Download audiobook

 

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

Purchase...

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.

-

 

Forty Years On

Author : Alan Bennett

Performed By : Full Cast Production

Publisher : BBC Audiobooks Ltd

Runtime : 1 hour 35 minutes

Categories : Dramatizations

Our Price : $13.49

Purchase...

The Headmaster has been at Albion House for fifty years, man and boy. Now he is retiring and tal<es part in the end-of-year entertainment for the last time. Entitled Speak For England, Arthur, It weaves together a multi-generational story of England: the glorious era at the turn of the century, when the summers were always golden: the fast-living inter-war years peopled by the Bloomsbury Group: and the growing cynicism of a country facing a second world war with the scars of the first still fresh in their memories.

Tongue-in-cheek, the play-within-a-play prompts an outraged response from the Headmaster, who can only see his beloved standards being mocked. Yet within the parody lies an almost painful nostalgia for a more peaceful age and the timeless misunderstanding of one generation by another.

Clever, funny and poignant, Alan Bennett's masterful play is rightly regarded as a modern classic.

Written By
Alan Bennett

First Broadcast
BBC Radio 4
28 August 2000