BBC Radio 3 will celebrate the art of portraiture on Monday May 7, with a day of performance and debate devoted to exploring how personalities have been captured in music, as well as in painting and sculpture.

Throughout the day there will be performances of more than 100 already existing musical portraits – Greta Garbo, Nelson Mandela, Marie Antoinette and Louis Armstrong will be among the personalities captured. 

Meanwhile, composer Jonathan Dove has been commissioned to write a new musical portrait, to be performed later this year, inspired by suggestions of public figures made by audiences during the day. More new music will be heard on Jazz On 3 with Jez Nelson, when Radio 3 New Generation Jazz Artist Shabaka Hutchings will create a musical portrait of 1980’s artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

The day will also feature a live broadcast from Birmingham Town Hall by the BBC Concert Orchestra, featuring Elgar’s Enigma Variations, one of the most famous musical portrayals of people. Impressionist Alistair McGowan will introduce this event. In London, Leon McCawley performs Schumann’s Carnaval, live from the Wigmore Hall.  
 
Other works to be heard throughout the day include Janáček’s String Quartet No 2, Intimate Letters, Coates’s Three Elizabeths Suite, Jerome Kern’s Portrait for Orchestra, Mark Twain, Debussy’s Prelude, General Lavine and Adams’s The Chairman Dances.

Alongside musical repertoire, Radio 3 presenters will be joined by guests for the In Tune programme to discuss why portraiture is such a driving force in so many art forms, including painting, photography, poetry, sculpture and music. Guests will include artist Maggi Hambling, portrait painter Jonathan Yeo, actor Fiona Shaw, composer Robin Holloway, and novelist Ian Rankin. 
 
There will also be outside broadcasts from the National Portrait Gallery, presented by Suzy Klein with live music and guests, and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, featuring a debate on the art of ‘Capturing a Likeness’.
 
May 7 will in addition launch a week of essays in which Germaine Greer, Martin Gayford, Maggi Hambling, Ian Rankin and Akram Khan will discuss both the subject of portraiture, and their own experiences being the subject of a portrait. 

Katya Herman