• Prix Europa for ‘Warsaw Variations’
Saturday, 3 November 2012 2 Comments
Huge congratulations to Alan Hall of Fallingtree Productions on winning ‘Best European Radio Music Programme’ last week at the 2012 Prix Europa in Berlin. The award was given for his half-hour programme ‘Warsaw Variations’, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 20 December 2011.
‘Warsaw Variations’ charts the musical friendship of Witold Lutosławski and Andrzej Panufnik during and after World War II. Among its interviewees are Camilla Panufnik, my former PhD student Beata Bolesławska and myself. Alan was one of my colleagues at Radio 3 in the early 1990s. He later went independent and is one of the most inventive and insightful producers around. It was an absolute delight to work with him again.
You can hear the programme via the Fallingtree website:
• http://fallingtree.co.uk/listen/warsaw_variations
A few other links:
• http://www.thenews.pl/1/11/Artykul/116810,BBC-radio-feature-on-Polish-music-wins-Prix-Europa-
• http://www.fallingtree.co.uk/news/2012/triple_awards_success_at_the_prix_europa!
• https://www.facebook.com/fallingtreeproductions
On Polish Music 
We listened to this in Poland! Radio 4 is often on, and so we caught it by chance, and it was a pleasant surprise for a Polish listener to hear a programme of this calibre on a UK station. Prize very well deserved!
Agreed! I listened again last night. Alan has a keen ear for both telling detail and the overarching story.