BBC Radio 3 has just announced that its rich schedule of concerts, operas and recitals will be further enhanced from May 3, 2011 when listeners will be able to hear LIVE broadcasts direct from venues across the UK every weekday evening in Performance on 3. Here, Radio 3 Editor Edward Blakeman offers a look behind the scenes.

I just love the prospect of live evening concerts on Radio 3! My colleagues and I have thought about it and planned it for months - since the end of last season's Proms in fact, and that was what gave us the idea. There is such a buzz during the Proms - 8 weeks of concerts all broadcast live on Radio 3 - so wouldn't it be great if you could carry that sense of really 'being there' on into the rest of the year? if you could offer Radio 3 listeners a live concert each weekday night - something that had never been done before.

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The picture shows Finnish quartet Meta4 rehearshing for a live Radio 3 performance at the Wigmore Hall in 2009.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00v3ycm

I was staggered recently when a colleague (in this case Andrew Connolly, who runs the BBC Concert Orchestra) told me what his orchestra was undertaking in a matter of days - the range of its output was breathtaking and the information itself made an impact on me.

Sometimes I think we do so much that it is hard to get any clear message out about what we are doing and when.

So it led me to think that the simplicity of merely communicating the details of our programmes can be a powerful tool to use in the promotion of Radio 3. This thought hit me again when I looked at week 40. I have always had difficulty in understanding BBC weeks. Many of my colleagues have amazing powers - not least to match a week number to particular dates. So for those like me who have no clue about week number except 1 and 52 (and they can be trickier than you might imagine!), I was looking at the plans for this week.

Just look at today's schedule:

A concert from the York Early Music Festival, a performance from the Darbar Festival in World Routes, Rigoletto from Welsh National Opera with Simon Keenleyside in the title role and a fascinating new play The First Day Of The Rest Of My Life by Martin Jameson in The Wire, That's all between just 1300 and 2200 on one day.

Later in the week you can hear Ugandan journalist Joel Kibazo visiting Kenya on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of 17 African nations, Wagner is Composer of the Week, there is a series of five talks exploring aspects of the Stewart dynasty, Rana Mitter talks to primatologist Frans de Waal and Matthew Sweet talks to the American novelist Jonathan Franzen (both on Night Waves), concerts from the Ulster Orchestra and the Halle (amongst others) and a live broadcast of Sir Andrew Davis conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in music by Elgar, Delius and the world premiere of a new work by Edwin Roxburgh, followed by The Verb in which Ian McMillan introduces a new commission written for the programme by novelist Louise Walsh. Please excuse the long list - but I hope you get the point.

I suppose if I were looking for a definition of broadcasting as opposed to narrowcasting just reading the list of programmes speaks more powerfully than a strategy document!

Roger Wright is Controller of BBC Radio 3

See the whole of week 40's schedule on the Radio 3 web site.
Read posts by Roger and other Radio 3 managers and editors on the Radio 3 blog.
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The picture shows Richard Wagner, Composer of the Week in Radio 3's week 40.

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