I cannot specifically remember when I first started listening but I must have been about 12 or 13 (in the mid 1980s).  My Mum bought me two cassette tapes (which I recently found after having misplaced them when we moved house last year!) of Beethoven's 3rd, 4th and 5th piano concertos.  I looked in the Radio times and lo and behold was a station playing Beethoven and hundreds of other composers as well.  That was it really as I have never stopped listening since!

Earliest memories of R3 were when I was 7 or 8 learning violin (mid 70s).  Around the same time, I had recurring nightmares about a wolf-man chasing me through a wood (!?), so I would be reluctant to go to sleep.  I'd often put in some earphones and listen to R3 via a handheld radio set.

I revisited this habit in my teens, listening to R3 until midnight.  Then if I was still awake, I'd re-tune to Inter Programme Radio Prague.

Tommo

Piano lessons as a child meant that I listened to the Third Prog occasionally. This led to my buying my first little record player (electric not the old wind-up one my mother had!) and my first LP which was Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 2 played by Julius Katchen. Then later on in the 1960s, training to be a teacher, I found that listening to the third Programme enabled me to concentrate on my work much better and I listened to much chamber music that before I had ignored.

I first discovered Radio 3 when I was about 21, and moved into a little cottage next door to an old lady, who listened to the radio a great deal....so I used to hear it through the wall.

Later on, in my thirties, I began to listen to the Proms, and it has gone on from there.

Jan  x

p.s. Soon I'll be an old lady, listening a great deal....   !

Aitch,

That reminds me of a time, couple of years ago just, I set the PC and FM radio up to record something from R3 just before we went out and we came back just before it had finished. At the end I stopped the recording. Next day I decided to listen. Five minutes before the end all I could hear was our burglar alarm going off.

We got lazy and walked in the front door which triggers off the initial loud 130dB internal alarm, but how did the noise get recorded? Through the speakers? Or the microphone even though the PC was set to record from the Line In?

 

First there was the Third Programme, and between that and Radio 3 there were Network 3 (1957, which carried Record Review), then the Music Programme. It's difficult to recall when any of these acquired a distinct identity for me, because when I first began serious listening, the Home Service broadcast many of the Proms and other concerts. Besides, in those far-off days, R3's predecessors did not broadcast for many hours each day.

The earliest musical experience I specifically associate with proto-R3 is the Tuesday (or was it Thursday?) Invitation Concerts, introduced by William Glock and which featured much 20th century music. I remember (this would have been 1959 or 1960) hearing the Kontarsky brothers play the Bartok Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, which opened up a whole new and wonderful sound world for me (and drove the rest of the family mad).