Colours of Autumn

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