Radio Orpheus streams classical music in Russian from Moscow, a station whose roots stretch back to the earliest years of Soviet state broadcasting. Press play on Radio Shuffle and it streams instantly, free, with no account or app download required.
Born as the Fourth Program
The station first went on air on 1 August 1960 as the "Fourth Program" of All-Union Radio, launched by the Soviet State Committee of Television and Radio Broadcasting on VHF, according to Wikipedia's history of the station. Olga Gromova founded the channel and served as its first general director, leading it all the way through to December 2002, a tenure spanning more than four decades across the fall of the Soviet Union itself.
A new name for a new era
The station carried its "Fourth Program" branding through most of the Soviet period before being renamed Radio Orpheus on 1 January 1991, just months before the USSR's collapse. That rename placed it at Ostankino, the state broadcaster, by December 1991, before it moved again into the All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company in 1998. In 2002, the same year Gromova's long tenure ended, the station was folded into the Russian State Music Television and Radio Broadcasting Center, the organization that still owns it today.
Still reaching listeners across Russia
Radio Orpheus broadcasts on FM at 99.2 MHz in Moscow and on FM frequencies in eight other Russian cities, alongside its online stream. That geographic spread, built up over more than sixty years under several different state broadcasting structures, has kept Radio Orpheus as one of Russia's main dedicated classical music outlets through the entire post-Soviet period.
Listen free on Radio Shuffle
Radio Orpheus streams around the clock, and Radio Shuffle carries the feed live with nothing to install and no subscription required. Press play for classical music from a station whose history runs back through six decades of Soviet and Russian broadcasting.