Four Quartets
Duration:
1 hour, 15 minutes
First broadcast:
Saturday 18 January 2014
Jeremy Irons reads Four Quartets by T.S.Eliot.
128K 65.7 Mb 1 mp3 file
Four Quartets is the culminating achievement of T.S. Eliot's career as a poet. While containing some of the most musical and unforgettable passages in twentieth-century poetry, its four parts, 'Burnt Norton', 'East Coker', 'The Dry Salvages' and 'Little Gidding', present a rigorous meditation on the spiritual, philosophical and personal themes which preoccupied the author. It was the way in which a private voice was heard to speak for the concerns of an entire generation, in the midst of war and doubt, that confirmed it as an enduring masterpiece.
With an introduction by Michael Symmons Roberts, Lord David Alton and Gail McDonald.
Replies
The guitarist John Fahey recorded an album-length guitar suite.
He needed a title, something beyond Opus 34. He pulled a copy
of Four Quartets off the shelf, skimmed through it and selected
"Fare Forward, Voyagers", "Thus Krishna on the Battlefield" and
"When the Fire and the Rose are One" for the three movements.
http://www.johnfahey.com/pages/ffv2.html
I heard him perform FFV at Carnegie Hall. There is a recording
available at the usual sub-rosa sites. I got mine fishing with Napster,
years ago.