The Radio 3 Documentary
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The Radio 3 Documentary
In-depth documentaries which explore a different aspect of history, science, philosophy, film, visual arts and literature. The Sunday Feature is broadcast every Sunday at 6.45pm on BBC Radio 3.
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229 EpisodenSound Sources
Paul McCartney, Jean-Michel Jarre and Lee Renaldo on their debt to classical music.
Time Canvasses - Morton Feldman and Abstract Expressionism
In a remarkable moment after WWII New York became the centre of the art world, simultaneously seeing the development of new ways of hearing music, and...
Tuner of the World
"For the next hour, I need your ears". It's 1974 and someone is trying to recruit you for a listening experiment on public radio in Canada.
Pio...
Supply Lines
Via ports and truck-stops, fulfilment centres and ring roads, Aidan Tulloch follows the supply chain and reimagines the journey an item goes on in the...
New Generation Thinkers: The Perfect Balance
Dr Anindya Raychaudhuri searches for different perspectives on the idea of balance.
The Pleasures and Pains of Denton Welch
Denton Welch lived the last years of his short life in Kent during the Second World War. His writing career took off in 1943 and in the same year he m...
The Black Cantor
Known in Yiddish as Der Schvartze Khazn--the Black Cantor--Thomas LaRue Jones was an African American tenor who sang Jewish music in the early decades...
Sunday Feature - Shakespeare's Brum Ting
Over a century ago, in 1881, the city of Birmingham purchased a copy of Shakespeare's first folio. It was to be the crown jewel of their new Shakespea...
X-Ray Vision: Rudolph Fisher in Harlem
Lindsay Johns makes the case for writer Rudolph Fisher's portraits of Black American life
Heinrich Heine: The First Modern European
One day, three decades after the event, the German poet and man of letters, Heinrich Heine, stood on the site of the battle of Marengo, one of Napoleo...
Government Song Woman
American musician Rhiannon Giddens investigates the fascinating life and recordings of the folk song collector Sidney Robertson Cowell. Travelling tho...
Tutu - A Portrait of Nigeria
Chibundu Onuzo tells the fascinating story of ‘Africa’s Mona Lisa’ and artist Ben Enwonwu.
O Sole Mio
“All Neapolitans were born to be musicians, to be singers,” says musicologist Dr Dinko Fabris, referring to the foundation myth of Naples, according t...
Metal City
Metalworking has been central to the rise and success of Birmingham over hundreds of years. But how has this industry affected the culture of the city...
Rebel Sounds: Musical Resistance in Barbados
From 1627-1807, nearly 400,000 human beings were kidnapped, sold and shipped in horrific conditions across the Atlantic Ocean from West Africa to the...
Yiddish Glory
During World War II, approximately 1.6 million Soviet, Polish and Romanian Jews survived the Holocaust by escaping to Soviet Central Asia and Siberia,...
Scott Ross - Harpsichord Rebel
In 1984, an American harpsichord player called Scott Ross quit a teaching job in Canada and returned to France, the country that since he was a teenag...
Unlocking Anne
Anne Lock, a woman living in 16th-century England, wrote the first ever sonnet sequence in the English language? Impossible, thought Clare Pollard. As...
What Walls Hold
London. Tavistock House. 1851. It shaped Charles Dickens’ life and career.
Home to The Smallest Theatre in the World, Mrs Weldon’s Orphanage a...
Sunday Feature: Shostakovich and the Battle for Babi Yar
Dmitri Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony was inspired by an unflinching poem about the ‘Holocaust of Bullets’ at Babi Yar in Ukraine, one of the bigg...
Briggflatts - A Northern Poetic Odyssey
Rory Stewart travels across Cumbria and Northumbria from an ancient Quaker meeting house in Brigflatts, to a medieval tower on Newcastle city walls, i...
Sunday Feature: Florence Price’s Chicago and the Black Female Fellowship
The remarkable female musicians and activists who helped Florence Price's music to thrive
Tchaikovsky's Island of Inspiration
If it hadn’t been for Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s love of jam, he may never have completed his first large-scale work. After graduating from the Conservatory...
Then there was Light - Stockhausen and LICHT, his opera cycle based on the seven days of the week
LICHT, the vast opera cycle composed by Karlheinz Stockhausen between 1977 and 2004 is an enigma, and composer and broadcaster Robert Worby goes on a...
Even more Kershaw Tapes
During the 1980s and 1990s, DJ Andy Kershaw travelled around Africa and the Americas searching out great music and taping it on his Walkman Pro, a new...
More Kershaw Tapes
In this episode, Andy meets Kenyan harpist Ayub Ogada on a beach in Cornwall, the Antioch Gospel group in a car park in New Orleans, Cuarteto Iglesias...
New Generation Thinker short feature: Hilltop Histories
Seren Griffiths uses a walk along a sandstone ridge in Northern Cheshire to explore the way a landscape can hold multiple histories, and in doing so m...
NGT The Balcony
New Generation Thinker Dr Islam Issa has a strong cultural attachment to the Balcony. In his native Egypt, the place where architectural historians be...
The Apple and the Tree
When he was a boy and returned to the family home from primary school in the afternoon, Carlo Gébler would often hear the sound of typing coming from...
Sunday Feature - Dissecting Beethoven
An exploration of Beethoven’s music through the body that gave him so much trouble.
Sunday Feature: The Fake Poet
Why does the image of the forlorn and abandoned poet Thomas Chatterton haunt us today?
The Silence of My Pain
Hannah French explores a hidden disability for many musicians: pain.
New Generation Thinker short Feature: COVID and The Black Death, an imperfect fit.
It's understandable that, with the onset of a global pandemic, commentators have looked to the past for comparisons. But Dr Seb Falk is concerned that...
Silent Witness: John Cage, Zen and Japan
John Cage is arguably the most important composer of the 20th century, even though he's perhaps famous, or infamous depending on your point of view, f...
The Crankiness of C.W.Daniel
New Generation Thinker Elsa Richardson on the radical 20th century publisher C.W.Daniel.
The Queen Of Technicolor
Marie-Louise Muir traces her childhood idol Maureen O’Hara’s journey from Dublin's suburbs to star of the Golden Age.
The East Speaks Back
We are used to getting a worldview from the west, but what did the east make of us? Jerry Brotton heads to Istanbul on the trail of one the world's gr...
Ken Campbell as Never Heard Before
David Bramwell with actors whose lives were transformed by director Ken Campbell.
Glitter and Villainy
Daisy Black, Radio 3 New Generation Thinker, investigates the camp villain in history.
Rewiring Raymond Scott
At the height of his fame as a jazz composer and band leader in the late 1930s, Raymond Scott was billed as ‘America’s Foremost Composer of Modern Mus...