Colours of Autumn

Available for 29 days

To mark the "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness", Radio 3's weekly selection of readings set alongside music links up with the mid morning programme Essential Classics. The readers Anton Lesser and Josette Simon have been appearing on Essential Classics in a midday sequence bringing us poems about apple picking, falling leaves, mushrooms and bird migration. In this compilation we'll hear music from Ella Fitzgerald, Elena Kats-Chernin, George Butterworth and Vivaldi, Joni Mitchell and Rautavaara alongside some listener suggestions from the Essential Classics Playlister which is revealed every weekday at 11.15. The readings include extracts from Cider with Rosie, The Woodlanders, Anne of Green Gables, Wind in the Willows and by Roger McGough, Mary Jean Chan, Simon Armitage, Raine Geoghegan, Jo Clement and John Betjeman. Produced by Helen Garrison and Robyn Read You can find Friday's special episode of Essential Classics broadcast from Calke Abbey in Derbyshire available on BBC Sounds Readings: Raine Geoghegan: It’s Hopping Time John Betjeman: Harrow-on-the-Hill Mary Jean Chan: The Painter Dante Gabriel Rosetti: Autumn Song Sylvia Plath: Mushrooms Simon Armitage: I kicked a mushroom Roger McGough: Just another Autumn Day LM Montgomery: Anne of Green Gables John Clare: Pleasant Sounds Annette Wynne: October Seamus Heaney: No Sanctuary Mother Goose: The Pumpkin Eater Jo Clement: A stopping place Emily Brontë: Fall, leaves fall George Eliot: Letter to Miss Maria Lewis, her old teacher David Thoreau: Excursions (extract) Thomas Hardy: The Woodlanders Oscar Wilde: Symphony in Yellow Melissa Harrison: All Among the Barley Edward Thomas: Digging Laurie Lee: Field of Autumn Laurie Lee: Cider with Rosie Ellen P Allerton: Indian Summer Seamus Heaney: Postscript Kenneth Grahame: Wind in the Willows