Music: On The Air

TUCKED AWAY late night on Saturdays and Mondays on Radio 3, Robert Dawson-Scott is inviting a succession of composers and performers to "revisit a major musical challenge" in a half-hour series called At the Foot of the Mountain.

Last weekend he had Anthony Payne reflecting on the complexities of elaborating the sketches for Elgar's Third Symphony, and on that belated work's almost nonplussing impact world-wide since its premiere last February.

No doubt nostalgia and the continuing backlash against Modernism have played their part in its rapid acceptance. Moreover, Elgar's idiom is already loved - never more so than today, as Payne observed - whereas a new work by a modern composer has to create the conditions for its understanding as it goes along. And, of course, as Payne could not observe, his empathy for Elgar's idiom and creative skill in simulating his characteristic procedures is, quite possibly, unique. Indeed, so close was his identification with Elgar that, as he told Dawson-Scott, he knew he would never escape the thrall unless he threw himself into a new piece of his own the moment he had heard the first run-through of the completed Elgar.

Performers, on the other hand, cannot identify too closely with the score, and it was fascinating to have the opportunity - as I did - to follow Andrew Davis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra developing, from the first run-through, by way of the recording sessions and first private performance, the seemingly comprehensive account of the work they offered at the public premiere: impetuous, volatile, elegiac and stoically noble. It was even more fascinating to hear how differently that most versatile of our younger conductors, Martyn Brabbins, and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra projected the piece in their Glasgow performance last autumn, broadcast in The BBC Orchestras slot on Radio 3 on Monday.

Where Davis's opening was fiercely driven, Brabbins's was massive, granitic; where Davis took the second subject with an affectionate forward flow, Brabbins was lingering and autumnal. And so it went: in the finale especially, compared with the chivalric panoply of Davis, Brabbins adopted an almost dangerously steady tempo, as if risking all on Payne's inspired clinching gesture, a tragic march-past and fade modelled on "The Wagon Passes" in Elgar's late Nursery Suite. Where Davis made of this a final burst of heroic defiance, Brabbins generated the crushing gravity of a funeral cortege.

Yet these differences suggest a deeper reason why audiences have responded so gratefully to Payne's Elgarian recension. Although the 20th century is widely supposed to have witnessed the liberation of the rhythmic dimension of music from the constraints of 19th-century tradition, the reverse is arguably truer. Vast tracts of today's music, "classical" and pop, are locked into unvaried, mechanistic pulses - the very engine, you may think, of coercive consumer culture. In 19th-century Romanticism you often find, by contrast, leading melodies, harmonies and supporting bass lines simultaneously unfolding at different rhythmic rates against a background pulse that may itself be varied according to expressive need. And it is precisely this multi-layered rhythmic flexibility, so subtly exploited by Elgar and emulated by Payne, that helps to explain how the Third Symphony is already yielding interpretations contrasting with yet complementary to those of Davis and Brabbins.