France Musique La ContemporaineFrance Musique La Contemporaine

France Musique, the classical network of French public radio, opened a bouquet of seven webradios in December 2016, each taking a single strand of what the main station covers across a day — baroque, opera, jazz, film scores — and running it around the clock. La Contemporaine got the strand that asks the most of a listener: music written now, or near enough to it. The selection is made by France Musique's own producers in Paris, and like everything Radio France broadcasts, it carries no advertising at all.

What that means in practice is works given whole and unannounced: Luciano Berio's Coro for forty voices and orchestra running movement after movement, then Richard Rijnvos scored for full orchestra. The range takes in the post-war avant-garde, electroacoustic writing and composers still at work today, experimental pieces sitting next to the modern classical repertoire.