Radio 3’s all-star cast for autumn season

SIR SIMON Rattle, Dame Diana Rigg, Toby Jones, Dame Vivienne Westwood and Armando Iannucci are among the stars who will be on BBC Radio 3 this autumn.

Kwame Kwei-Armah, Charles Dance, Kraftwerk and David Threlfall are also taking part in the autumn/winter season across the music and culture station.

Highlights from the upcoming season include the broadcast of live concerts marking the return of Sir Simon to the UK from Berlin and a two-week Russian focus marking the centenary of the revolution.

Mountaineer Gwen Moffat, 93, lays down a challenge – is it possible to take her climbing again? In a new poetry commission, Helen Mort picks up the gauntlet with an original poem recorded in binaural sound to give Moffat the sense of teetering on the edge of a rock face.

The station will embark on its most ambitious Slow Radio broadcast yet, with Horatio Clare attempting to recreate the sense of the landmarks along Johann Sebastian Bach’s famous journey from Arnstadt to Lubeck.

As part of the wider BBC Opera Season, BBC Radio 3 will broadcast all seven operas featured in the V&A’s upcoming opera exhibition, in collaboration with the Royal Opera House. A presenter reshuffle will see Suzy Klein join Rob Cowan on Essential Classics. Sarah Walker will get her own show, as the sole presenter of Sunday Morning on Radio 3.

Launching the new season, Radio 3 Controller Alan Davey said he wants the station to be “an antidote to today’s often frenzied world”.