Classical: Music on Radio 3

Leon Goossens has a lot to answer for. Born 100 years ago, he was revered because he introduced a new sound to oboe playing in this country. When Goossens gave an "A" for the newly formed London Philharmonic, his friend Sir Thomas Beecham used to quip, "Gentlemen, take your pick". In Mining the Archive last Friday afternoon, the tone Goossens made, playing an arrangement of Ravel's Pavane pour une infante defunte, would have cut the stoutest block of Parmesan with ease. Yet, according to Evelyn Rothwell, Goossens's pupil (and later the second Mrs Barbirolli), he sounded much less acidic than his British predecessors, lightening his tone so that, unlike them, he didn't need to stuff a handkerchief in the bell. The trouble with this series of programmes is that, once locked in hagiographic mode, the presenter and contributors are almost bound to commit a mild form of perjury. Oh for a counter-series, taking a more critical look at mythical reputations.

On the Friday evening, Mark Wigglesworth conducted the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in three new commissions. One was David Sawer's The Greatest Happiness Principle, which crops up again at the Proms late next month. The title refers to the ambiguous philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, who designed a prison on the site of the Tate Gallery in which a centrally placed jailer could keep an eye, unseen, on the prisoners, back-lit, around him. The 10-minute piece is the closest Sawer has so far come to American minimalism - transparent and breezy, it ends by resuming the opening after a strong E flat major chord. Sawer wouldn't have thought of it quite in this way, but the music could be taken as an allegory of a harmoniously ordered - or is it a regimented? - society. Slightly sinister.

By coincidence, John Pickard's Symphony No 3 also ended by implying E flat major, though the harmony was unresolved. This was combative music in four movements, the last three joined, with lots of brass and percussion, and thoroughly exhausting in its intensity. It was certainly assured, too, wielding rhetorical flourishes with such unapologetic ferocity, you had to be convinced of the composer's sincerity. Quite different was the Piano Concerto by the Korean-born composer Un-Suk Chin. She only finished it two months ago, so the soloist Rolf Hind must have gone through nightmares mastering its intricacies. The piano part is virtually continuous throughout the four movements. Its style is related, if references are needed, to Ligeti in mechanical mood and, more distantly, to Ravel's G major Concerto, with a lot of brittle, ever-evolving figuration, predominantly in a high register. In the second movement a tentative web of sustained sounds on the orchestra spreads behind the chimes and plops of piano and percussion. Then, without any break, comes a stuttering toccata, full of rapid repeated notes, liberally accented, which eventually exhausts itself. The final movement is the most varied and, for the listener, the most challenging, because it goes through so many tactical changes. It resists summary description, though a longish passage over a pedal point in the middle and an accumulative passage at the end give signals that a conclusion is in the offing. Un- Suk Chin says she wanted to avoid a 19th-century approach to the concerto form but, although she treats the solo pianist as the first among equals, his part is flamboyantly demanding. The Concerto is also impressively sustained as a composition and beautifully detailed.

Challenging talks about music seem to have disappeared from Radio 3, at least for the time being. Instead, information and opinion are offered through interviews or reviews. In Spirit of the Age last Sunday afternoon (repeated the following Tuesday), Christopher Page talked to The Independent's Bayan Northcott about John Milton, whose father was a fair composer, and whose own poetry was almost too daunting to set, though Handel was characteristically undaunted and quite cavalier in rearranging extracts. Alexander Goehr is one of the few present-day composers to have taken up the challenge. Northcott's contribution in this hour-long alternation of conversation and music, which included not only settings of Milton but music he knew, amounted to a veritable talk in itself. But it wasn't a lecture, because Northcott seemed to be drawing spontaneously on his formidable fund of knowledge, of literature as much as music, and the fact that he was finding his words as he spoke made it all the easier for the listener to take them inn

Adrian Jack