Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Classical Music: Sunday 24 November 2013

Catherine Bott delves into the golden age of British film and discovers why so many great composers wrote for the movies.

In the fourth programme in Classic FM's ambitious 150-part series, singer and broadcaster Catherine Bott finds out why so many great British composers wrote music for films in the 1930s and 1940s. 

Her starting point is The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra by Benjamin Britten, the centenary of whose birth was marked on the 22nd of November. 

Britten composed the music for a public information film called Instruments of the Orchestra, commissioned by one Muir Mathieson, the 'Tsar of British Film Music'. Mathieson also persuaded such legends as Malcolm Arnold, Sir Arthur Bliss, William Walton and Vaughan Williams to write for films too and is paid due respect tonight.