Tune in, switch off

Listening to this year's Proms has made it obvious: Radio 3's broadcast sound is being crudely doctored. And that's not all that's wrong with the station, says Bayan Northcott

It was turning up a copy of the 1986 Proms handbook that focused the matter for your critic. For therein, point by point, was a sober account by a senior BBC music studio- manager of exactly how concerts were then broadcast. "The extremes of loudness and softness must be restricted for broadcasting," he wrote, "because distortion occurs when signal strengths are too high, and residual electronic noise becomes irritatingly noticeable when they are too low. A certain amount of 'compression' becomes desirable. But the compression must be done musically. Working from a full score (which has probably been annotated during rehearsal), the studio manager constantly anticipates large changes in dynamics, and is careful to avoid spoiling the effect with a sudden boost, during a pianissimo, or a frustrating 'cut back' at a climax."

Whether or not all Radio 3 studio-managers over the years proved equally adept at living up to this ideal, it has become all too obvious in evening broadcasts over the last couple of months or so, that it is no longer being pursued. What first raised the suspicions of this pair of ears was the unaccountable way in which Walton's Belshazzar's Feast on the opening night of the current Proms season seemed to come and go over the air. Three nights later, during Elgar's In the South overture, the boosting of the gentle solo viola episode was so marked compared with the cutting back of the ensuing orchestral tutti, one had the strange sensation that the latter was actually quieter. Either the studio managers were under new orders, or a system of automatic compression – such as apparently operates already on Radio 3 daytime programmes – had been interposed.

Whatever the explanation, the results are not infrequently maddening. Rachmaninov's cantata The Bells opens with a delectable upbeat of silvery resonances answered by the jubilant entry of full chorus and orchestra. At that point in the Prom 19 relay, the listener seemed to be whizzed in a split second from the front of the promenade to the far reaches of some backstage Albert Hall corridor. Nor have such distortions affected only works for vast forces. The slow finale of Alexander Goehr's Piano Trio centres on a long, hushed passage for the strings alone into which the piano suddenly erupts. In the recent Hear and Now broadcast, the strings were duly bumped up and the piano damped down, wrecking this structural climax of the entire movement.

Perhaps because it tends to stay evenly loud or soft for longish stretches, Mahler's colossal Eighth Symphony the following night seemed to suffer less. That is, until one switched a little later to Tchaikovsky's Manfred symphony being broadcast on disc in Classic FM's Evening Concert. While the fiercest climaxes of this were evidently cut back a bit, the quiet music was genuinely allowed to remain quiet. Could it be that Classic FM – so often excoriated for fiercely compressing its output to the requirements of background tranny users and traffic-challenged car radios – was now actually offering a wider dynamic range than Radio 3? And, if so, what could it mean?

Though enquiries failed to yield any information, it is just possible that these are teething troubles of a new computerised system that will eventually match the most sensitive ministrations of the old studio- managers. One would expect no less under the current controller of Radio 3, Roger Wright, who is an experienced orchestral producer and recording executive himself. Or could he now be under pressure from higher up in the BBC to maximise precisely the casual tranny and car radio-listener numbers, at whatever the cost in artistic standards? If the latter is nearer the truth, it would certainly confirm a number of other trends in recent Radio 3.

More serious listeners cannot say they were not warned. In July 2000, the Radio Times ran a feature entitled "Roll Over Beethoven", with a large photo of Radio 3's most ubiquitous presenters all dolled up in trendy black leather. "Tune into Radio 3 these days and you might not recognise it when the new kids are on the air," shrilled the caption, and the writer went on to extol the cult status already achieved by the recently launched Late Junction, the imminent arrival of Andy Kershaw from Radio 1, and the "cheerful, accessible and ebullient" controller Roger Wright's claim that "we are welcoming lots of new listeners who respond well to our new schedule".

Suddenly, the network was rebranded as "Radio 3: Classical Music, Jazz, World Music". The modest expansion of time allotted to jazz – by now surely a classical 20th-century tradition of performance- composition – was hardly at issue. The world-music category seemed more questionable. After all, Radio 3 had been paying intermittent but often highly informed attention to such great non-Western classical traditions as India, South-east Asia, and so on for decades. World music, on the other hand, was essentially a commercial slogan devised in the1980s for the marketing of the burgeoning vernacular-pop-fusion musics round the globe – much of which ought long ago to have found a home on Radios 1 and 2 if they were more adventurous.

Two years on, in any case, the great revamp has evidently yet to work: the Radio 3 audience figure remains flat as ever, at around two million. Which, if the claims of an influx of new listeners are true, must mean that many longer-established ones are switching off. No doubt the grouses of the latter range from the insufferable jollying along now practised by all but a handful of presenters, via the abandonment of such serious programmes as the early-music Spirit of the Age series, to the screaming teenyboppers of the recently instituted Radio 3 World Music Prize.

A particular bugbear of this listener remains Late Junction, not only because its juxtaposition of musics is mostly so predictably circumscribed, and its presentation so slack compared with what they might be according to the programme's own brief, but because of the inordinate time it monopolises just when one might welcome more structured listening. Another is the apparent on-going marginalisation of more demanding new work, so that notable premieres – when Radio 3 any longer bothers to record them at all – seem increasingly liable, as with Elliott Carter's recent opera, to be put out, insultingly, after midnight.

But, Wright would doubtless riposte: what about the daytime schedules, what about the BBC orchestras? Of course, the great Western classical tradition remains the core of Radio 3. And that is why the sudden sonic falsification of some of its greatest masterpieces in recent weeks creates such an ominous frisson. It is as if the public-service façade of the BBC were being eaten away from behind by an increasingly rabid neo-commercial corporation – all too happy to be assured by media ideologues that "there are no arts, only culture" in any case, or that a preference for substance over style is easily dismissed as elitist.

To such executives, the plaints of a classical musician the wrong side of 60 will seem automatically self-invalidating – though given the tendency of an ever- increasing proportion of the population to remain compos mentis until the age of 90, they may yet prove demographically mistaken as to Radio 3's real constituency.

Meanwhile, after almost 50 years in which, for all its limitations and faults, the network has occupied the centre of his musical life, it is with no glee whatever that your critic now admits that he finds himself listening less and less to Radio 3.