BBC Radio 3 Autumn season: opera, anniversaries, technology and memory

The BBC Proms finished on Saturday, which means that BBC Radio 3 schedule gets back to normal and the Autumn season starts. Like many other organisations Radio 3 is linking up with the Victoria and Albert Museum's Opera: Passion, Power and Politics exhibition. Other highlights include a new series from Clemency Burton-Hill exploring the impact of technology on creativity, as well as Why Music? The Key to Memory, a weekend of events at the Wellcome Collection.

Radio 3's Opera on 3 will be broadcasting all seven operas featured in the V&A's Opera: Passion, Power and Politics exhibition, and there will also be a chance to catch up on Jonas Kaufmann's debut in the title role of Verdi's Otello in a recording from Covent Garden, and Nico Muhly's new opera Marnie will be broadcast from English National Opera.

Another big feature of the Autumn schedules is Sir Simon Rattle taking up the baton at the London Symphony Orchestra, and Radio 3 will be broadcasting live from the ten-day This is Rattle festival at the Barbican.

Why Music? The Key to Memory, is a free weekend of events and broadcasts exploring the relationship between music, memory and the mind in collaboration with Wellcome Collection. BBC Radio 3 will present a series of live events and programmes, discussions will explore everything from power of song in helping people living with dementia and how conductors learn complicated musical scores, to how jazz improvisation works. There will be performances of four world premieres, including a new work by Scottish composer Martin Suckling, composer and performer Kerry Andrew and works by three young composers taking part in the BBC Proms Inspire scheme.

In Select-Copy-Paste, Clemency Burton-Hill will will explore the impact of technology on creativity, across three episodes tracing the creative process, from conception and execution, to sharing and experiencing.

Anniversaries include the 30th anniversary of the death of Jacqueline du Pre, and Daniel Barenboim will be conducting a memorial concert with the West Eastern Divan Orchestra. The London Sinfonietta is celebrating its 50th anniversary and Radio 3 will be broadcasting the anniversary concert live as well as transmitting other events from the celebrations. Radio 3 will also be marking the 50th anniversary of the European Broadcasting Union's regular music exchanges, with a live transmission of the celebratory concert from LSO St Luke's with the BBC Concert Orchestra joined by current or former members of the BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists scheme: violinist Esther Yoo and viola player Eivind Holtsmark Ringstad come together in Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, and Pavel Kolesnikov is the soloist in Beethoven’s Emperor concerto.

Happy Birthday Radio 3

Radio 3 presenters celebrate the 70^th anniversary of the Third Programme, the predecessor of BBC Radio 3, on Thursday 29 September. L-R: Lopa Kothari, Sara Mohr-Pietsch, Max Reinhardt, Tom Service, Katie Derham, Petroc Trelawny, Sean Rafferty

Today is |BBC Radio 3's 70th birthday. The radio station was founded in 1946, as the Third Programme, and at 6 pm tonight (29 September 2016), the time at which the Third Programme first went on air, there will be jollification on air and at the Southbank Centre where the presenters from the station are in residence at a pop-up studio as part of a two week residency, Sound Frontiers, from 23 September to 7 October.

So there are celebrations at the Royal Festival Hall this evening, and a specially commissioned drama on Radio 3.  The celebrations are part of a whole season of broadcasting on Radio 3 celebrating 70 years, which launches today and lasts 70 days. Events include the young composer Matthew Kaner being embedded with the station. He will work day-to-day for the entire 70 days, establishing his voice with Radio 3’s listeners via a diverse portfolio of short pieces, among them a premiere every Monday morning for Radio 3’s Breakfast programme.

Seven composers, including Laura Jurd, Laurent Durupt, Jane Harbour and Kate Whitley, are being given their first Radio 3 commission to write a ten minute work, to be performed by a BBC Performing Group or Radio 3 New Generation Artist. Innovative newly composed music projects conceived specifically for radio and celebrating the broadcasting medium will include Matthew Herbert’s Requiem and Florian Hecker's site specific sound installation for BBC Maida Vale Studios. Established composers are being commissioned to write a significant work marking the 70th anniversary for future premier in 2017/18 including a piano concerto from Ryan Wigglesworth and a new work from Tansy Davies for the BBC Philharmonic.

A day with Bach - Bach Marathon with John Eliot Gardiner

Like much of Britain, we took advantage of the Easter weekend to get away and we spent a large chunk of Easter Monday travelling back from the East Midlands. This meant that we listened to substantial amounts of John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Marathon on BBC Radio 3 on the car radio. It proved an uplifting and illuminating way to travel, experiencing Bach's music continuously and one again marvelling at his genius. John Eliot Gardiner proved a stimulating companion, both in his music making and in his introducing of the music. The main performers were his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, with guest appearances from Alban Gerhardt, Viktoria Mullova and John Butt. The BBC dipped in and out of the events in the hall, so that it was actually rather difficult to ascertain quite what the Royal Albert Hall programme was.

Tenebrae - Proms Chamber Music Concert

I caught the second Proms Chamber Music concert, 23 July, on Radio 3 broadcast live from the Cadogan Hall. In it, the chamber choir, Tenebrae, conductor Nigel Short, gave a programme which mixed Orlando Gibbons’s The Cryes of London with Steve Martland’s more contemporary take on similar material, Street Songs. In the middle, the premiere of a BBC commission from Julian Philips, Sorrowful Songs.