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Ballerina by Annemarie Heinrich (1933)
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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 called '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.
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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.
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"His dialogue runs as smoothly as a conference between cliché experts even when his people are considering a scheme for supplying eagles with parachutes and spectacles." - The Listener, 28 July 1960
's absurdist gem 'A Resounding Tinkle' had its theatre premiere at the
on 1 December 1957 and its first broadcast adaptation appeared on the
on 20 July 1960.
and
starred. Frederick Laws, quoted above, also said: “The play was very amusing but I also found it alarming and difficult to understand.” Simpson - pictured, in 1963 - lived until 2011 and his final play, ‘If So, Then Yes’, had its premiere in London in 2010.
microphone...
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Sidonie Goossens was a legendary musician. Principal Harpist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra for over fifty years, from its very beginning until her retirement, on this day, in 1981. She worked with composers and conductors like Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. Pierre Boulez, Principal Conductor from 1971-1975, said of her:
Always her presence was reassuring, her professional conscience irreproachable, her attitude faultless. She loved her metier, her instrument. All this, really, was the reflection of her personality for which I have had from the first instant, not only the greatest admiration, but also an immense affection.
She died in 2004 and her last appearance at the BBC Proms was in 1991.Click the individual pictures for the original captions.
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Andy Pandy, children’s TV puppet. A creature of powerful popular resonance in Britain, born on this day in 1950, in a live children’s TV programme watched by millions. The programme ran on BBC TV until 1970 and was revived several times after that. This 1950 photograph from the BBC archives is, incidentally, as far as I can tell, an outrageous, pre-Photoshop fake. You can definitely see the join.
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The BBC once had dozens of orchestras. Ensembles of every size: jazz and dance bands, full-sized symphony orchestras, chamber groups, choirs and choruses. They were needed to fill the airwaves with music at a time when an agreement with the musicians’ unions allowed only five hours per day of recorded music across all of the BBC’s stations. Today, the BBC still supports five orchestras and one choir and, between them, they perform over 400 concerts per year, providing an enormous amount of content for Radio 3 in particular.
On this day in 1934, the splendid BBC Midland Orchestra, pictured, made one of its regular appearances on the BBC’s National Programme, from a studio in Birmingham and broadcast on medium wave from the Daventry transmitter. The Radio Times doesn’t record what they played but they were on-air for an hour from 2pm, between a twenty-minute programme of dance music on record and an hour of music from the Torquay Municipal Orchestra. Frank Cantell, deputy conductor, directed the performance.
Masters of Melody is a very comprehensive web site about those early BBC orchestras and ensembles.
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Anita Ekberg
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21 May 1950. Lime Grove. The BBC opens new studios in West London, meant to provide a temporary home for the TV service while the much bigger, purpose-built Television Centre is planned and built round the corner. Inevitably, it was 42 years before Lime Grove was closed (the last live show was on 13 June 1991) and it became home to dozens of the biggest shows of the era, including Steptoe and Son, Doctor Who and daily magazine show Nationwide. More important, Lime Grove is still home to fictional TV news programme The Hour.
The top picture was taken on the day Lime Grove was opened. In the studio: Lady Attlee. The other pictures were taken on various dates during the 1950s.
I'm fascinated by early television cameras...
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Federico Fellini by William Klein 1956
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On Radio 3’s morning show ‘Essential Classics' this week, Rob Cowan's artist of the week has been conductor and composer Malcolm Sargent. Here’s one of those splendid ‘pretend you’re conducting something’ shots from the BBC archive. The picture was taken on 11 August 1947 so it’s right in the middle of that year’s Proms season and Sargent was almost certainly in the midst of rehearsals for that evening’s Prom - the London Symphony Orchestra performing Tchaikovsky, Starokadomsky and Rimsky-Korsakov (with an overture by John Ireland mid-concert). This was Sargent’s first year as principal conductor at The Proms and, like Henry Wood before him, he conducted almost every concert. Details of every Prom since the first season in 1895 in Proms Archive.
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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 Third Programme 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.
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Happy birthday Radiophonic Workshop! Not the first specialist electronic music studio in the world, but one of the most innovative and certainly the most influential. Even if you’ve never heard of it, the sounds the Workshop inserted into the British sonic landscape over the four decades of its life will be familiar to you.
The Workshop got started in its Maida Vale home on this day in 1958, although its various engineers and artists had been working together for some time. Naturally enough, the Third Programme was critical to the early history of the workshop and the one of the earliest programmes to make use of its exotic, synthetic sounds was a fifty-minute ‘radiophonic poem’ by BBC radio drama producer Frederick Bradnum (that’s him in the bottom photo), broadcast in October of the previous year (earlier still was a Third Programme Beckett commission). In the pictures you’ll see Daphne Oram, Donald McWhinnie, Desmond Briscoe, Richard Bird and Frederick Bradnum. Click the pictures for the original, more detailed, captions.
Here’s a useful history of the Workshop and an article about the female composers and engineers of the Workshop.
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Audrey Russell was a true radio legend of the post-war period. Her voice would have been known to millions while radio was still the senior service. She presented programmes of every kind, from live recordings of the VE Day celebrations to the 1952 Coronation and hundreds of others in between.
On this day in 1964 - early in the space race, when only a handful of humans had orbited the earth and before the first close-up images of the moon - she presented a remarkably prescient discussion on the Third Programme about the threat of human contamination of space. Professors of radio astronomy Sir Bernard Lovell and Martin Ryle, meteorologist J.M. Stagg, biologist A Miles and professor of international law R.Y Jennings brought their expertise to the topic.
The programme lasted for an hour and was followed by music for wind instruments by Mozart.
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Dr Charles Hill was the ‘The Radio Doctor’ during WWII, dispensing stern health advice to a nation adjusting to a restricted diet and all the stresses of war and war work. He was never named on air but became famous nonetheless and, after the war, became an administrator and a committee man. In 1967 Prime Minister Harold Wilson appointed him Chairman of the BBC Governors, a controversial appointment. He’s shown, at the mic, during a broadcast on this day in 1954, sixty years ago today.
dat mic...