The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
On My Wavelength
Aweekend of big-hitters starts with a moody two-part Macbeth (Saturday and Sunday, Radio 4, 3pm) starring David Tennant as Shakespeare’s tragically flawed hero and Daniela Nardini as his ruthless wife, Lady Macbeth. Even more atmospheric is Opera on 3: Peter Grimes (Radio 3, 6.30pm), in Deborah Warner’s new production at the Royal Opera House, with Allan Clayton singing Grimes, Maria Bengtsson as Ellen and the great Bryn Terfel as Balstrode. And if that’s a mite too high culture, a weekend of 80th birthday tributes to Barbra Streisand kicks off with Archive on 4: To Barbra (Radio 4, 8pm), Maureen Lipman’s homage to one of Hollywood’s most powerful women.
Hard on the heels of Macbeth, yet more Shakespeare. Drama on 3: Make Death Love Me (Sunday, Radio 3, 7.30pm) is an exceptionally engaging reworking by Neil Bartlett of Antony and Cleopatra. He foregrounds the dysfunctional love story between needy Egyptian empress Cleopatra (Adjoa Andoh) and Roman general Mark Antony (Tim McInnerny), emphasising how powerful folk wage bloody war for personal reasons as well as for survival.
Brighten up your mornings with razor-sharp dispatches from the legal frontline in Book of the Week: Nothing but the Truth (Mon-Fri, Radio 4FM, 9.45am).
The anonymous criminal lawyer behind the award-winning Secret Barrister blog has just published a third book on the parlous state of justice in 21st-century Britain.
Here they trace their journey from trainee at the bar to the reforming author who has amusingly (and often shockingly) lifted the lid on the imperfect British legal system.
In Mary Portas: On Style (Tuesday, Radio 4, 11.30am), the retail expert begins a new four part-series reflecting on contemporary fashion by looking at the current state of menswear. Taking the ongoing Fashioning Masculinities exhibition at the
V&A as a jumping-off point, she juggles the UK’s “really wonderfully proud tradition of peacocks, dandies and natty dressers” with the vast majority of British men’s preference for “kind of blendy-in clothes”.
In a novel twist on the truecrime podcast Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley (Wednesday,
Radio 4, 11.30am & BBC Sounds) sees the historian reassess 10 cases of murder by Victorian women from a contemporary, feminist perspective. Today, Worsley explores the sensational story of Florence Bravo, the woman at the heart of one of Victorian Britain’s most debated unsolved murders.
There’s a superstar guest on Ken Bruce (Thursday, Radio 2, 9.30am) as Michael Bublé plays a session for Radio 2’s Piano Room. Back in February the Piano Room hosted a raft of top artists playing with the BBC Concert Orchestra in one of the station’s biggest celebrations of live studio performance in years. Keen not to be left out, the Canadian crooner, who’s in the UK to promote his first new album in three years, contributes today.
The BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s series of CoLaboratory concerts are known for their expectation-defying fusions of musical genres. In Radio 3 in Concert (Friday, 7.30pm), the Franco-Irish conductor, violinist and composer Fiona Monbet joins the orchestra to perform her suite, Trois Reflets, which weaves together classical, jazz, and folk. Monbet also conducts Milhaud’s
La création du monde and the world premiere of Luke Styles’s saxophone concerto Tracks in the Orbit, with soloist Iain Ballamy.