#third programme

[bbcradio3]

23 October 1946. The Third Programme, Radio 3's predecessor station, was only a few weeks old. The centrepiece of the evening's output was Paul Hindemith's complex, neo-classical piano work 'Ludus Tonalis', played by young Australian pianist Noel Mewton-Wood. This splendid picture shows Hindemith conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a studio performance of his 'Requiem' in 1955. The composer died in 1963. Listen to Donald Macleod's epoisode of Composer of the Week about Hindemith on the Radio 3 web site.

[bbcradio3]

Harold Pinter's play 'A Slight Ache' had its world premiere on the Third Programme on this day in 1959. The cast included Pinter himself, under his stage name David Baron, in a silent role, Maurice Denham and Vivien Merchant. Ian Rodger, in The Listener, wrote:

A conversation piece between a man (Mr. Maurice Denham) and his wife (Miss Vivien Merchant) who talked variously about the weather, sex and a seller of matches whom they inveigled into the house. The match seller never spoke, which involved Mr. Pinter in some dramatic expertise, but it was hard to know, in spite of the sharp clarity of the performance and the sure speech formations of Mr. Denham and Miss Merchant, what the play was really all about.

The picture of Pinter was taken ten years later during production of a BBC TV programme.

[bbcradio3]

What a splendid picture. What a splendid cast! For Shakespeare’s 383rd birthday, members of the Old Vic Theatre Company appearing in Richard II at the New Theatre, London, recorded their production for a BBC Home Service transmission on this day in 1947. In the studio, left to right, George Ralph (Duke of York); Alec Guinness (King Richard); Nicholas Hannen (Earl of Northumberland); Margaret Leighton (Queen); Ralph Richardson (John of Gaunt) and Harry Andrews (Henry Bolingbroke). Listen to Sunday’s 450th birthday production of ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, with Alex Kingston and Kenneth Branagh, on the Radio 3 web site, from anywhere in the world in 320K HD Sound, for the next four days.

[bbcradio3]

Richard Burton, narrator, and Douglas Cleverdon, producer, during recording of Burton's part in Dylan Thomas's 'Under Milk Wood'. Burton was 'first voice' for the first transmission on the Third Programme at 7.25pm on 25 January 1954. This picture is from rehearsals for the 1963 recreation.

[bbcradio3]

On this day in 1960, the first of William Glock's 'Thursday Invitation Concerts' on the Third Programme. Boulez's 'Le marteau sans maître' was sandwiched between two great Mozart string quintets. That was the format: a 'difficult' new work between two better-known ones. The picture shows Pierre Boulez in 1966. Between 1971 and 1975 Boulez was principle conductor at the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

[bbcradio3]

"You want to be all by yourself and see the silly ants going up and down and give them sugar and stamp on them."

'The Ants' was Caryl Churchill's first radio play. It was transmitted on the Third Programme on 27 November 1962. She was 24. Special effects were provided by the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop. These pictures were taken at the Workshop in Maida Vale in the same year.

[bbcradio3]

11 October 1946. The first radio broadcast, on the Third Programme, of Benjamin Britten's 'The Rape of Lucretia', written for Kathleen Ferrier (top, in 1948). The cast also included Peter Pears (middle right, in 1962) and Joan Cross (bottom, in 1937) as the male and female choruses. The opera had had its premiere at Glyndebourne in July of the same year, with the same cast.

[bbcradio3]

John Berger, critic, novelist, painter, poet, gave a talk on the Third Programme on this day in 1952. It was about his feelings while drawing from life. He was 26. The picture was taken during production of a BBC TV programme based on his book 'Pig Earth' in 1979. He was 54. The programme billing reads:

For several hundred years painters have made a regular practice of drawing from the nude model. The process serves as a discipline for training in the observation of form and structure and in the coordination of hand and eye. In this talk John Berger, a young painter and art critic, analyses his own reactions as they occurred while he was making a drawing from a model.