Audio book

 

Hymn: Alan Bennett And The Medici String Quartet

Author : Alan Bennett and George Fenton

Performed By : Alan Bennett

Publisher : BBC Audiobooks Ltd

Runtime : 50 minutes

Categories : Biographical
Music Related
Comedy
Biographical
Non Fiction

Our Price : $7.49

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Recorded live for BBC Radio 4, Hymn is a memoir of music in childhood, written by Alan Bennett and George Fenton

 

'I am one of those boys, state-educated in the Forties and Fifties, who came by the words of Hymns Ancient and Modern by singing them day in, day out in school every morning at assembly. It's a dwindling band... you con pick us out at funerals and memorial services because we can sing the hymns without the book'

To mark their 30th anniversary, the Medici Quartet asked composer George Fenton and writer Alan Bennett to collaborate on a piece for performance at the Harrogate International Festival. The result was Hymn, a meditative piece, by turns funny and

melancholy, in which Bennett looks at the part which music played in his childhood, at his father's doomed attempts to teach him the violin, and at what hymns mean to him now. The illustrative suite for strings, played by the Medici Quartet , draws on a range of musical references including Elgar, Delius and several well-known hymns. Recorded in front of an audience at the BBC Radio Theatre, Hymn is prefaced by an introduction from the author.

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Brideshead Revisited

Author : Evelyn Waugh

Performed By : Full Cast Production

Publisher : BBC Audiobooks Ltd

Runtime : 4 hours

Categories : Classic Literature
Classics

Our Price : $22.25

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'Here, at the age of thirty nine, I began to be old. '

In 1944 Captain Charles Ryder travels with a company of soldiers to Brideshead. It's a place he's been to before, and one which serves as a potent reminder of the decadent and stylish lifestyle now destroyed by the austerity of the Second World War.

Evelyn Waugh's moving and nostalgic novel revisits a golden age, when Ryder was a student at Oxford in the 1920s and in thrall to the captivating but tragic Sebastian Flyte. As the story unfolds over the next two decades, Ryder traces his friendship with Sebastian and his involvement with the young man's aristocratic Catholic family - in particular Julia, the eldest Flyte daughter.

Ben Miles stars as Charles Ryder with Jamie Bamber as Sebastian in this full-cast dramatisation, which also features Eleanor Bron and Edward Petherbridge.

Written By
Evelyn Waugh

First Broadcast
16 March 2003

NUMBER OF EPISODES
4

Last Broadcast
6 April 2003