From Monday to Friday next week, Paul Griffiths, of Manorbier, is Donald Macleod’s guest on the Radio 3 programme Composer of the Week. The topic for the week is 21st-century opera.

In the five hour-long programmes - broadcast at midday - Paul and Donald will discuss 19 operas and their composers, most of whom are still living, and put the works in historical context.

Though many of the composers in this series are rarely heard on Radio 3, all are well established internationally. Important British figures including Thomas Adès, George Benjamin, Harrison Birtwistle, James Dillon, Brian Ferneyhough and the late Jonathan Harvey will be represented by The Tempest (2004), Written on Skin (2012), The Minotaur (2008), Philomela (2004), Shadowtime (2004) and Wagner Dream (2007), respectively.

The other composers come from nine other countries. The American minimalist Philip Glass, widely known for his film scores (including The Hours, which won the BAFTA in 2002), is a prolific source of operatic scores, beginning in 1976 with Einstein on the Beach. The work featured on this programme is The Trial (2014), based on the novel by Franz Kafka, in a recording by Music Theatre Wales. The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, whose opera Emilie (2008) is included, made history in 2016 when her earlier opera L’Amour de loin (2000) became the second by a woman ever to be performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The first was British composer Ethel Smyth’s Der Wald in 1903.

Some of the works are not for the timid. Anyone who would rather not know what it sounds like when a half-human, half-bull monster from Greek mythology brutalizes a sacrificial victim in a labyrinth, with orchestral accompaniment, is better off not tuning in. Irish composer Gerald Barry’s take on The Importance of Being Earnest, which won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s award for large-scale composition in 2011, was compared by Stephen Fry to ‘taking a machete to a soufflé’. None of it can be called ‘relaxing’.

Presenter Donald Macleod has been a broadcaster since 1982 and host of Composer of the Week since 1999. Widely enjoyed since it first went on the air in 1943, Composer of the Week is Radio 3’s longest-running programme and the BBC’s second-longest-running. Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs dates back to 1942.

Paul Griffiths was born in Bridgend. He has written several opera librettos and over two dozen books, which have been translated into eleven languages, including Welsh. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was appointed OBE in the 2013 New Year’s Honours. Neither Paul nor Donald Macleod studied music beyond piano lessons. Donald received an undergraduate degree in psychology; Paul read biochemistry.