Radio
Culture corner
Michael Vestey
Athough I've dipped into it occasion- ally, I had not until last Friday night lis- tened to the full two hours of Radio Two's weekly arts programme. It's a pleasant, well-presented look at the mainstream arts, mercifully lacking the earnest tone of the daily Kaleidoscope on Radio Four.
It helps to have as its presenter Sheridan Morley, The Spectator's drama critic (whom I've never met), whose mellifluous and enthusing voice, at once deep and soft, is ideal for evening broadcasting. It seems quite bold of the network to devote two hours to the arts, forsaking the usual easy- listening music it specialises in. But, then, Radio Two is full of surprises. Morley con- ducts longish interviews. Last week it was the smoky-voiced actress Kathleen Turner who is appearing at the Chichester Festival Theatre in a play about Tallulah Bankhead, as well as in Somerset Maugham's Our Bet- ters; Chichester's director Duncan Weldon on how his theatre copes without grants; Frank Delaney on his latest novel; Peter Fiddick hesitantly commenting on the leaked imminent changes to Radio Four which went before the BBC governors this week (if past experience is anything to go by they'll go through on the nod, assuming this narcoleptic body of the Great and the Good is awake, that is) and Nicholas Keny- on, controller of Radio Three, on this year's Proms which began last Friday.
Kenyon sounded quite chirpy, like a sol- dier coming through a war with only minor flesh wounds and wondering how he dodged the heavy shrapnel. His reign at Radio Three has been something of a bat- tle as it always is, of course, for any con- troller who makes controversial changes. He's still burbling about making the Proms more 'accessible' and 'approachable' to people, just like his network, and in princi- ple there's nothing wrong with that. Although I don't agree with everything he's done, I've never been anti-Kenyon. As an ex-BBC man I know networks need to evolve to thrive. It's how it's done that mat- ters. As the organiser of the Proms he was defending the inclusion of Beatles' music this year, and Morley played the King's Singers version of Eleanor Rigby which I had not heard of before. It's a strangely effective, clever and slightly haunting choral reworking of the song and its pres- ence in the Proms doesn't jar, as the origi- nal would.
The 103rd season of the Proms began well enough with Beethoven's Missa Solem- nis played by the BBC Singers and the BBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, fol- lowed on Saturday night by Schubert and Mozart. Sunday night, though, was a show- piece for the drab, talentless world of mod- em, minimalist 'music' by the Americans Steve Reich, Michael Gordon, Lou Harri- son and John Adams who, bizarrely, is Radio Three's composer of the week. The presenter was the High Priestess of Pseuds, Natalie Wheen, who rambled on about how it was 'music, or attitudes, that have opened the windows to let fresh air into the concert hall'. HPP reminded us that it began in the United States as a reaction against the status quo and against the aca- demic rules of music. Or, as I prefer to put it, against the talent, effort and self-disci- pline of fine music.
In fact, much of it isn't music at all but playing and experimenting with sounds to produce an electronic effect, like Reich's It's Gonna Rain. This consists of the words `it's gonna rain' by a Pentecostal preacher recorded and merely repeated with other sound effects. I heard it on a Kaleidoscope Feature about Reich (Saturday) and it's dif- ficult to imagine anything more tedious and fifth-rate except, possibly, the equally bogus conceptual art of Damian Hirst and Rachel Whiteread. It's anti-art, of course, just as minimalist composers are anti-music. I sup- pose it's the sheer monotony and artistic emptiness of it all that is so depressing. It possesses all the artistic poverty of flying ducks on the wall and plastic gnomes in the garden and like these excrescences it has its fans and they applauded with gusto at the Royal Albert Hall on Sunday night as vari- ous pieces were played by the German Ensemble Modern. 'What an extraordinary performance that was,' Wheen gushed at the conclusion of one of these offences against the ear.
What irritates me about Wheen is the way she prates about Reich and Adams as if they're on a par with the great artists of the past and present. She said that Adams was 'a composer who conducts, like Brahms and Mendelssohn'. He might be a composer who conducts but Brahms and Mendelssohn he ain't. I suppose she really believes this drivel. If you're going to broadcast two-and-a-quarter hours of this primitive, naive contemporary flapdoodle, the product of a new but inferior culture, I suppose you have to have a presenter who strives to see the point of it all and is will- ing to promote it. On that level she excelled herself, as did to a lesser extent Lynne Walker on Kaleidoscope by eagerly swallowing the fatuity of Reich and his `works'.
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