Music
Rewarding collaboration
Robin Holloway
Amonth rich in Radio Three features — they include four witty interval talks by Christopher Ricks on words, attitudes, usages; Dennis Marks's absorbing series exploring the laultlines' of middle-Euro- pean culture; and the climax came on 21 October with an evening-length celebration of the Chaucer sexcentennial, preceded by is three-quarters of an hour lecture on Shakespeare's Coriolanus from Geoffrey Hill, third in a series (by different authors) of six — has caused me to think about the balance of speech in general on what is basically a music channel. They shouldn't be set in opposition when their collabora- tion can be so rewarding. For the medium itself remains wholly conducive to the spo- ken voice, all the way from straightforward reading or interview, to exposition — his- torical, technical, practical — and compos- ite portraits of persons and evocations of place.
The state of this art on Radio Three is currently more lively, interesting and valu- able than it has been for some years, even if the ultimate goal, to reach and possibly surpass the achievements of the original Third Programme, remains elusive. Some old favourites, though, remain a shade dis- appointing. The Saturday morning record review, for instance, seems perfunctory compared with its former amplitude. To cover properly the available recordings of major musical repertoire requires more not less time for the depth and detail which really tell. At its best, this programme can still, unobtrusively, almost on the side, pro- vide fascinating insights — way over its immediate aim of recommending which recording to buy — into style, idiom, changing modes of interpretation, orches- tral/vocal/instrumental technique, the nature of the chosen piece itself. Another victim of squeeze follows in Music Matters on Sunday mornings, where Ivan Hewitt's intelligent interviewing always sounds as if he has to dash to catch a train. Surely an hour wouldn't be overmuch when the sub- ject matter is so full and various; and a repeat would also be welcome.
Private Passions has both (Saturday morning and Sunday night, reversing the old novel and film). The desert-island-disc format could hardly go wrong of course: with Michael Berkeley's suave and experi- enced care it could hardly go righter. His wide-ranging guests are a source of idle curiosity at least, and, at best, of pleasure and illumination even when one sometimes jibs at the conventionality and perpetual recurrence of their choices. It is always good to discover how music is understood, what makes it appeal and move, how love for it is first encountered, how taste devel- ops, matures, deepens, how intimately music twines around the inner and outer life in so many different ways. In a word: what music can do, what music is for. Often on this programme one receives, almost inadvertently, the most stirring endorse- ments of the role music can play in the integrated personality: Michael Berkeley excels in tempting people to say with heart- felt directness the simple-seeming things that might, in a more formal context, be too elusive, or merely embarrassing, to utter.
Then one has to be available, if possible — at the desk, the sink, the steering-wheel.
— for quite substantial further tracts of the weekend; especially in this 250th year of Bach's death, with an hour-long feature every Sunday of the year, some of them outstanding. I feel real chagrin if I have to miss Saturday afternoon's Jazz Record Requests, the weekly hour framed between Geoffrey Smith's inimitable 'hullo' and `goodbye'; and, within, his lucid enthusiasm for an extraordinarily catholic range of popular musics, constantly surprising an aging square like myself with pleasure, admiration, astonishment (as well as occa- sional boredom, repulsion, indifference). As with Private Passions, the utterly simple formula is so sufficient and well done that there is no reason why these programmes shouldn't go on for ever. There's certainly enough material.
Against such sturdy successes the infor- mal chat show doesn't stand up well. Night Waves more often quenches than kindles the eager imagination: one can get further talking with friends or acquaintances over a drink, on a walk, down the phone. The same applies with greater force to a new venture hopefully christened lebrecht.live after its compere Norman Lebrecht, which so far has proved an object-lesson in inepti- tude jejune and, for all the hectic excite- ment, dead dull.
As a froward schoolboy I was capable of thunder-scowls if social exigencies deprived me of the weekly Anthony Hopkins Talking about Music. In the last few years pro- grammes like this — serious, professional, frankly educational — have made a wel- come comeback after their dumb-down exile. Another tried-and-tested formula, an introduction to a major musical broadcast in the ensuing week, occasions a real sense of relevant interconnectedness. I remem- ber in particular the series called Secrets of Orchestration wherein different speakers demonstrated either particular themes texture, timbre, melody and accompani- ment, polyphony etc. — or individual pieces like Petrushka, la mer, la valse with extracts specially recorded to highlight with X-ray precision exactly what was being anatomised. Again so simple and obvious, yet so infinitely interesting. That the best of these programmes were presented by com- posers doesn't follow necessarily, com- posers being as often tongue-tied and shambolic as they are fluent. But when it works (all these did) they give a creative extra: Colin Matthews on Ravel, George Benjamin on Sibelius, Julian Anderson on Berg, best of all Gerard McBurney on more general issues involving the art and craft of orchestral writing. I've been waiting all my life to hear such wonders as the astringent opening section of The Rite of Spring or the tweetering sub- tleties of September from. Strauss's Four Last Songs lovingly taken apart and re- assembled like this; and I can't believe that such scrupulous exposition of what makes music tick is of interest only to 'specialists'. We love to read James Fenton elucidating the nuances of a poem, to see with learned and sensitive guidance the structure of a painting or a building. Musical demonstra- tion too has its exactest, most perfectly suited medium, the sound broadcast where concentration is undistracted by anything extraneous.
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