The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Gerard O’Donovan On my wavelength
Another gem from the New York Met’s winter season in tonight’s Opera on 3 (Radio 3, 6.30pm). David McVicar’s new production of Umberto Giordano’s Fedora features soprano Sonya Yoncheva as the Russian princess who falls for her fiancé’s murderer, Count Loris, sung by star tenor Piotr Beczala. Earlier, Drama: Death and the Penguin (Radio 4, 2.45pm) is an adaptation of Andrey Kurkov’s hit black comedy set in the chaotic, newly independent Ukraine of the mid-1990s.
Perfect timing for an edition of Words and Music (Sunday, Radio 3, 5.30pm) on the theme of Warmth, with actors Amanda Hale and Oliver Alvin-Wilson charting a course through the many ways in which writers (from John
Donne to Zadie Smith) and musicians (from Tchaikovsky to Tori Amos) have interpreted the sensation, from fireside cosiness to anxiety about global warming and the inner warmth of affection, friendship and love.
The quiet lives of small towns ignored by the national media are the subjects of Ian Wylie’s Inside Pages (Monday-Friday, Radio 4, 1.45pm). They don’t have football teams, or famous beauty spots to attract tourists, or even marginal seats to draw election-time coverage. What they do have in common, says Wylie, is that they’re largely invisible to the media, other than those who run local newspapers and websites. Wylie begins on Monday with Caerphilly in south Wales.
Amiable comedian Chris McCausland tells Matthew Parris on Great Lives (Tuesday, Radio 4, 4.30pm) why Kurt Cobain deserves a place in the hall of fame and how, as lead singer and songwriter for Nirvana, he became the voice of a generation. Worth a listen, too, is Tuesday’s Free Thinking (Radio 3, 10pm), which explores the legacy of one of medieval literature’s most vivid characters, Chaucer’s saucy Wife of Bath.
The great thing about the bite-size health tips on Just One Thing with Michael Mosley (Wednesday, Radio 4, 9.30am) is that you don’t have to take them all on board. You can latch onto any one of his suggestions to make a small but significant difference to your wellbeing. Previous tips covered everything from napping regularly to eating more beetroot. Today he looks at the benefits of “reaching out” and how regular contact with friends and family boosts the brain and immune system, reduces stress and helps us to live longer.
Live from the Wigmore Hall in London, Thursday’s Radio 3 in Concert (Radio 3, 7.30pm) sees one of the UK’s leading sopranos, Carolyn Sampson, join forces with an outstanding Scandinavian ensemble, the Finnish Baroque Orchestra. Pieces written by Handel during his sojourn in Italy in the early 1700s are interspersed with sonatas by two of the great musicians he went out of his way to meet on his travels, Domenico and Alessandro Scarlatti.
Peter Terson was known for his plays about working-class life in Britain. As such, Tales My Father Taught Me (Friday, Radio 4 Extra, 10am & 3pm), a 1990 radio adaptation of a memoir by Osbert Sitwell is a curiosity. Particularly so with John Gielgud, in one of his last radio roles, in the lead as Osbert’s (Richard Pearce) eccentric father, Sir George Sitwell, an obsessive recluse whose chief interests are running the family’s vast Derbyshire estates and ensuring his eldest son and heir never, ever gets to do what he wants to do.