MUMBAI: From Breakfast in the morning right through to Jazz On 3 at night, BBC Radio 3 will salute a snapshot of under-25-year-olds working in the arts with live interviews, music, commissions and features throughout the day. Tipped as 'ones to watch', the young artists involved come from a variety of backgrounds and all corners of the UK - some more established, some at the very beginning of their career - working in fields as diverse as music, poetry, dance, composing, writing, video art, fashion design and photography.
Alan Davey, Controller of Radio 3 says, "BBC Radio 3 is committed to nurturing young talent as part of our support of the creative industries in the UK and the wider BBC Arts and BBC Music strategies. In addition to our existing new talent schemes, Young Artists Day is our chance to put the spotlight on the young people who are at the very beginning of their career in the creative sector. At BBC Radio 3 we value highly the contribution from young creative talent and recognise that this next generation of young artists will be part of the artistic fabric of the UK for many years to come. We're really excited to share with our listeners some of the big names of the future."
The day of programming dedicated to young artists kicks off with Breakfast (6:30-9:00), when teenage poets Isla Anderson and Magnus Dixon join Clemency Burton-Hill to perform a selection of their new poems live on the show, before Sarah Walker welcomes 18-year-old dancer and choreographer Folu Odimayo into the studio for a live interview in Essential Classics (9:00-12:00). Surrey-born Folu, who is a member of the prestigious National Youth Dance Company at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, will choose some of his favourite classical music to be played in the programme. Sarah’s Artist Of The Week is 22-year-old classical pianist Benjamin Grosvenor, and Five Reasons To Love will play recordings from the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, with a different youth orchestra featured throughout the week. The programme will also hear from fashion designer Richard Malone, 23, who is a graduate of London’s Central Saint Martins art school and a winner of the LVMH Grand Prix scholarship.
Martin James Bartlett, the teenage winner of BBC Young Musician 2014, discusses Mozart’s early years with Donald Macleod in Composer Of The Week (12:00-13:00), then in a special edition of Afternoon On 3 (14:00-16:30), Welsh 22-year-old Lloyd Coleman joins Ian Skelly live in the studio to talk about life as a young composer. The Royal Academy of Music graduate, who is visually and hearing impaired, is particularly passionate about disability art and regularly works with the British Paraorchestra. He performed with them at the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Paralympics. Birmingham-raised video artist Ruth Spencer Jolly, 21, and self-taught oboist and composer Michael Sluman, 24, will also feature in the programme.
Young Artists Day then goes live to London’s iconic Roundhouse, the arts venue dedicated to young creatives, for a special youth-focused live edition of In Tune (16:30-18:30). Presented by Sean Rafferty, the show will present a unique mix of classical music and carnival-inspired sounds in a special collaboration between Radio 3 and the Camden venue’s own young artists. The programme will include live performances and interviews with carnival band Kinetika Bloco, singer-songwriter Jess Carmody, the award-winning Artesian Quartet and the Roundhouse Choir. Plus, young producers from Roundhouse Radio, an online youth-led radio station which acts as a platform for the next generation of radio talent, have created two radio features exclusively for In Tune, which will explore the different ways classical music influences today’s young musicians and creative artists.
In another special programme for Young Artists Day, Composer Of Tomorrow (18:30-19:30) sees famed Scottish composer James MacMillan give a masterclass to three young composers including the classically trained Montgomery Sadler, 24, while Radio 3 Live In Concert (19:30-22:00) comes live from Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music with Sara Mohr-Pietsch presenting a concert combining exciting new music composed and performed by students from the college with classic works by composers such as Stravinsky and Dvorak. The interval will include a feature with 22-year-old Nottingham native and photographer/artist Edward Dowsett.
Ian McMillan then brings listeners a showcase of young writers and performers in a special broadcast of The Verb (22:00-22:45). Recorded in front of a studio audience at BBC’s MediaCityUK, Ian’s guests include novelist Samantha Shannon, 23, and performance poet Isaiah Hull, 17. Londoner Samantha started writing at the age of 15 and is the author of The Bone Season – a bestseller in the UK, US and India - and The Mime Order, which was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller when it was published earlier this year. Isaiah, meanwhile, is a member of the Young Identity collective – a Manchester-based group of young poets and performers.
The four winners of this year’s Verb New Voices competition will also be announced in the programme. The scheme, which is a joint initiative between the BBC, Arts Council England and arts organisations across the north of the country, will support the winning artists to create an innovative piece of work for broadcast on the Radio 3 show and to help develop their art for multimedia environments.
Another highlight is The Essay: Sunita (22:45-23:00), an original story specially commissioned by Radio 3 about youth and cultural identity in modern Britain by 23-year-old author Chibundu Onuzo, who became the youngest novelist to sign to book publishers Faber & Faber when she was just 19. The day’s proceedings come to a close with Jazz On 3 (23:00-00:30), which will feature the acclaimed organisationTomorrow’s Warriors Youth Orchestra, which helps develop and promote promising jazz musicians in the UK. The programme will also hear from BBC Young Jazz Musician of the Year Alexander Bone, who will appear alongside one of the members of the orchestra to pick some new jazz releases to play for listeners. What’s more, the show will include a panel debate on the value of conservatoire jazz courses to the nurturing of young talent.
As well as hearing from this selection of young artistic talent, throughout the day Radio 3 will play music by the great composers in their own youthful periods, as well as recordings of seminal classical performers made when they were young.
As part of Young Artists Day, BBC iPlayer has commissioned five young female spoken-word poets to write new work tackling a range of themes they have identified as preoccupying young people today, available exclusively on BBC iPlayer from Monday 4 May. Collectively titled Women Who Spit and produced by BBC Arts, they will tackle topics including homelessness, depression and what it means to be a feminist in the 21st century. BBC Arts Online will host a series of exclusive highlight videos from the In Tune performances on Young Artists Day, as filmed by a team of Roundhouse Young Creatives.