91Èȱ¬ Radio 3
Radio 3's highlights include a 90-minute drama All Quiet On The Western Front - based on the German book about futile life in the trenches, a 45-minute documentary called Rebellion And Fear about less familiar poets and painters reaction to the war presented by art critic Richard Cork and a special broadcast of Britten's War Requiem.
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Discovering Music: Vaughan Williams And The Lost Generation
(Sunday 9 November)
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Part of the pan-91Èȱ¬ season marking the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War, today's Discovering Music sees Stephen Johnson looking at three English masterpieces in their historical context.
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Ralph Vaughan-Williams's The Lark Ascending was begun in 1914 and is one of the composer's best-known works. Stephen Johnson joins 91Èȱ¬ National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Michael Seal with violinist Lesley Hatfield and tenor James Gilchrist for an exploration of the English idyll in the light of some of the English music to have appeared in the lead-up to the Great War - specifically Butterworth's rhapsody A Shropshire Lad and Vaughan Williams's On Wenlock Edge.
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Drama On 3: All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
(Sunday 9 November)
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All Quiet On the Western Front, first published in 1929, quickly established itself as one of the greatest war novels of all time, selling 2.5 million copies in 25 languages.
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It is a 20th century classic and although it has been famous as a masterpiece of the cinema, this is the first radio adaptation.
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All Quiet On The Western Front is a First World War story told from the German perspective. The story is of four 18-year-olds and their company on the Western Front, fighting in the trenches over a period of years.
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The young men go to war only to be disabused of all notions of Kaiser and country and all finally perish in the mud of Flanders.
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Our guide through this is Paul Baumer and the story follows him and his company through years of fighting, resting behind the lines, going on leave, fraternising with local girls, arguing about the meaning of their lives and, in the end, dying.
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All Quiet On The Western Front is dramatised for radio by Dave Sheasby, whose dramatisation of George Steiner's short story Cake brought praise from the writer himself. Dave has written extensively for radio and has been nominated for a Sony award for his radio work.
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The cast includes Robert Lonsdale, Simon Trinder, Gunnar Cauthary, Lloyd Thomas, Joseph Arkley, Stephen Critchlow, Malcolm Tierney, Stuart McLoughlin, Dan Starkey, Luke Walker, Tim Treloar, Nick Sayce, Janice Acquah, Donna Hughes, Jill Cardo, Carolyn Pickles, Inam Mirza, Paul Rider, Chris Pavlo and Manjeet Mann.
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Sunday Feature: Rebellion and Fear - Artists in the Great War (Sunday 9 November)
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The Great War was crucial to the development of the early avant-garde art movement in Europe. Art critic Richard Cork explores how the conflict figured in the lives and work of leading visual artists.
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From a new exhibition that recently opened in Madrid, it seems that, in the first years of the war, many European artists had a kind of war fever. We hear how the Italian, Marinetti, the founder of Futurism visited the cities of industry, including London in 1912, urging artists to rally and embrace modernity.
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In Britain, artists including Jacob Epstein, David Bomberg and Wyndham Lewis moved to develop a new movement in art, named by Ezra Pound as 'the Vorticists'.
We hear from Michael Nyman, a long admirer of the work of David Bomberg, who is contemplating composing an opera on Bomberg's work, and Richard explores the little known fact that the sculptor Henry Moore served in the First World War.
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Just 18 years old when he fought on the front line at the Battle of Cambrai, Moore refused to describe the shock and repulsion of his war experiences, but his figures with gas masks, amputated limbs and pierced bodies reveal the horrors he witnessed.
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