dance rhythms of Shostakovich's most inward looking and most personal of string quartets that lead towards the square dance of Roger McGough's Flanders Fields.

There are also literal interpretations however. It's remarkable how when placing Goethe's Dance of Death with Danse Macabre by Saint-Saens the two fit together like hand in glove. The Drum and Bass of Sub Focus and Saturday Night weave in and out of each other seamlessly, and the Italian Tarantella joins Rilke's Spanish Dancer bringing out the subtlety of the flaming colours in the fire.

Music, dance and poetry finally combine in Baudelaire's sensuous Evening Harmony and Arvo Part's Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in Mirror). The two create an almost motionless, introspective, melancholy waltz, bringing the sequence to a close.

Jeremy Evans (Producer)

To Music
Sunday 22 April 2007 22:45-0:00 (Radio 3)

Diana Rigg and Samuel West read a selection of poetry on the theme of music. Including Elizabeth Jennings's First Music, Andrew Marvell's The Empire of Music, DH Lawrence's Piano and TS Eliot's Four Quartets, and WB Yeats reading his poem The Fiddler of Donney.

Music includes Webern's arrangement of Bach's A Musical Offering, songs by Dowland and Schubert and Seamus Heaney's reading of The Given Note accompanied by piper Liam O'Flynn.

Producer's note

For this week's Words and Music, I have chosen poetry on the theme of music: starting with Richard Barnfield's poem which praises music and poetry, and ending with an extract from TS Eliot's Four Quartets about the word and music. The range includes Sarah Maguire's affectionate portrait of 'My father's piano', Siegfried Sassoon's description of a 'Concert party' at an Egyptian Base Camp where music is an escape, Larkin's tribute to a jazz legend, Sidney Bechet and Seamus Heaney's 'The Given Note' with music played by the piper, Liam O'Flynn.

I chose music to complement these poems. Beethoven's String Quartet Op.135 following Baudelaire's tribute to the composer, Auden's poem 'The composer' followed by Britten's setting of Auden in Hymn to St Cecilia and Messiaen's shimmering Vingt Regards reflecting the "music breathing of statues" in Rilke's poem - To Music.

Message edited by its author, Apr 29, 2007, 3:29am.

Today:

Anthony Calf and Rebecca Saire read poems in an uninterrupted sequence of music, poetry and prose on the theme of the seasons. Including A Song of the Seasons by Alfred Perceval Graves, Thomas Hardy's During Wind and Rain, Philip Larkin's And now the leaves suddenly lose strength, and AE Housman's Loveliest of Trees. With music by Vivaldi, Astor Piazzolla, Tchaikovsky, Debussy and Benjamin Britten.

Taking spring as the starting point, this edition of Words and Music follows the changing seasons of the year. Beginning with On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring by Delius and ending with Vivaldi's Winter, the poetry and music are loosely tied together by movements from Vivaldi's Four Seasons. The programme traces a path from the birth of the year, through the still heat of the summer, the ochre of autumn, winter's dark days, and ending with a glimmer of hope and a hint of spring.

You'll hear a BBC recording of Ted Hughes reading Spring Nature Notes made in 1977. There's Housman's Loveliest of trees and Spring by Thomas Nashe, set by Benjamin Britten in his Spring Symphony.

Thomas Hardy's During wind and rain alludes to thecyclical nature of the renewal of the seasons whilst Amy Lowell's Dog-days talks ofa mutter of thunder in the summer air.

The thundering of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and the hubbub of Messiaen's birds in Chronochromie give way to the stillness of Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915. The autumnal North Wind on the Aeolian harp is complemented by Strauss' Four Last Songs, and the visceral energy of Harrison Birtwistle's Earth Dances takes us from Purcell through to Ives' Unanswered question and finally Vivaldi.

Jeremy Evans (Producer)

A Dante Sequence
Sunday 6 May 2007 22:15-0:00 (Radio 3)

Dante's journey from the infernal underworld to Paradise in The Divine Comedy has inspired writers and composers through the ages.

In this sequence, poems by WH Auden, Samuel Beckett, TS Eliot and Stevie Smith are interwoven with translations of the original by Benedict Flynn and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and music by Liszt, Messiaen and Salvatore Sciarrino.

A Dante Sequence
Readers: Heathcote Williams, Claire Higgins, John Shrapnel, Anton Lesser, and the late Bob Peck.

"Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them - there is no third." So wrote TS Eliot, for whom Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy was a life-long inspiration. The Florentine poet's masterpiece - a visionary journey from the infernal underworld of Hell to a paradise of universal harmony - was written in the early years of the 14th century, yet such is the power and timelessness of its poetry that its influence has permeated seven centuries of literature - much of it in the English language. Chaucer, Milton, Byron, Keats, Longfellow, the Brownings, Shelley, Tennyson, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Stevie Smith, Samuel Beckett and WH Auden are among the many great writers who have echoed, imitated, translated and been inspired by Dante.

This sequence offers a counterpoint of 'Words and Music' with The Divine Comedy as its focal point. Extracts from Benedict Flynn's recent translation - a vivid, contemporary account of Dante - are read by Heathcote Williams and intercut with a late 19th-century version by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Along with Geoffrey Chaucer (for whom medieval Italian poetry held a particular allure), one of the earliest English writers to be inspired by Dante was the anonymous author of the 14th-century dream sequence 'Pearl'. This is an account of a bereft parent who has lost a child - the 'Pearl' of the title - and who travels to another world, an intoxicating garden of mysterious marvels, in which he meets his dead daughter in the bliss of Paradise. The dream is, perhaps indirectly but nonetheless strongly, influenced by Dante's journey into the afterlife, his encounter with his deceased beloved, Beatrice, and their ascent together to Paradise. This 'Words and Music' sequence includes two vocal pieces roughly contemporary with 'Pearl' from the English manuscript known as 'Old Hall: 'Salve porta paradisi' and 'Qualis est dilectus', the ecstatic words and sonorous harmonies of which complement both medieval poets' vision of Paradise.

Over two centuries later, John Milton was introduced to the writing of Dante at school, where he learnt Italian, and later during his travels in Italy, where he met the great Dante scholar Bonmatthei. Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Milton'sexploration of man's Fall and his salvation, are full of Dantean echoes, notably the vivid descriptions of Hell and Heaven which draw directly on imagery from The Divine Comedy. Milton was a friend of the composer Henry Lawes, whose dark, brooding consort music is used in the sequence alongside readings from Paradise Lost. We also hear 'Possente spirto' - Orpheus's incantation to Charon, ferryman of the River Styx in Hades, from Monteverdi's Orfeo.

The Romantic period gave rise to a flood of Dante translations and imitations, among the less well-known of which is an eloquent and stylish version of Inferno by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. "Dante's poetry seems to come down in hail rather than in rain," she commented to her husband Robert, expressively suggesting the sharp and chilling power of Dante's descriptive writing.

Like the Brownings, Franz Liszt was an ardent Italophile and several of his works were directly inspired by his readings of both Dante and Petrarch. His so-called 'Dante Sonnet', which we hear near the beginning of the programme, is a piano transcription of a song by Hans von Bulow, setting one of Dante's love poems to Beatrice in La Vita nuova - 'Tanto gentile e tanto onesta'.

It was perhaps the 20th century that produced some of the greatest literary works inspired by Dante's grim picture of the underworld as well as his radiant vision of Paradise: TS Eliot's Little Gidding; Auden's In the Year of my Youth, Stevie Smith's Francesca in Winter and Ezra Pound's Cantos, extracts from all of which are included in the programme. The stark, gritty language of these poets seems best reflected in music by their contemporaries: Britten's third string quartet - an aptly visionary swan-song, itself inspired by Italy - flows naturally after the words of his close artistic collaborator WH Auden; while Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time - an exploration in sound of the end of time and the beginning of eternity - mirrors the apocalyptic and seraphic extremes of the Commedia.

Chamber and instrumental music by the contemporary Sicilian composer Salvatore Sciarrino evocatively suggests the ghostly sights and sounds which Dante and his guide Virgil encounter on their journey: sighs, shrieks and the exhalations of agonised breath as the tormented souls of Hell endeavour to speak of their pain; the breathy whispering of the murdered lovers, Paolo and Francesca, consigned to float forever in the air fanned by infernal flames; or the ghoulish cries of souls shaped as disfigured trees. Sciarrino seems to be haunted by Dante's images of the underworld: indeed, 700 years on, The Divine Comedy is still exerting its extraordinary and profound influence.

Running Order

22:15:00
READING
The Divine Comedy - Canto 1
Extracts translated by Benedict Flynn 1'40"
Read by Heathcote Williams
From CD: Naxos NA 431712

And trans. Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1'50
Read by Claire Higgins

22:18:30
MUSIC
Liszt: Dante Sonnet ('Tanto gentile e tanto onesta') 6'29
Leslie Howard (piano)
Hyperion CDA 67004

22:25:00
READING
Dante: The Divine Comedy - Inferno
Extracts translated by Benedict Flynn 2'30
Read by Heathcote Williams

22:27:30
MUSIC
Thomas Damett: Salve porta paradis (Old Hall MS) 1'48
Hilliard Ensemble
EMI CDC 7 54111-2 T 24

22:29:00
READING 2'20
Dante: The Divine Comedy - Inferno (3 extracts over music)
Extracts translated by Benedict Flynn
Read by Heathcote Williams

22:29:50
MUSIC
Salvatore Sciarrino: Lo spazio inverso 3'00

22:33:00
MUSIC
Monteverdi: Possente spirto (from Orfeo) 8'25
Anthony Rolfe Johnson (tenor)
English Baroque Soloists / John Eliot Gardiner
DG 419 251-2

22:41:10
READING
Milton: "Beyond this flood" from Paradise Lost 2'36
Read by Anton Lesser
Naxos NA 935012

22:43:40
William Lawes: Pavan in G minor 5'45
Rose Consort of Viols
Naxos 8.550601

22:43:20
READING 1'00
Dante: The Divine Comedy - Inferno
Extracts translated by Benedict Flynn
Read by Heathcote Williams

22:50:30
Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time - 2nd mvt
Bell/Isserlis/Mustonen/Collins
Decca 452899-2 T 5 2'40

22:53:00
READING
Dante: The Divine Comedy - Inferno 4'07
Extracts translated by Benedict Flynn
Read by Heathcote Williams

22:57:00
Sciarrino: L'orizzone luminoso 3'47
Mario Caroli (flute) Srradivarius STR 33598 T6

22:59:00
READING:
Stevie Smith: Francesca in Winter 1'06
Read by Claire Higgins

23:01:00
READING
TS Eliot: Little Gidding (extract) 5'02
Read by John Shrapnel

23:06:00
Anon. (13th-century Italy) Lamento di Tristan (extract) 1'32
The Dufay Collective

23:07:40
READING
WH Auden: 'In the Year of my Youth' (extract)1'39
Read by John Shrapnel

23:09:10
Benjamin Britten: String Quartet no. 3 (last mvt)
Amadeus Quartet
London 425 715-2 T8 8'23

Segue
23:18:00
Sciarrino: Omaggio a Burri (extract)

23:18:05
READING
Dante: The Divine Comedy - Inferno Canto XIII 1'05
Extracts translated by Benedict Flynn
Read by Heathcote Williams

23:19:10
Sciarrino: Omaggio a Burri (extract, cont.)

23:19:30
READING
Robin Robertson: The Woods of Suicides (after Dante Inferno, Canto XIII) 2'14
Read by John Shrapnel

23:22:00
READING
Samuel Beckett: Alba
Read by Claire Higgins

23:23:00
Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time (7th mvt)
Bell/Isserlis/Mustonen/Collins
Decca 452 899-2 Tr 11 6'50

23:29:40
READING
Milton: Paradise Lost - "At last the sacred influence of light" 1'17
Read by Anton Lesser

23:31:00
Nicholas Lanier: 'Like hermit poor' 3'14
Paul Agnew (tenor), Christopher Wilson (lute)

23:34:10
READING
Dante: The Divine Comedy - Inferno Canto XXXIV
Extracts translated by Benedict Flynn
Read by Heathcote Williams

23:35:30
READING:
Anon. (14th century): Pearl - "My soul forsook that spot in space"
Read by the late Bob Peck
BBC archive recording DAT OLN 814/98BB0923

23:36:50
Anon. De ce que fol pense (after Pierre des Molins) 2'44
Andrew Lawrence-King (harp)

23:39:30
Dante: The Divine Comedy - Paradise(extract) 1'50
Extracts translated by Benedict Flynn
Read by Heathcote Williams

23:41:30
Forest: Qualis est dilectus (Old Hall MS)
The Hilliard Ensemble

23:45:00
READING
Milton: Paradise Lost - "They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld of Paradise" 0'48"
Read by Anton Lesser

23:45:50
William Lawes: Consort set in A minor for viols 4'07
Rose Consort Naxos 8550601

23:48:50
Ezra Pound: Canto CXVII - "I have tried to write Paradise" 0'25"
Read by John Shrapnel

23:50:15
Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time - last movement
Bell/Isserlis/Mustonen/Collins

Altitude
Sunday 13 May 2007 22:20-0:00 (Radio 3)

A sequence of poetry and music inspired by the world seen from a great height, the flight of birds and the romance of mountain tops.

Musical evocations of mountains by Sibelius, Richard Strauss and Liszt sit with poems by Shelley and Petrarch. Anton Lesser and Lesley Sharp read works by Ted Hughes, Pablo Neruda and EE Cummings which describe the world of birds in flight, and music by composers including Haydn, J.S. Bach and George Benjamin evokes the same subject.

Producer's Note

In this programme I wanted to explore the idea of altitude, the world of mountain tops, flying through the air and viewing the landscape from above. I have tried to make this a poetic journey upwards from terra firma (albeit a terra firma several thousand feet above sea level) through the atmosphere and into space.

So we begin with evocations of mountains: Strauss's wonderful, brooding beginning to his Alpine Symphony, and John Evelyn's awestruck response to an alpine walk above the cloudline; and move on to descriptions of clouds in poetry (Shelley) and music (Rimsky-Korsakov). Thereafter we ascend into the realm of birds, with two of the greatest poets of the avian, Ted Hughes and Pablo Neruda, painting contrasting pictures of birds on the wing: one all rapid movement and agility, the other far aloft and still.

We go still higher into the stratosphere with a pair of lyrics about powered flight: Thom Gunn's poem about a plane above Kansas, and Laurie Anderson's delightfully off-beat song set on a commercial airliner. The sequence closes with a trio of poems looking up into the heavens.

Many of my music choices have explicit links with the theme: Liszt and Strauss spent much time in the Alps and reflected this in their music, while the Sibelius symphony, although abstract in conception, was written on a mountainside and is - to me, at least - hugely evocative of the Finnish landscape.

George Benjamin's piece for solo flute, Flight, inspired by the sight of a bird swooping and gliding above the Swiss Alps, was an obvious foil for the Neruda poem of the same title. In other cases the character of the music suggested a connection with the poetry: on reading Ted Hughes's poem A Dove I was reminded of the helter-skelter virtuosity of Peter Racine Fricker's Badinerie, while the Mondonville and Messiaen seemed complementary to the poetry they accompany.

Other connections are more playful: the inclusion of a Bach fugue plays on the fact that the word "fugue" derives from the Italian fuga ("flight"). The final poem, Gerard Manley Hopkins's intimate "I am like a slip of comet", seemed in my mind to blend naturally into the opening bars of Holst's Neptune, whose female chorus fading away into oblivion provides a suitably celestial close.

Thomas Morris (Producer)

Lost in the City of Waters
Sunday 10 June 2007 22:15-0:00 (Radio 3)

Jeremy Irons and Anna Massey read poetry and prose on the theme of Venice.

Including works by Shelley, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann, with music by Giovanni Gabrieli, Benjamin Britten and Faure.

This week's Words and Music explores Venice as it has captured the imagination of writers and composers. The city conjures up images of late Romantic decadence (Proust/Mann/James) as well as early Romantic revolt against the Napoleonic yoke (Platen/Wordsworth/Gounod/Shelley), Baroque persiflage (Galuppi/Vivaldi) and Renaissance grandeur (Gabrieli/Ruskin).

Running through the sequence are readings from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice which revels in the over-ripe voluptuousness of Venice, intoxicating the senses and threatening reason: the dark-underbelly beneath the glittering surface. This was a theme that inspired Benjamin Britten to write his final opera (2nd piece of music) and his final string quartet (last piece of music).

Salvatore Sciarrino composed his piano piece Lost in the Waters of Venice after he had been to visit the dying Venetian composer Luigi Nono. Death and Venice seem somehow inextricably linked in the imagination. Wagner, having earlier written much of the love music for Tristan in Venice, died there. Britten went on a valedictory last visit when he knew he was about to die.

Venice was also a place for Northern Europeans like Marcel Proust, Henry James and Thomas Mann to venture south in search of wider perspectives and broader horizons. The cliche of slightly-stiff northerners coming to terms with red-hot Italy is captured by the famous 1960s guidebook by J.G Links Venice for Pleasure; a tradition that stretches back to Gilbert and Sullivan (Gondoliers)

Composers wanting to represent La Serenissima in music had 2 "sound effects" to play with: bells and water. The programme starts with the great bell of St Marks. And you can hear it tolling in Schubert's part-song Gondelfahrer. Water is suggested in the lilting 6/8 rhythm of the barcarolles, the songs that the gondoliers supposedly sang as their oars plashed against the waters of the canal. As Gustav von Aschenbach, the narrator of Death in Venice, finally sinks back into the soft black cushions of his gondola, Faure's barcarolle conjures up the swaying motion of his boat. And there is more than one barcarolle in the programme: Faure, Hahn, Gounod and Offenbach. The penultimate piece of music, Le gatorigole is an original 18th century Canzone di Battello (in Venetian dialect) which would have been sung to an amorous couple during a nocturnal outing on the canal.

Today:

Town and Country
Sunday 17 June 2007 22:15-0:00 (Radio 3)

This week's programme explores the theme of Town and Country. The music includes works by Handel, Copland and Vaughan Williams, and Samantha Bond and Tim McInnerny are the readers in poems by (among others) T S Eliot, Wordsworth and John Clare.

This week's Words and Music explores the contrasts between the worlds of town and country, and looks at the ways in which they can meet and intertwine.

Oddly, while poets seem to dislike the town - Wordsworth's hymn to London and its river was one of the relatively few wholly positive poems I could find - composers seem to be happier among its sounds and moods, as shown by Charles Ives's atmospheric Central Park in the Dark, Steve Reich's vibrant City Life, or Richard Rodney Bennett's song Let's Go and Live in the Country (which, despite its title, comes down firmly in favour of purely urban comforts). Yet there is a warm sense of nostalgic romance in Sean O'Brien's 'The Park by the Railway', while Andrew Fusek Peters's 'Last Night I Saw the City Breathing' captures a childish excitement at the way a city's very buildings can appear to come to life when viewed with the right kind of imagination.

Peaens to the country life are easier to come across. John Clare's 'In Hilly-Wood' and Duke Senior's speech from As You Like It both celebrate its qualities as a refuge from noise and bustle, while John Ireland's Amberley Wild Brooks, Ralph Vaughan Williams's A Pastoral Symphony and Aaron Copland's New England Countryside are all musical landscapes of the most affectionate kind. Elsewhere, Clare's poem 'The Flitting' and a passage from nature-writer WH Hudson's autobiographical Far Away and Long Ago both look back on their departure from the rural life as a time of severance with their truer, happier selves.

In their role as link between town and country, railways make several appearances: Edward Thomas recalls a brief ear-opening moment when a train stops at a country halt; John Betjeman's 'Parliament Hill Fields' is a classic celebration of Metroland; Tom Waits observes a down-at-heel world from 'the yellow windows of the evening train', and Scottish poet WS Graham records his breathless arrival at Euston before making encounters with some of the city's great literary ghosts.

Finally, there are poems which examine how town and country can be in conflict while at the same time co-existing. Miriam Waddington sets the characteristics of various North American cities against the 'beautiful green grain elevator' that is Manitoba, Italo Calvino proposes the cosmos as the ideal model for a modern city, and FL Lucas even looks forward to nature's ultimate triumph. But the last word goes to William Carlos Willams's bleak suggestion that 'the country will bring us no peace'.

Transfigured Night
Sunday 24 June 2007 22:15-0:00 (Radio 3)

A sequence of poetry and music taking Richard Dehmel's poem Transfigured Night as a starting point for a theme around night and dreams.

Simon Russell Beale and Emma Fielding read a selection from Longfellow, Poe, Milton, Gerald Manley Hopkins with archive readings from Dylan Thomas and Michael Longley. Music includes Schoenberg's Verklaerte Nacht, Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit and Takemitsu's Dreamtime.

This sequence starts and ends with Schoenberg's Verklaerte Nacht (Transfigured Night). Night becomes the thread for the programme which is at times a comfort (as in Longfellow's 'Hymn to the Night'), terrifying (Grave's 'A Child's Nightmare'), threatening ('Macbeth'), mysterious (Auden's 'This lunar beauty'). But it is also at night that the truth will out (Larkin's 'Lying in bed' and Richard Dehmel's poem 'Transfigured Night').

I selected music which for me complemented the poetry. Lawes' hymn-like fantasy seemed to match Longfellow's praise of night and the purity of Holborne's lullaby for cittern reflected Blake's 'Cradle Song'. The menacing nature of night (Pushkin's 'Rememberance') and the "dark agents" of 'Macbeth' are reflected in Honneger's brooding third symphony. Restless sleep (as in Whitman's poem) seemed to lead naturally to the ebb and flow of Bach's solo violin sonata and the seductive poem of Auden, 'This lunar beauty', reminded me of Miles Davis' dark and smokey Round Midnight. Finally, I ended with the rich orchestral version of Verklaerte Nacht with Richard Dehmel's programme and you hear in words and music a man and woman walking off into the moonlight.

The theme of childhood continues:

Dancing in the Wind
Sunday 22 July 2007 22:15-0:00 (Radio 3)

Sara Kestelman and Rory Kinnear read poetry and prose on the theme of childhood. Including Prayer before Birth by Louis MacNeice; Morning Song by Sylvia Plath; Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney; and Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Music includes Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, Rufus Wainwright's The Art Teacher, John Tavener's To a child dancing in the wind, Schumann's Kinderszenen and Hans Kraas' Brundibar.

Childhood has always been a rich source of inspiration for writers and composers - the possibilities are endless. This Words and Music takes a journey through childhood beginning with a child in the womb and closing with the end of childhood. Many of the poems present an adult's view of the child - Ted Hughes with his young daughter in 'Full Moon and Little Frieda', a mother playing the piano to her son in Rainer Maria Rilke's 'From a Childhood' and Robert Browning's 'Rhyme for a child viewing a naked Venus in a painting of 'the Judgement of Paris'. The music around these poems reflects this - Debussy's 'The Snow is Dancing' evoking the lightness and brightness in Sharon Olds' poem about a baby in the womb and John Tavener's beautiful setting of Yeats' 'To a child dancing in the wind'. But some of the poems are the voice of the child themselves and these are much darker. In Louis MacNeice's 'Prayer before birth' a child prays for safety and inveighs against the harshness and ruthlessness of the modern world. Seamus Heaney reads his own poem 'Mid-term Break' in which he remembers being taken home from school after his little brother's death and, in John Burnside's powerful 'Catch-kiss' a young girl remembers the abuse she suffered at the age of six. The music is darker too with Schubert's song 'Erlkonig' telling the story of the death of a child attacked by a supernatural being, in Mahler's 'Kindertotenlieder' and Kurtag's enigmatic 'Mad Girl with the Flaxen Hair'. The programme ends with the final loss of innocence in William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies'.

The Beast Within
Sunday 29 July 2007 22:20-0:00

Actress Fiona Shaw introduces a selection of poetry and prose on the theme of animals, including work by Ted Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, William Golding, Les Murray, Lewis Carroll and Paul Durcan. With music by Sibelius, Schumann, Schubert, John Tavener and Poulenc.

Duration:
1 hour 40 minutes

The Beast Within

"Animals began to play a bigger part in my life this year. In April I went to the Galapagos Islands with the artist Dorothy Cross whose work often reflects the power and the mystery of animals in her photographs of beached whales and her video work on jelly fish: this trip was inspired by her research on Darwin and the notion of evolution and language. My role was to provide poems that cut across the quietude that forms the big divide between man and beast. I was stunned by what I saw: the connection between sea lions and tortoises, the way in which animals reflect back to us our own origins and the difference between their unconscious fight for survival and our worrying self consciousness.

I returned refilled with the notion that our survival as humans and as creatures with art in our core is dependent on the animal world and that their preservation is intrinsic to our own. The poems chosen reflect this relationship - the sensuality of John Montague hunting a trout, Gwyneth Lewis' delight in her dog and the reverse anthropomorphism of Paul Durcan imagining himself as a snail in his prime lying in the famous neolithic grave at Newgrange with mud in his ears. But perhaps most inspirational is the great Ted Hughes who takes the beasts of our collective memory and with deft modernism makes Ovid's poems come to life: in Actaeon we see the hunter transformed into a deer and savaged by his own hounds when a curse falls upon him for spying on Diana the goddess. Alongside the poems you'll hear Ravel's 'Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune', James Macmillan's wonderfully expressive organ concerto A Scotch Bestiary which explores the connections between man and beast and Elvis Costello's balletic adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Il Sogno. All explore the world we must share". Fiona Shaw

A Song of the Seasons
Sunday 5 August 2007 22:30-0:00 (Radio 3)

Anthony Calf and Rebecca Saire read poems in an uninterrupted sequence of music, poetry and prose on the theme of the seasons. Including A Song of the Seasons by Alfred Perceval Graves, Thomas Hardy's During Wind and Rain, Philip Larkin's And now the leaves suddenly lose strength, and AE Housman's Loveliest of Trees. With music by Vivaldi, Astor Piazzolla, Tchaikovsky, Debussy and Britten.

Taking spring as the starting point, this edition of Words and Music follows the changing seasons of the year. Beginning with On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring by Delius and ending with Vivaldi's Winter, the poetry and music are loosely tied together by movements from Vivaldi's Four Seasons. The programme traces a path from the birth of the year, through the still heat of the summer, the ochre of autumn, winter's dark days, and ending with a glimmer of hope and a hint of spring.

You'll hear a BBC recording of Ted Hughes reading Spring Nature Notes made in 1977. There's Housman's Loveliest of trees and Spring by Thomas Nashe, set by Benjamin Britten in his Spring Symphony.

Thomas Hardy's During wind and rain alludes to thecyclical nature of the renewal of the seasons whilst Amy Lowell's Dog-days talks ofa mutter of thunder in the summer air.

The thundering of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and the hubbub of Messiaen's birds in Chronochromie give way to the stillness of Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915. The autumnal North Wind on the Aeolian harp is complemented by Strauss' Four Last Songs, and the visceral energy of Harrison Birtwistle's Earth Dances takes us from Purcell through to Ives' Unanswered question and finally Vivaldi.

Magic
Sunday 12 August 2007 22:25-0:00 (Radio 3)

Linked to the Shakespeare theme of this year's Proms, Nicholas Farrell and Miriam Margolyes conjure up words on magic by Shakespeare, Pushkin, Martin Feinstein, Chaucer, Derek Walcott and Keats. These are accompanied by the music of Wagner, Mendelssohn and Tippett, among others.

This week's Words and Music explores magic in its many shades, light and dark. Shakespeare, featured in this year's Proms season, is the starting point and the programme includes readings from 'The Tempest', 'Macbeth' and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. Ariel's Songs, or 'spells', punctuate the programme and are accompanied by the song settings of Locke, Purcell and Tippett.

The overall sequence forms an arch as the words and music darken towards the core of the programme where Shakespeare's 3 witches concoct a poisonous brew to the deathly beats of Birtwistle's Earth Dances. As the programme lightens towards its end, Oberon is joined on the 'bank where the wild thyme blows' by a shimmering chorus from Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

At the beginning and end of the programme, the mysterious words used in magic practice float above Ligeti's Atmospheres: abbazabba, alkazam, kedavra and, more familiarly, abracadabra, the meaning of which is contemplated in Ambrose Bierce's poem.

Magic has the power to transform being, like the Cheshire cat in Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland' and Martin Feinstein's poem, 'The conjuror'. Gubaidulina's quirky 'Magic Circles' from Musical Toys links the two texts together while Messiaen's angels from La Nativite du Seigneur picks up on the sinister final turn taken by Feinstein's conjuror.

Two dramatic texts about the darker side of magic flank Shakespeare's 3 plotting witches: Christopher Marlowe's 'Faust' making his pact with the devil and Derek Walcott's Odysseus slowly being lured by a potion into seductress Circe's grip to the hypnotic strains of Stockhausen's Stimmung.

There are the magic people too, like Orpheus, who tunes his lyre, or rather Cowell's Aeolian harp, at the beginning of Joseph Addison's 'Epilogue to British Enchanters' and Gilbert and Sullivan's sorcerer, who makes magic out of word play. Pushkin presents a magical 'Talisman' while Chaucer's Clerk from 'The Franklin's Tale' shows his magical powers to Salzedo's sparkling Jeux d'eau for solo harp.

The programme ends with Browning's 'The Natural Magic' before slipping back into echoes of magic words floating around Ligeti's Atmospheres.

Authority
Sunday 19 August 2007 22:15-0:00 (Radio 3)

Writer and broadcaster Armando Iannucci selects poetry, prose and music around the theme of authority, spanning gods, kings, the state and parents, and encompassing anarchy, rebellion and disobedience.

Including Pope's Essay on Man and excerpts from Milton's Paradise Lost, Primo Levi's If This Is A Man and Orwell's Shooting an Elephant, with music by Britten, Respighi, Joni Mitchell and Copland's Lincoln Portrait narrated by Margaret Thatcher.

Wild Wood
Sunday 2 September 2007 22:40-0:00 (Radio 3)

The Wild Wood is where you find Dante and Winnie the Pooh. It's where you shelter from the storm and where you're stalked by nameless terror. It's a place for monkish retreat and contemplation, and a place where, according to Vaughan Williams, an amorous Sir John Falstaff can be found prancing around with antlers on his head. Readers Emma Fielding and John Rowe take you into this beguiling and bewildering space, with the musical help of Wagner, and Schubert.

What could be more unsettling than the darkness seeping like sump oil from beneath the branches of a pine forest? What's more likely to give imagination wings than a big wind catching at the green sails of a huge chestnut grove? The Wild Wood bewitches as it bewilders.

This was the starting point for me when I began to think about this evening's edition of Words and Music. I wanted to give a sense of both. I also wanted to suggest how the wild wood is with us from the very beginning, from the time when we listen, rapt, to a bed time story such as Wind in the Willows to that moment in anxious adulthood when, like Dante, we look back and wonder how we came to be lost in the dark wood of our lives.

The programme is a kind of journey, beginning with Mole's first encounter with untamed nature and ending with his rescue. The way in which his youthful confidence gives way to speculation and inquiry is reflected in the path the programme takes - where and how did the woods come into being, what gives them their power.

I have included part of the Gaelic poet, Sorley Maclean's wonderful elegy to the woods of Raasay, the island of his birth, as well as Boris Pasternak's perfect lyric on pine trees. The terror of the forest is also there in Messaien's piano portrait of the tawny owl just as the forest's sense of carnival and riot is there in the Wild Rumpus scene from Oliver Knussen's Where the Wild Things Are.

As you would expect there are many moods in between, Sylvia Plath reading her poem about the insidious, spooky power of mushrooms, the hushed flowering of Gyorgy Kurtag's miniatures next to Edward Thomas's meditations on mortality, as well as Vaughan Williams' portrait of the amorous Falstaff stumbling about in Windsor Forest. Something for everyone, I hope.

Zahid Warley - producer

Villains
Sunday 16 September 2007 22:15-0:00 (Radio 3)

A sequence of music and poetry reflecting on villainy, from the Emperor Nero to Billy the Kid. With music by Mozart, Bartok and Stephen Sondheim, and poems by writers including Oscar Wilde, Shelley and Sylvia Plath. Readers: Patience Tomlinson and Jonathan Keeble.

This programme is a counterweight to last week's sequence of poems and music about Heroes. In tone it is inevitably somewhat darker, although there are several characters sufficiently complex and ambiguous to have been included in either programme. There are, in fact, several connections between the two, most notably the inclusion in both of Napoleon (a more subtle connection is Liszt, whose Transcendental Studies provided me with both a hero and a villain).

The villains of this programme are a miscellany of the historical, the mythical and the literary. The sequence begins and ends with musical portraits of the Russian historical figure Ivan Mazeppa, a favourite of the Romantics, who in real life may have been far less villainous than in his poetic depiction by Pushkin, Hugo and others. The richest seam of villainy in music is undoubtedly opera, and it was difficult not to turn the programme into a medley of favourite operatic scoundrels; though I resisted this urge, it proved impossible to omit Scarpia, Don Giovanni and Bluebeard, particularly when there were literary connections I could exploit. Some musical choices (the Scriabin) suggested themselves by mood rather than explicit connection with the subject matter; others (for instance the Shostakovich, described by the composer in his memoirs as "a portrait of Stalin, more or less") have a connection which may not be obvious.

In choosing the poetry for this programme I have aimed at a diversity of voice and period - I have included a few works which may well be familiar, such as Browning's superb and dark My Last Duchess, but also several which were, to me, discoveries, like Cavafy's wonderfully sardonic poem Nero's Term. It would be easy to compile a programme on this theme with a rather unremittingly dark tone - so I have included a few rather lighter poems (Stevie Smith's Lord Barenstock, for instance) which I hope leaven the mood somewhat.

To Byzantium

Sunday 14 October 2007 22:15-0:00

W B Yeats' poem Sailing to Byzantium is the starting point for a theme about the journey of man and the vision of eternal life. Andrew Lincoln and Deborah Findlay read a selection of poetry and prose including John Keats, Longfellow, John Masefield and Adrian Mitchell. With related music by John Tavener, Messiaenand Gesualdo.

This edition takes as a starting point Yeats' poem Sailing to Byzantium for a meditation on immortality and the journey of the soul. The calls of "phos"/light in John Tavener's Ikon of Light hint of the world to come suggested in Yeats' poem. Charles Causley's poem I am the song and the reading of Traherne are a meditation on mans' existence matched with Biber's extraordinary Mystery sonatas in the vibrant recording by Monica Huggett. It is Pierre Boulez' electroacoustic piece Repons, that takes the listener deep into the impenetrable tomb in Anthony Thwaite's Monologue in the Valley of the Kings. The mysteries of life and death lead to Beethoven's monumental Appassionata sonata in a new recording by Paul Lewis.

There are also lighter moments to life's journey with Adrian Mitchell's affectionate poem Elephant Eternity and the nobel prize winner, Wislawa Szymborska's wry poem Utopia accompanied by the shimmering strings of Stanley Black and his orchestra. But, there is also a sinister tone in TS Eliot's Whispers of immortality followed by the brooding darkness of Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem. The journey from life to death is distilled in Emily Dickinson's poem Chariot with the pulsating rhythms of Reich's Music for mallet instruments, voice and organ and in Don Paterson's new translation of Rilke's poem Parting. The programmes ends with Yeats' Byzantium written three years after Sailing to Byzantium and exploring perfection of the human soul in a city of eternal art.

Words and Music 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long). Wild Wood. The Wild Wood is where to find Danteand Winnie the Pooh. It's where to shelter from the storm and where one is stalked by nameless terror. It's a place for monkish retreat and contemplation, and a place where, according to Vaughan Williams, an amorous Sir John Falstaff can be found prancing around with antlers on his head. Readers Emma Fielding and John Rowe visit this beguiling and bewildering space, with the musical help of Wagner, Schubert, and John Coltrane.

Sunday 9th November 2008 (starting this evening). Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long). War and Peace.

On a theme of the eternal struggle between conflict and concord, Joanna David and Paul McGann read poems by Emily Dickinson, George Herbert, John Milton, Wilfred Owen, Edith Sitwell and Walt Whitman. Including music by Bartok, Dowland, William Lawes, Monteverdi and Purcell.

Sunday 16th November 2008 (starting this evening). Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Bridge Passage.

A selection of poetry, prose and music inspired by bridges, with readings by Lindsay Duncan and Adam Godley. Featuring poetry and prose by Friedrich Holderlin, Edmund Blunden, Longfellow, Dickens, Kafka, Nabokov and Nobel Prize-winning Bosnian writer Ivo Andric. The music includes works by Stravinsky, Leo Ferre, Handel, Kodaly, Finzi and Gubaidulina.

Sunday 23rd November 2008 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

With Alison Steadman and Timothy West reading a selection of verse on the theme of food and drink, including Moules a la mariniere by Elizabeth Garrett, Since by WH Auden and Chocs by Carol Ann Duffy as well as Tony Harrison's A Kumquat for John Keats, Hillaire Belloc's On Food and Elizabeth Bishop's The Fish. Interwoven with the poetry is Schubert's Trout Quintet, Feast of the Pheasant by Binchois and Fats Waller performing Hold Tight Want Some Seafood Mama.

Sunday 30th November 2008 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:25 to 23:30 (1 hour and 5 minutes long)

Winter.

A sequence of music and poetry on the theme of winter, with readings by Struan Rodger and Cheryl Campbell. Including works by John Clare, Thomas Campion, Sarah Maguire, Emily Dickinson, Mark Doty and Wallace Stevens, and music by Tchaikovsky, James MacMillan, Jean Redpath, Debussy, Schubert and John Cage.

Sunday 14th December 2008 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Monsters.

A selection of poetry and music on the theme of monsters, with readings by Don Warrington and Carolyn Pickles. Including works by Jack Mapanje, Christina Rossetti, Seamus Heaney, Yeats, Hans Christian Andersen, Robert Browning, Sylvia Plath, Brian Patten, Carol Ann Duffy, Tennyson and Ted Hughes, and music including Grieg, Knussen and Schubert.

“The sleep of reason calls forth monsters” – Goya’s famous words – hover over this week’s Words and Music, which explores the Monster in all its contradictory incarnations, both benign and destructive. Shades of darkness and glimmers of hope haunt the programme.

Sibelius’ overture from The Tempest draws us into the watery world of the Kraken. In Hans Christian Andersen the Little Mermaid braves the monstrous Sea-Witch’s lair to plead for a potion to make her human, and gains her legs only in exchange for a lifetime of pain. Unrequited love and the search for acceptance are part of what it means to be a monster – whether in Handel’s evocation of the one eyed Polyphemus in Acis and Galatea, or the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s poem about Medusa.

The Monster, as a seducer, flickers through Mozart’s Don Giovanni. As a victim, in Browning’s Caliban, he enlists our sympathy. The arrival of the monster doesn’t always herald disaster. In Roald Dahl’s Red Riding Hood the heroine produces a pistol from her knickers and vanquishes the Big Bad Wolf.

With monsters from Grieg, Mussorgsky and Schubert, the monstrous hordes in turn lay waste, cajole and entice.

Performer: Lahti Symphony Orchestra, cond. Osmo Vanska
The Tempest, Overture
Composer: Jean Sibelius
Theatre Music – The Sibelius Edition
CD3 Track 3

Tennyson
The Kraken
From The New Dragon Book of Verse
Reader: Don Warrington

Margaret Atwood
Siren Song
Margaret Atwood Poems (Virago Press 1981)
Reader: Carolyn Pickles

Tim Buckley
Song to the Siren
Composer: Tim Buckley
Acoustic Love
CD2 Track 16

Hans Christian Andersen
Extract from Little Mermaid
From Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales (Penguin 2004)
Tiina Nunnally
Reader: Carolyn Pickles

Alexei Lubimov, piano
Fur Alina
Arvo Part
Post-avant-garde Piano Music from the ex-Soviet Union
Track 3

Performer: Burrowes/Johnson/Hill/White/Cond. John Eliot Gardiner
Acis and Galatea
Handel
Acis and Galatea
CD2 Track 1

W.B. Yeats
Leda and the Swan
By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember, and
Reader: Don Warrington

Playlist
Philarmonia Orchestra & Chorus, Carlo Maria Giulini
Don Giovanni
W.A. Mozart
Fromt Mozart: Don Giovanni
CDC 747260/62 2 EMI
CD 3 Track 10 & 11

Bram Stoker
Dracula (extract)
Reader: Carolyn Pickles

New York Chamber Symphony, cond. Gerard Schwarz
The Minotaur
Eliot Carter
Eliot Carter The Minotaur, Piano Sonata, Two Songs
Track on CD: 11, 12, 13

John Stallworthy
The Trap
The New Dragon Book of Verse
Reader: Don Warrington

M83
Gone
Nicolas Fromageau and Anthony Gonzales
From Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts
Track 11

Jack Mapanje
Beasts of Nalunga (verse I)
From: Beasts of Nalunga (Bloodaxe 2007)
Reader: Don Warrington

Beowulf
From: BBC Sound Archive
Translator: Seamus Heaney
Reader: Seamus Heaney

Bryn Terfel
Erlkonig
Franz Schubert
An Die Musik – Favourite Schubert Songs
Track 11

Christina Rosetti
Goblin Market (extract)
Christina Rossetti, The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics 2001)
Reader: Carolyn Pickles

Florian Henschel
March of the Dwarfs
Edvard Grieg
Edvard Grieg Lyric Pieces
CD2 track 3

Author of poem: unknown
Gawain and the Green Knight
Gawain and the Green Knight (Faber and Faber 2007)
Translator: Simon Armitage
Reader: Don Warrington

London Sinfonietta, cond. Oliver Knussen
The Wild Rumpus from Where the Wild Things Are
Oliver Knussen
Higgledy Pigglety Pop! & Where the Wild Things Are
CD2 Track 10

Playlist
Carol Ann Duffy
Medusa
The World’s Wife (Picador/ MacMillan 1999)
Reader: Carolyn Pickles

Portishead
Glory Box
G Barrow/ B Gibbons/ A Utley/ I Hayes
Dummy

Ted Hughes
Snail of the Moon
The New Dragon Book of Verse
Reader: Don Warrington

Anatol Ugorsky, piano
IX. La Cabane sur des pattes de poule (The Hut of Baba Yaga)
Composer: Modest Mussorgsky
Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition
Track 15

Robert Browning
Caliban upon Setebos
Robert Browning The Poems Volume One (Penguin Classics 1981, 96)
Reader: Don Warrington

Lahti Symphony Orchestra, cond. Osmo Vanska
The Tempest, Caliban’s Song
Jean Sibelius
Theatre Music – The Sibelius Edition
CD3 Track 15

Edwin Morgan
Loch Ness Monster’s Song
BBC Sound Archive
Reader: Edwin Morgan

Roald Dahl
Little Red Riding Hood and The Wolf
Revolting Rhymes (Jonathan Cape 1982)
Reader: Don Warrington

Cat Power
Werewolf
Written by Michael Hurley (string arrangement David Campbell)
Cat Power You Are Free
Track 5

Hans Christian Andersen
Little Mermaid (extract)
Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales (Penguin 2004)
Tiina Nunnally
Reader: Carolyn Pickles

Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Cond. Igor Stravinsky
The Firebird
Igor Stravinsky
Columbia Symphony Orchestra: The Firebird/ Stravinsky
Sony Vlassical SM3K46291
Track 19-22

Sunday 21st December 2008 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:45 to 00:00 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Birdsong.

Claire Skinner and Hugh Bonneville are the readers in a celebration of nature's musicians. The poems include Milton's Nightingale, Hardy's Darkling Thrush and Tennyson's Blackbird, and the music includes Saint-Saens's Cuckoo, Rameau's Hen and Sibelius's Swan of Tuonela.

Sunday 28th December 2008 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Ancient Greece.

Actors Tim McMullan and Clare Higgins read poems and prose by Shakespeare, Keats, Byron, Auden, Homer and Euripides on the subject of Ancient Greece. With music by Schubert, Tippett, Bernstein, Stravinsky, Vaughan-Williams and Ravel.

Sunday 4th January 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

The Year.

Andrew Lincoln and Emma Fielding read a selection of poetry on the subject of the changing seasons. Featuring Ted Hughes's Season Songs interspersed with poems which complement these themes - by Thomas Hardy (The Darkling Thrush), Robert Frost (Prayer to Spring), Wordsworth, Tennyson, William Blake and Kahlil Gibran. With music ranging from Michael Tippett's opera New Year, Piazzolla's vibrant response to the seasons through tango, Mahler's delight in a spring morning in Fruhlingsmorgen and the autumnal Brahms Ballades.

Sunday 11th January 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Through the Looking Glass.

A selection of poetry, prose and music on the theme of mirrors and reflections, with readings by Derek Jacobi and Lesley Manville. With works by Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Jorge Luis Borges interspersed with music by Rachmaninov, Ravel, Clara Schumann and Cole Porter.

Sunday 18th January 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Femmes Fatales.

A programme of poetry and music on the theme of the femme fatale, an idea exemplified in some of the most passionate artistic creations, including Medusa, Delilah, Carmen and Lady Macbeth. Jeremy Northam and Harriet Walter read works by Keats, Spenser, Shakespeare, Wilde, Carol Anne Duffy and Angela Carter, alongside music by Handel, Massenet, Saint-Saens, Richard Strauss, Bizet and Gershwin.

Sunday 25th January 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

In the House of God.

Hugo Thurston and Pookie Quesnel read poetry and prose on the theme of places of worship including work by Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson and Thomas Hardy, with music by Bach, Britten and Monteverdi.

Sunday 1st February 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:35 to 23:30 (55 minutes long)

We Must Love One Another or Die.

Sian Thomas and Nicholas Farrell read poetry and prose from the 1930s by Louis MacNeice, Sylvia Townsend Warner, John Steinbeck, George Orwell, Dylan Thomas and WH Auden, with music by Britten, Barber, Robeson, Bela Bartok and Noel Coward.

Sunday 22nd February 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:25 to 23:30 (1 hour and 5 minutes long)

Harold Pinter.

A special of the programme devoted to Harold Pinter, who died in December 2008, featuring archive recordings of the playwright and actor himself reading poems by Thomas Hardy, Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and his own poetry. The programme also includes new readings by Michael Gambon and Penelope Wilton. Gambon reads the passage from No Man's Land he read at Pinter's request at the playwright's funeral, a passage from Proust's Time Regained, a poem by WS Graham, a poet much admired by Pinter and an unpublished poem heard for the first time, To My Wife, dedicated to Antonia Fraser. Penelope Wilton's readings include a passage from Old Times and, with Michael Gambon, she reads the passage from TS Eliot's Little Gidding chosen by Pinter for her to read at his funeral. There are also some of the late playwright's favourite music, by Miles Davis, Bach, Thelonius Monk, Schubert (played by his friend Mitsuko Uchida) and Beethoven, alongside music from one of the films he wrote - The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Sunday 8th March 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Insects.

Poetry, prose and music devoted to the world of insects, and the beauty and variation to be found within, with readings by Ewan Bailey and Rachel Atkings. Including Thom Gunn's poem Considering the Snail, DH Lawrence's The Mosquito and Robert Burns' To A Louse, as well as music by Josquin, Roussel, Bela Bartok and Martin Carthy.

Yuck. Insects. ;-)
Has anyone, by chance, recorded "Femmes Fatales" in January? Or the "American Landscape" of last week? I've been wrapped up in real life and haven't checked the radio listings (or this group)...

No answer to your request Girlfrom - but these programmes will probably be repeated at some point.

Today:

Sunday 22nd March 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Words and Music - Years Of Wonders.

Juliet Stevenson and Kenneth Cranham read prose and poetry describing the momentous times that the composer Henry Purcell would have witnessed. He was a baby at the Restoration of Charles II to the throne, but would have known the Great Plague and Great Fire of London. In adulthood,he would have seen both the accession and the forced abdication of James II in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as well as the coronation of James's daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange. Readings include excerpts from Pepys, Evelyn, Dryden, Aphra Behn and Defoe, while the music includes Purcell and his contemporaries alongside works from the 20th century.

Sunday 29th March 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Young and Easy.

Readings of poetry and prose, interspersed with music. A programme of words and music exploring the intensity of youth and its transience. Hattie Morahan and Sam West read poetry and prose by Wordsworth, Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, Thom Gunn, AE Houseman, Evelyn Waugh, Sylvia Plath, Jane Austen and Caroline Bird. The music of youth includes Debussy, Schumann, George Butterworth, Prokofiev, Thomas Morley, Britten and Bernstein.

Sunday 5th April 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Correspondence.

A selection of poetry, prose and music centring on correspondence - between poets, musicians, lovers and friends. With writings by Kafka, Ovid and Mary Wollstonecraft interspersed with music from Arthur Honegger, Steve Reich, Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington.

Sunday 26th April 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Food For Thought.

A selection of poetry, prose and music on the subject of food, with readings by Samantha Bond and Robert Powell. Including stories from the Bible, poetry by Robert Frost and Carol Anne Duffy as well as writings by Jane Grigson, Marcel Proust, Samuel Pepys and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Music includes Chabrier, John Cage, Schubert, Stravinsky and Bach.

Sunday 10th May 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:30 to 23:30 (1 hour long)

The Faerie World.

A selection of poetry, prose and music on the theme of the fairy tradition, with readings by Stella Gonet and Robert Glenister. With works by Keats, Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, Christina Rossetti and Yeats interspersed with music by Stravinsky, Judith Weir, Schubert, Purcell and Kathryn Tickell.

Sunday 24th May 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Do Not Go Gentle.

Barbara Jefford and Neville Jason explore the adventure of entering our 'third age', and the challenges and consolations of old age. With readings from Shakespeare, Yeats, Browning, Dylan Thomas, Roger McGough and Dannie Abse, and music including Verdi, Mahler, Strauss, Beethoven, Ravel and Jerome Kern.

Sunday 31st May 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 23:00 to 00:00 (1 hour long)

Illumination.

Poetry, prose and music on the theme of illumination, with readings by Sian Thomas and Jamie Glover. Including works by Rimbaud, Jo Shapcott and Margaret Atwood with accompanying music by Thomas Ades, Arvo Part and Franz Schubert.

Message edited by its author, May 31, 2009, 3:04am.

Sunday 7th June 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:25 to 23:30 (1 hour and 5 minutes long)

Man and Beast.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music examining the relationship between humans and animals, with readings by Hermione Norris and Jim Norton. Including works by John Donne, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, WH Hudson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge among others, interspersed with music from Barber, Vivaldi, Haydn, Britten, Noel Coward, Tom Waits and Johnny Cash among others.

Sunday 14th June 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

The Best Days of Our Lives.

Sarah Lancashire and Paul Copley read poetry and prose about the experience of going to school. Including writings by Laurie Lee, DH Lawrence, Muriel Spark, Roger McGough and Carol Ann Duffy, as well as music by Malcolm Arnold, Frank Loesser and Alice Cooper.

Sunday 21st June 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Ideas of Wilderness.

Jenny Agutter and Anton Lesser explore ideas of wilderness from all corners of the globe, reading works by W H Auden, eco-writer Jeffers Robinson, the Australian Elizabeth Brown, Shackleton and the Taoist wilderness literature of Ancient China. Music includes excerpts from Messiaen's Des Canyons aux Etoiles, Redolfi's Mare Teno, Purcell's Solitude and Shostakovich's 8th String Quartet.

Sunday 5th July 2009 (starting in 1 day)
Time: 22:30 to 23:30 (1 hour long)

Cheryl Campbell and Douglas Hodge explore the world of science in poetry and prose with work by Miroslav Holub, Mary Shelley, Thomas Hardy, Fleur Adcock and Emily Dickinson and music by Philip Glass, Dvorak, Takemitsu and Bach.

Sunday 12th July 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:45 to 23:45 (1 hour long)

The Soft Machine.

A sequence of poems read by Anna Maxwell Martin and John Rowe interspersed with music, all on the theme of the body. The programme features writings by Walt Whitman, Homer and Auden along with music from Tchaikovsky, Monteverdi and Charles Mingus.

Sunday 19th July 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

As part of the BBC Poetry Season, a selection of poems recommended by BBC Radio 3 presenters. Including work by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Keats, WH Auden, Emily Dickinson, Edna St Vincent Millay and Maya Angelou, and music by Strauss, Bach, Shostakovich, Haydn and Yasmin Levy. The choices include Jez Nelson on Langston Hughes's The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Sara Mohr-Pietsch on Gerard Manley Hopkins's Peace, Suzy Klein on On First Looking into Chapman's Homer by Keats, and Iain Burnside on I Heard a Fly Buzz by Emily Dickinson. The readers are Tamsin Greig and Alex Jenning.

Saturday 1st August 2009 (Already shown)
Time: 18:00 to 19:30 (1 hour and 30 minutes long)

Italian Fantasy.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music inspired by travellers to Italy. Actors Emily Bruni and Benedict Cumberbatch read poetry, including works by Byron, arch-Italophile Robert Browning and EE Cummings, who depicts numberless hordes of tourists to Italy clutching cameras. With prose from Henry James, explaining Wordsworth's enthusiasm for a particular Italian pine tree, cookery writer Elizabeth David on white truffles and American writer Eleanor Clark, who found the fountains of Rome surprisingly shocking. The music includes Berlioz's Harold in Italy inspired by Byron, Bob Dylan's When I paint my masterpiece, Respighi's depictions of the pines and fountains of Rome and the vocal sound of the Italian trallalero team Vagabondo.

Sunday 2nd August 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:30 to 23:35 (1 hour and 5 minutes long)

The Double.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music exploring the disturbing world of shadows and ghostly doubles, with readings by Janie Dee and Nicholas Farrell. With works by Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dostoevsky, Heine, Wilde, Robert Lowell and Khalil Ghibran, interspersed with music by Bach, Boulez, Schubert and Steve Reich.

I'm just browsing this thread after being away travelling for a while. I'm very grateful to antimuzak for keeping us posted - the notes are at least as good as the R3 official emails and I'm about to take advantage of some of these programmes while I work. Thank you!

#40. > Yuck. Insects. ;-). GirlFromIpanema. Hahahaha! This struck me though... what is wrong with insects? They do so many useful things and on top of all that are (OK, cockroaches, botfly and mosquitoes excepted) beautiful! Sorry, I can't help getting enthused by insects - seeing a breathtakingly beautiful butterfly sail by, for me, surpasses any human work of art. Just curious...

Chris, I was just looking for something semi-witty to say ;-). That being said, I have been battling white flies and aphids on my balcony today (with "sticky cards" and soapy water, plus brushing them off MY tomatos and MY chillies. These bastards have no reason to live --or at least not off MY vegetables! *grrr*

Yes, I sort of agree GirlFrom. I had an infestation of my gooseberry bushes this year - rampant caterpillers that rapidly feasted on the leaves. I tried liquid detergent and water, they fell off and then just climbed back up and I was only able to squish a few. They were so destructive! Eventually, I resorted to commercial killing spray that assures me that fruit is able to be eaten only a few hours after spraying.

But, what do we expect? We create these super fruits and at the same time kill off all alternative food sources. The insects have as much right to this as we do. The problem is that we now have the ability to zap these things out of existence to satisfy our own needs to overpopulate the planet. How do we get off of this road to destruction?

Not sure how this relates to radio 3?

Hmm... GFI, sounds like not enough ladybirds / lacewings to me! Sorry, I shouldn't have side-tracked. I've searched, but I can't find anything on R3 to justify it either. Surely someone must be making music based on insect sounds....

Something more here for you Chris!

Sunday 9th August 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:45 to 00:00 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

To Strive, to Seek, to Find and Not to Yield.

In a programme celebrating the work of Tennyson, Beth Goddard and Michael Pennington read poetry from Tennyson himself and others on the theme of destiny, alongside with music inspired by, and reflecting the texts. The poetry is represented by excerpts from favourites such as The Lady of Shalott and Ulysses. With works by Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Andrew Marvell, Dylan Thomas and TS Eliot, as well as music from Vaughan Williams, Britten, Hubert Parry, Richard Strauss and Arthus Bliss among others.

Wonderful! Dylan Thomas, VW, Britten and Parry to boot! Thank you!

Saturday 15th August 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 18:00 to 19:30 (1 hour and 30 minutes long)

The Geography of a Home.

Belinda Lang and David Bamber read poems on the theme of houses and homes. With poetry by WH Auden, Philip Larkin and Ivor Gurney interspersed with music by Sibelius, Chopin and The Beatles.

Sunday 30th August 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:30 to 23:30 (1 hour long)

Russian Dreams.

A journey to Russia, as imagined by poets and musicians: natives, exiles and foreigners. Music by French composer Tournemire conjures up the bells of Moscow, while verses by Marina Tsvetaeva give a Russian literary slant on the same subject. Stravinsky depicts his homeland from the perspective of both resident and emigre, one in an unabashedly Russian vein, the other unmistakably coloured by his exposure to American jazz. Including poems by Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Lermontov and Osip Mandelstam, and music by Borodin, John Field and Schnittke. Readings by Andrew Sachs and Siobhan Redmond.

Sunday 6th September 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:30 to 23:30 (1 hour long)

Warriors.

An exploration of the warrior in poetry and music, from classical heroes to contemporary soldiers. Deborah Findlay and Don Warrington read poetry and prose on the theme of warriors, from Beowulf and Gawain to Tennyson and Shakespeare's Henry V, alongside music ranging from Stravinsky to June Tabor.

Saturday 12th September 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 18:00 to 19:30 (1 hour and 30 minutes long)

Ballad of the Northern Lights.

Douglas Hodge and Stella Gonet read poetry and prose on the theme of the North - from Ted Hughes, Katrina Porteous, Philip Larkin and Kathleen Jamie. Music includes Sibelius's Symphony No 4, Delius's North Country Sketches, Holst's A Moorside Suite and Ewan MacColl's The Shoals of Herring.

Message edited by its author, Sep 12, 2009, 2:14am.

Argh! *scrambles to record last week's broadcast* Thanks for the reminder(s), antimuzak.

And another one on Sunday evening:

Sunday 13th September 2009
Time: 22:45 to 23:45 (60 minutes long)

In the Park.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mm0lw
A sequence of poetry, prose and music on the theme of public parks, with readings from Greta Scacchi and Henry Goodman.

Including writing by Ted Hughes, DH Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Gwen Harwood and Sara Teasdale, as well as music from Handel, Saint-Saens, Debussy, Phyllis Tate and Nina Simone.

Thanks Girlfrom, I always look forward to this mix of words and music which produce interesting and often surprising illuminations. One of the best programmes on radio.

Sunday 20th September 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

The Ark.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music centring on the perennially fascinating story of Noah and the Ark, with readings from Claire Skinner and Andrew Scott. Writings by Chaucer, Blake and Milton jostle with comedians Bill Cosby and Stanley Holloway among others. Music is by Britten, Saint Saens, Bruch and Rossini.

Sunday 27th September 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

An American Landscape.

Actors Ian Barford and Jeff Perry, from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, read works on the theme of the American landscape. With prose by John Steinbeck and Henry James, plus poetry by Robert Frost and John Ashbery interwoven with music by Charles Ives, Woodie Guthrie, Samuel Barber and Irving Berlin.

Yay! American Landscape! (see my message #40. Now if they would repeat Femmes Fatales --I'd die a happy woman.)
:-)

Hope you caught if GirlFrom. Femmes Fatales in American Landscapes ............. Interesting

Sunday 11th October 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Power.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music on the theme of power, with readings by Sheila Hancock and Tom Hollander. With poems from Percy Shelley, Ted Hughes, Rudyard Kipling and Margaret Atwood, archive readings from Philip Larkin and Edith Sitwell, as well as music by Prokofiev, Steve Reich and Vivaldi.

Sunday 18th October 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 23:00 to 00:00 (1 hour long)

Walkers, Wanderers and Wayfarers.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music on the theme of walking, featuring readings by Clare Higgins and Ian McDiarmid. With excerpts of writing by Thoreau, Edward Thomas, WH Davies, William Wordsworth and Alfred Wainwright, as well as music by Mussorgsky, Elgar, Richard Strauss, Vaughan Williams and Lou Reed.

Sunday 1st November 2009 (starting in 1 day)
Time: 22:35 to 23:35 (1 hour long)

Illumination.

Poetry, prose and music on the theme of illumination, with readings by Sian Thomas and Jamie Glover. Including works by Rimbaud, Jo Shapcott and Margaret Atwood with accompanying music by Thomas Ades, Arvo Part and Schubert.

Sunday 8th November 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Berlin.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music evoking the history of the city of Berlin, with readings by Henry Goodman and Liz Sutherland. Including music by Richard Strauss, Felix Mendelssohn and Schoenberg as well as Eisler and Weill, plus performances from Otto Klemperer among others. With texts by Alfred Doblin, Joseph Roth, Bertolt Brecht and Gunter Grass as well as Anna Funder and Emine Sevgi Ozdamar.

Sunday 15th November 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:15 to 23:30 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Solitude.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music exploring the theme of solitude, with readings by Paul McGann and Kirsty Besterman. With works from Alexandre Dumas, William Wordsworth, Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson and Maya Angelou as well as music from J S Bach, Delius, Richard Strauss, Scriabin and Thelonius Monk.

Sunday 29th November 2009 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:45 to 23:45 (1 hour long)

The Metaphysical Soul.

Anna Massey and Derek Jacobi read a selection of poems by metaphysical poets John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Carew and Andrew Marvell. These are interspersed with the five sections of Burnt Norton, the first of the four Quartets by TS Eliot. Including music by Mahler, Takemitsu, Britten, William Byrd and Beethoven.