Radio
Performers
Noel Malcolm
In the Ideas Department of Broadcasting House they have spent the last 43 years staring in disbelief at the success of Desert Island Discs. Generations of bright young Men have joined the department, where they have been equipped with clean pads of paper and freshly sharpened pencils and told to think of a programme which would be rather like Desert Island Discs but not too similar. Their pencils have become blunted, their eyes have glazed over and their bright young minds have aged, with- ered and died. (After a few years they are led away — sad, shambling figures mutter- ing incoherent phrases about Robert Robin- son and Richard Baker. Sometimes they
gibber with wild hilarity for no apparent reason. They are fed, looked after, and taken to join the Studio Audience, where they will be happy.) The task they were given is an impossi- ble one. If the latest attempt succeeds, it will be because it is really the same programme, though with a different voice and a different name: Russell Harty's Musical Encounters (Saturday, 6.25 p.m., repeated Friday, 9.05 a.m.). The only other difference is that Mr Harty picks some of the records himself, partly in order to reminisce in his own right, and partly to coax a `reaction' from his guest. The first programme went rather well, with Sir Harold Acton going effortlessly through his paces like the old performer he is.
When called upon to do so he sang the Chinese national anthem, told a few stories about `poor dear Evelyn Waugh' and gave a wonderful brief sketch of Alice B.
Toklas, who `spoke the most perfect 18th- century English, and looked like a little
gypsy, with a moustache'. At one point he had to listen patiently while Russell Harty played him a piece of pop music by Wham. Mr Harty must have felt rather like Tris- tram Shandy when he gave a macaroon to a donkey: `my heart smites me, that there was more of pleasantry in the conceit, of seeing how an ass would eat a macaroon, than of benevolence in giving him one. . • .' But Sir Harold took it all in good part, and observed that `The Whams' had a fetching sense of rhythm. In the end I thought it was the men from the Ideas Department who should really be feeling Shandyesque pangs of conscience. Sending Russell Harty to meet Sir Harold in his villa is a sort of aesthetic equivalent of taking a donkey to a patisserie.
I often think about what it is that radio can do well. Music obviously comes high up on the list: hearing a symphony orches-, tra on the wireless is infinitely preferable to watching it on the television, where one is subject to all the fidgety whims of the cameramen. But we can always listen to records, or, sometimes, go to concerts. For a taste of what only radio can do, and what it does supremely well, listen to Roger Nichols's excellent series on great French singers of the past (Radio 3, Friday, 7 p.m.). Or, better still, try the currently repeated series of programmes called Inter- pretations on Record (Monday, 7 p.m.), in which a music critic runs through the whole legacy of recordings of a well-known work, from the earliest performances on 78s to the latest digital wizardry of, say, Rattle and Popp. One of the things that emerges quite strikingly is how far the field for interpretation has narrowed among recent generations of performers. Take violinists, for example. If someone puts on a record of Perlman or Zuckerman or their like, you are struck by the superb quality of the playing, but you can seldom guess which one it is. If the record is of Kreisler or Thibaud or Heifetz or Szigeti, you can know who it is after a few bars, and the interpretation which unfolds is an utterly
individual one. What is popularly thought of as the stone age of recording was in fact the golden age of musicians. I don't under- stand why we are almost never allowed to hear them on Radio 3. Classical music has been recorded for 98 years now, but the first 65 years or so are passed over as if something unmentionable had happened.
Just lately, however, there have been some honourable exceptions to this rule. A sporadic series called Bach on Record produced some real treasures, including a brief snatch of Brahms's friend and col- laborator Joseph Joachim. Recorded in his final, fading years, it was technically dis- appointing, inevitably. But there is some- thing extraordinarily moving about being able to hear the sound made by a violinist who gave his debut with Mendelssohn in 1843.
Of course there's one reason for the neglect of early recordings which I do understand: the broadcasters are afraid that playing scratchy old records will offend the audio buffs. But I doubt whether true buffs ever listen to such an impure medium as the radio, where passing lorries or thun- derstorms can produce far worse effects than the gentle, friendly crackle of a 78. By now, anyway, the audio enthusiasts have all invested in Compact Minds. The Com- pact Mind is a revolutionary new device. It is compatible with conventional equipment — an ordinary pair of tone-deaf ears, for example — and focuses all the owner's mental energies with astonishing clarity on the quality of sound reproduction, elimi- nating all the tiresome interference with this which used to come from being in- terested in music.
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