Hours of pleasure

On the subject of works that first inspired us (see also Letter of the Month, left), Children’s Hour on the BBC Home Service in the late 1940s introduced me to the delights of classical music. Works I encountered there included an extract from Walton’s Façade, used to introduce the whimsical

Said the Cat to the Dog, and Elgar’s gentle Chanson de Matin, which preceded the exciting thriller serial Bunkle Butts In. On Mondays, Helen Henschel gave a series of talks entitled Music at Random which she introduced with a piano arrangement of the main theme from the last movement of Brahms’s First Symphony, and another Children’s

Hour serial began with an excerpt from a Shostakovich symphony. Determined to hear more Shostakovich, I thus embarked on my first voyage of discovery to the Third Programme, an experience which, at about nine years of age, I confess initially left me somewhat bewildered!

Robert Darlaston, Goostrey