Classical music: Not suite enough

MUSIC ON TV: don't just talk about it, says Anthony Payne, play it

After a long-term absence of serious classical music programmes on television, which has been a cause for real concern, we have in recent months experienced what amounts to an embarrassment of riches. Whatever reservations one had about the seven instalments of the BBC's Great Composer series, they were palpably serious in intent and tackled central issues in the case of each composer without resorting, for the most part, to the kind of popularist irrelevancies that merely sell classical music down the river. Then there were those excellent films over Christmas about the century's great singers, with, for once, engrossing musical insights in the accompanying commentaries.

The flood of programmes continues: last weekend saw the showing on BBC2 of the first pair of films in Yo-Yo Ma's ambitious series of cinematographic interpretations of Bach's six Cello Suites, Inspired by Bach. As if this was not enough, ITV's South Bank Show on Sunday night presented Tony Palmer's Hail Bop - a Portrait of John Adams. Three serious films about classical music over one weekend. It may not be long before the powers that be lose faith once more in the idea of devoting time to serious music on the box, but for the moment there is much food for thought.

Each of Yo-Yo Ma's films has a different director, and to judge by the first two in the series, each will view its chosen Bach suite from a totally different viewpoint, and with very different technical means. Indeed, the complete series will constitute a compendium of current cinematic methods of presenting serious music.

Not all will succeed in illuminating the astounding inner worlds of Bach's instrumental music, balancing as it does the physical with the spiritual, singing with dancing, unrivalled technical resource with freedom of expression. But whether complemented by the visual style as in Patricia Rozema's treatment of the Sixth Suite (last Saturday), or cluttered and obscured by it as in Francois Girard's Second Suite (on Sunday), Yo-Yo Ma's playing will continue to cast its spell. His clarity of exposition is just extraordinary, and the combination of physical gesture and inner life, which was so beautifully reflected in the skating of Torvill and Dean during the Sixth Suite, captures Bach's very essence.

Bach himself was made to appear in the latter film, in the person of actor Tom McCamus, spinning a narrative about his life and thinking which was intercut with the movements of the suite. Informative, if somewhat naive in style, this biographical element was certainly more acceptable than the rambling discussions that overloaded the treatment of Suite No 2. Fascinatingly based on the notion of presenting Ma within 3-D computer- generated realisations of Piranesi's famous prison etchings, Girard's film lost its sense of direction and became bogged down in conversations about the performer's relationship to his performing space. These could have been massively cut to advantage.

It is a far cry from the humanity and overwhelming dialectical power of JS Bach to the minimal processes of John Adams, as portrayed by Tony Palmer; and while making the incredible claim that Adams is the most important composer of our age, his film inadvertently shot itself in the foot by relegating the music quite successfully to a background function.

It is one of television's besetting sins that it shies away from dealing with music pure and simple, and, sure enough, it was the political aspect of Adams's operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer that took up most space. Not a thing was said about genuinely interesting later works like the Violin Concerto or the Chamber Symphony, which make a considerably greater claim on our attention than the pleasant but hardly challenging earlier minimalist pieces.

`Inspired by Bach': Suite No 3 at 8.05pm Sat; Suite No 1 at 4.25pm Sun, on BBC2