clarity, proportion, integrity
Golden Radio specializes in unique “symphonies for radio” for the BBC and elsewhere. Founded by Antony Pitts and Jeremy Summerly in 2005 in order to make extraordinary, filmic radio programmes in the finest tradition of “heterophonic radio”. The founders recommend listening as if in a cinema: lights low, comfortable chair, no other distractions, apart possibly from a glass of wine and a pair of good headphones. With many decades of production and broadcasting experience and recognition – including the Radio Academy BT Award, the Prix Italia Music Prize, and launching BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, the Golden Radio production team has provided editing and mastering services for some of the world’s leading record labels and for BBC Radio International. As Thomas Aquinas put it: “clarity, proportion, integrity”.
CHURCH TIMES (Edward Wickham) on Bach and the Art of Bee-keeping: "Gratitude was my overwhelming emotion, too, on hearing Radio 3’s Sunday Feature: Bach and the Art of Bee-keeping, because it demonstrates how the BBC can still find space for the eccentric and ambitious. Antony Pitts is well known both as a composer and radio producer, and this programme demonstrated again his fascination with musical forms and their correspondence with theological precepts. The programme began with a boy in conversation with a bee-keeper. The connection with Bach came with a poem by Charles Tomlinson, which speculates about how Bach might have conceptualised his music had he been a bee-keeper: "All those notes Suspended above the other In the air of his ear". We were treated to miniature essays on everything from Big Bang theory to double-leading-note cadences to quantum mechanics..."
THE TIMES on A Wireless Revelation: "...It is almost impossible not to be drawn in by such resonant, dire phrases, many of them familiar... It is an ambitious undertaking. There is no commentary, no interruption; the book is unabridged, read in its entirety by half a dozen voices, and it speaks for itself apart from the briefest of introductions. Once you settle in to the voices in counterpoint, the noise of it all, it is compelling. Pitts sees the words and music very much as in harmony: 'It does require you to shut other things out and give it your undivided attention,' he says. 'It covers the end of the world played out over a huge expanse of time and place. I treat the words as sounds, as music. There are two approaches for the listener: one is semantic and one is visceral. The combination of both those things is what makes it powerful, challenging.'..."
FINANCIAL TIMES (Martin Hoyle) on GOLDEN RADIO production of In memoria for BBC Radio 3's Between the Ears – Radio Choice: "Tonight's Between the Ears is Radio 3 at its best, by turns freewheeling, precious, touching, aggravating and riveting. Renaissance motets and modern compositions alternate with liturgical readings, children's voices and a man's heartbreaking account of his wife's tragic death. Frequently beautiful, cumulatively moving - and fascinating radio."