What's your earliest memory of R3/Third Programme

[cmr_for3]

I am interested to hear from our number your earliest memories of R3/Third Programme.

I never grew up listening to it but I have a hypothesis that a lot of members here did.

Be interesting to see if I am right.

I used to skip past it R3 whilst station skipping as a kid as there seemed to be nothing playing!

I came to Radio 3 via Classic FM as a student from what I can remember. I usually have a good memory but on the change in my listening habits I'm foggy. I know getting a smart phone and Iplayer radio had a lot to do with it (2015 seems to have been am important year...

CoTW got me hooked and I've not looked back.

[ahinton]

I am interested to hear from our number your earliest memories of R3/Third Programme.

I never grew up listening to it but I have a hypothesis that a lot of members here did.

Be interesting to see if I am right.

I used to skip past it R3 whilst station skipping as a kid as there seemed to be nothing playing!

I came to Radio 3 via Classic FM as a student from what I can remember. I usually have a good memory but on the change in my listening habits I'm foggy. I know getting a smart phone and Iplayer radio had a lot to do with it (2015 seems to have been am important year...

CoTW got me hooked and I've not looked back.

John Ogdon playing Chopin's Fourth Ballade more years ago than I want to recall...

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

My parents used to moan about the Third Programme. I thought this must be because of inferior content, but it wasn't that at all. It was because in our part of Cheshire, it was barely possible to listen to it, as we only had an AM radio and the reception for that channel was terrible. The Home Service and Light Programme were fine. However, when my dad realised I liked classical music, he bought a very smart Perdio VHF radio, and I was hooked from the early 60s onwards.

[DracoM]

Had heard stuff before, but the biggest sustained impact...............?
Sunday evenings: regular autumnal relays of recordings of the Bayreuth Fest / Wagner when I started my first job while living solo in a smelly little flat in Lancashire. Utterly compelling
AND...of course.............
Anthony Hopkins's mesmerising 'Talking about Music': quiet, alert, instructive - i.e. everything Tom Service isn't.


Other things too, much earlier, notably generated out of my school's Music Circle [and...ahem... oh the shame I cringe at now....of then talking about Stockhausen in the desire to appear just a tad superior in the tiny little clique of six that had stuck together and tried EVERYTHING from Y11 onwards when I had first arrived at the school and on.......

[Edgy 2]

1970/71
Classical music on the radio in the mornings
Tom Crowe
Interpretations on record
Anthony Hopkins talking about music
Sounds interesting (prog rock show,Sunday evenings)

[Petrushka]

I got to like classical music via Radio 2 (Your 100 Best Tunes etc) in the late 1960s aged around 14/15 and in those days I used to listen to Test Match Special on the Third/Radio 3. When rain stopped play (a not infrequent occurrence!) the station used to revert to playing music and I used to stay with it. I can remember listening to the Bruno Walter/Kathleen Ferrier Das Lied von der Erde that way for the first time as well as the LSO/Solti Mahler 1.

That's how I got to R3!

[cloughie]

464m white at the top, Home service was on 434m and Light Programme on 1500m red at the top. The colour referred to the knob which had to be turned before then turning the tuning knob. I seem to remember in the early days broadcasts were limited to certain hours of the day, evenings only. This would be sometime in the 1950s. Dad was a regular listener! There were also many music programmes on The Home Service including Music Magazine. 1964 it was renamed Network Three, and hours increased. Then the transition to R3 in 1967 followed by 26 years of great broadcasting and 26 years of decline!

[Serial_Apologist]

My first time consciously was hearing what I think must have been the second only performance of Walton's Symphony No 2. That would have been in 1960. Dad had recorded it onto Scotch tape from Medium Wave - he always said he preferred Medium Wave, even after VHF came in, because he liked the much heavier emphasis on the bass register! - and the applause at the end went on for ten minutes! After that he taught me how to use the machine, so I could record programmes while he was at work and I was on my school holidays, and I remember selectively recording Hindemith's Clarinet Concerto and Symphony for Wind Band, Messiaen's "Chronochromie" and "Oiseaux exotiques", and Bliss's Colour Symphony in rapid succession, simply because they were names in a book on modern music which I had just then obtained. I was thirteen at the time, and it was the proper start to my passion for all things "modern": the jazz enthusiasm took off a couple of years later, but I don't remember any of it being on Radio 3, more likely The Light Programme.

[Bryn]

An uncle of mine, an optical physicist, introduced me to two major influences, the Third Programme via VHF (as FM was commonly referred to as in the '50) and Tom Lehrer. I nagged my parent for several years before they eventually caved in and got a VHF radio for the kitchen. The vast majority of 'art music' I was introduced to was via the Third. However, it's all too long ago to recall what exactly the first programme on the Third that I heard was.

[Nick Armstrong]

Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto from the Proms coming out of a transistor radio one evening on a family dormobile holiday somewhere in England (probably Northumberland) some time in the mid-70s...

[Cockney Sparrow]

I got to like classical music via Radio 2 (Your 100 Best Tunes etc) in the late 1960s aged around 14/15 and in those days I used to listen to Test Match Special on the Third/Radio 3. When rain stopped play (a not infrequent occurrence!) the station used to revert to playing music and I used to stay with it. I can remember listening to the Bruno Walter/Kathleen Ferrier Das Lied von der Erde that way for the first time as well as the LSO/Solti Mahler 1.

That's how I got to R3!

I too followed up pieces/composers from programmes such as 100 Best Tunes and Desert Island Discs etc, using the excellent local record library. I must have persuaded my family to buy the Radio Times and was listening to Radio 3 - and seen the blurb about Mahler's 8th for a performance by C.U.M.S at Ely under Willcocks - recording it onto reel to reel tape is my first specific Radio 3 memory - geeting on for 40 years ago.
An earlier memory is Kathleen Ferrier on the home service in about 1960 - Che faro....... (But I also found George Formby engaging and funny.......).

[rauschwerk]

My parents used to moan about the Third Programme. I thought this must be because of inferior content, but it wasn't that at all. It was because in our part of Cheshire, it was barely possible to listen to it, as we only had an AM radio and the reception for that channel was terrible. The Home Service and Light Programme were fine. However, when my dad realised I liked classical music, he bought a very smart Perdio VHF radio, and I was hooked from the early 60s onwards.

Yes, I remember Third Programme medium wave reception in Kent being terrible as well. I recall my brother and myself straining to listen to Shostakovich 8 in the late 50s but giving up after the third movement. Soon after that, my parents bought an FM radio - that would have been around the time when William Glock started the Invitation Concerts. I certainly got to know pieces by Stravinsky (Concerto for two pianos) and Bartok (Sonata for two pianos and percussion) from those broadcasts.

I recall also taping part of a Saturday afternoon concert on spec, as it were - works by Arthur Butterworth (didn't much care for that) and Philip Cannon (Concertino for piano and strings, which I did like, and which was was for a time very popular). Who plays works by those two nowadays, I wonder?

[antongould]

Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto from the Proms coming out of a transistor radio one evening on a family dormobile holiday somewhere in England (probably Northumberland) some time in the mid-70s...

R3, LVB and the pit heaps - could there be anything better Rumpole ..... ????

The Bishop of Hereford on Private Passions ..... which wasn’t really back in the day ......

[Bryn]

. . . I certainly got to know pieces by Stravinsky (Concerto for two pianos) and Bartok (Sonata for two pianos and percussion) from those broadcasts.

And Boulez's Le Marteau sans Maitre, I would hope. Cornelius Cardew learned to play the guitar specifically to perform in that very first Invitation Concert. I am not aware of him ever returning to the instrument in public performance. Piano and cello were his most frequently used instruments, with a strong and virtuosic emphasis on the former.

[Pulcinella]

I can remember trying to record (via a microphone into a reel-to-reel recorder) a performance of Britten's Ceremony of carols, from a portable Dansette radio rather like this:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dansette-111-portable-radio-1960s-in-green-vinyl-covered-case-fully-working/184370958243?hash=item2aed5d8fa3:g:t8oAAOSwYy9fFhUN

I was upstairs in my parents' bedroom (better reception/quieter).
Just how I knew that it was going to be on, I don't know.
We sang the piece at school, so maybe the music master told us?

I had my own VHF portable radio by about 1967, as a birthday or Christmas present, and used to listen on that.