A Beat in TimeSunday 21 October 2007 22:15-0:00 (Radio 3) Actors Greta Scacchi and Greg Wise delve into poems on the subject of time: lives ticking away as the poets contemplate ageing and change, the rhythm of life and clocks themselves - objects that rule our lives. With poems and prose by Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, Wendy Cope, Sylvia Plath and Shakespeare and music by Haydn, Ravel, Bach and Philip Glass. Duration:1 hour 45 minutes A Beat in Time Greta Scacchi (reader)
 Greg Wise (reader)
Producer's Note
Time is the Words and Music theme tonight - time and the rhythm of life, so connected with sequence and order, the shared fabric of music and poetry and increasingly our most valued and scarcest commodity.
The poets speak of time from the sands of prehistory, as in DH Lawrence's phantasmagorical musing on the Hummingbird, right up to the most present-tense of writing, like ee cummings's ecstatic celebration of life I thank you god for most this amazing day.
We've also a movingly beautiful archive of the late R.S. Thomas reading his nocturnal reflection on the deity, The Other, in which time is measured in prayers, like waves, breaking on God.
And to bring us back to earth, Kit Wright's poem All Souls is about ageing not so gracefully while listening to scratchy Schubert records.
There's a two thousand year old Chinese poem, putting a brave face on going bald - time, in this case, measured in clumps and patches.
Crystal Bacon writes about the out-of-synch ticking of two clocks by her bedside. John Berger contemplates a different sort of out-of-synch: separation and loss, or just the separateness of people, in an untitled poem from his book and our faces, my heart, brief as photos. "How to measure" he asks, "a season against the calendar of your absence?"
Greta Scacchi reads the Shakespeare Sonnet "When I do count the clock that tells the time", set to Brian Eno's ambient masterpiece, Music for Airports, as well as a wonderfully alliterative passage from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. And she also delivers her favourite poem, Sylvia Plath's Morning Song about birth and motherhood. Greg Wise takes on Burnt Norton, TS Eliot's broad and deep meditation on time, and plenty more.
One small, almost postscript - Greta Scacchi brought along a book of poems to the recording session: Who Said the Race Is Over by Anno Birkin, a feverishly gifted young writer and musician whose family and friends were robbed of his talent for life when in 2001, aged 20, he was killed in a car accident.
Personally, I think Michael Ondaatje gets it just about right when he writes, from his collection, "The Cinnamon Peeler": strange how. however briefly, bedraggled history focuses.
Paul Frankl (producer)
Playlist 00:00:00
JS BACH
Prelude in C Major, BWV 846
Keith Jarrett, piano
ECM 1362/63 835 246-2 CD1 Tr 1
00:00:34
ECCLESIASTES 3:1-8
To Everything There is a Season
Read by Greta Scacchi and Greg Wise
00:02:08
SYLVIA PLATH
Morning Song
Read by Greta Scacchi
00:03:11
RAVEL
Laideronette (Mother Goose Suite)
Lyon National Opera Orchestra
Kent Nagano, conductor
ERATO 0630 14331 2 Tr 11
00:05:21
KIT WRIGHT
All Souls
Read by Greg Wise
00:04:40
SCHUBERT
Litanei
Elisabeth Schumann, soprano
Gerald Moore, piano
EMI CHS 7630402 CD1 Tr 23
00:08:56
LOUIS MACNEICE
Time Was Away
Read by Greta Scacchi
00:11:14
JS BACH
Canons BWV 1072-1077
Gottfried von der Goltz and friends
HANSSLER CLASSIC 92133 Tr 17-22
00:17:29
PHILIP GLASS
Symphony For Eight (3rd movement from Symphony No. 3)
Cello Octet Conjunto Iberico directed by Elias Arizcuren
ORANGE MOUNTAIN 0032 Tr 1
00:17:52
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Ends of the Earth
Read by Greta Scacchi
00:22:19
ee cummings
I thank you god for most this amazing day
Read by Greg Wise
00:23:10
ERIC WHITACRE
I thank you god for most this amazing day
Polyphony, conducted by Stephen Layton
HYPERION CDA67543 Tr 1
00:29:05
RS THOMAS
The Other
Read by RS Thomas
BBC ARCHIVE: POETRY NOW (14SX0383)
First broadcast 2nd May 1980
00:29:40
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
Pastoral Symphony, 1st movement
London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Richard Hickox
CHANDOS CHAN 10001 Tr 2
00:40:15
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
Read by Greta Scacchi
00:42:22
PHILIP GLASS
Morning Passages (from music for The Hours)
Michael Riesman, piano
Orchestra conducted by Nick Ingman
NONESUCH 79693-2 Tr 2
00:45:00
JOHN BERGER
On your island
Read by Greg Wise
00:48:00
DH LAWRENCE
Hummingbird
Read by Greta Scacchi
00:48:55
BRIAN ENO
Large Bell improvisation and Lithuanian Bell studies
Performed and produced by Brian Eno
OPALCD 02 Tr 10 & 5
00:50:45
BRIAN ENO
"1/1" (Music for Airports)
Performed by Bang on a Can All-Stars
POINT 5368472 Tr 1
00:51:45
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Sonnet no.12 "When I do count the clock that tells the time"
Read by Greta Scacchi
00:54:52
CRYSTAL BACON
Between the Beating Clocks
Read by Greta Scacchi
00:55:25
MASON, WATERS, WRIGHT, GILMOUR
Time
Performed by Pink Floyd
EMI 5821362 Tr 4
00:55:57
HAYDN
Clock Symphony
La Petite Bande, conducted by Sigiswald Kuijken
DEUTSCHE HARMONIA MUNDI 05472773512 Tr 2
01:04:25
WEBERN
5 pieces for Orchestra Op. 10: No. 3 - Sehr langsam und ausserst ruhig
Ensemble Intercontemporain, conducted by Pierre Boulez
DG 457 637-2 CD3 Tr 7
01:04:35
WENDY COPE
On Finding an Old Photograph
Read by Greta Scacchi
01:06:00
DUPARC
L'invitation au voyage
Regine Crespin, soprano
Janine Reiss, piano
EMI CMS 7644342 CD3 Tr 13
01:06:06
DH LAWRENCE
Piano
Read by Greg Wise
01:10:44
ANONYMOUS:
On His Baldness
Read by Greg Wise
01:11:50
LYADOV
Musical Snuff Box Op. 32
USSR Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Yevgeny Svetlanov
MELODIYA 1000140 Tr 7
01:14:10
ANNO BIRKIN
There's hope despite time
Read by Greta Scacchi
01:14:40
LIGETI
Etudes pour piano: Der Zauberlehring
Jurgen Hocker, player pianos
SONY SK62310 CD1 Tr 18
01:16:45
MESSIAEN
Quatour pour la fin du temps: Louange a l'Eternite de Jesus
Gil Shaham (violin), Paul Meyer (clarinet)
Jian Wang (cello) Myung-Whun Chung (piano)
DG 4690522 Tr 5
01:17:00
TS ELIOT
Burnt Norton (Four Quartets)
Read by Greg Wise
01:26:35
PHILIP LARKIN
Long Sight in Age
Read by Greta Scacchi
01:27:05
JOHN CAGE
In a landscape
Alexei Lubimov, piano
ECM 1771 Tr 2
01:33:50
WILLIAM COWPER
A Comparison
Read by Greg Wise
01:34:45
BYRD
Pavin Johnson's Delighte, BK5a
Davitt Moroney, harpsichord
HYPERION CDA 66551/7 CD2 Tr 1
01:39:54
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Tempest: Our Revels now are Ended
Read by Greg Wise
DON'T MISS:
Words and Music live, Saturday November 10th 2007, 8.30pm
St George's Small Concert Room, William Brown Street, Liverpool, L1 1JJ
Join Cathy Tyson, Ensemble 10/10, saxophonist Tim Whitehead, New Generation Jazz Artist Gwilym Simcock and singer Jennifer John for a unique Words and Music event, as part of the Radio 3 Free Thinking festival.
The theme of "Freedom" will be explored, with readings of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Tennyson and music from Janacek, Bach and Stravinsky to improvisations on Ellington's Come Sunday and The Beatles' Free as a Bird.
Tickets are still available from Radio Merseyside on 0151 708 5500.
Details are also available on the Free Thinking website www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/freethinking
The programme will be broadcast on 11th November in the usual Words and Music slot.
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