Music on Radio

In a musical era that places an ever increasing importance on image and packaging, competitions are playing a role of commensurate significance - a necessary evil in many musicians' eyes, for while winning competitions gives artists a valuable selling point, few would deny that in the art of performance it is more appropriate to talk of differences of poetic vision than levels of excellence. But while we may associate competitions with an age that seems aggressively materialistic in its approach to art, it has to be admitted that ours is not the first to sin in this respect. Forget Mozart's, too - as represented by his brisk improvising bout with Clementi - for as early as 1518 there are records of a competition that took place between two of the finest choirs in Tudor England.

BBC Radio 3's The Cardinal's Household Chapel told the tale of how Henry VIII got wind of the fact that Cardinal Wolsey's chapel choir was outstripping his own Chapel Royal choristers in its virtuosity and summoned both choirs to a contest - which focused their sight-reading abilities among other things. It seems that Wolsey's singers came out on top, and the mortified Henry was only placated by the gift of an outstanding boy treble trained by Wolsey's Master of Choristers, Richard Pygott. If he could read and sustain the highly arching lines typical of Pygott's Mass Veni Sancte Spiritus, which took the lion's share of this programme in a majestic performance by the Choir of Christchurch Cathedral (once Wolsey's Cardinal College) under Stephen Darlington, he must have been quite a singer.

A further trawl through Tudor history was offered on the same channel by Spirit of the Age, which casually though informatively continued its historical tour of Westminster Abbey with music to match. It is a well tried formula, but radio can do this kind of thing so well, and the nape of one's neck tingled as a few words set the scene for the arrival at the Abbey of French ambassadors prior to the betrothal of Prince Charles and Henrietta Maria. It was night, torches flared, and "The organ was touched by the best finger of that age", that of Orlando Gibbons. Television could not have matched the intensity of that characteristic moment of radio, coloured as it was by the building's haunting resonance.

Given the cost of mounting performances of new orchestral music, and the financial risk involved - especially if the composers are little known - the BBC remains its most generous promoter, and the BBC Philharmonic's programme under Sir Peter Maxwell Davies on Tuesday evening was a typically brave enterprise. Three world premieres were broadcast, including that of a BBC commission, Maxwell Davies' own Sails in St Magnus No 2, and the works of three young composers, all of great interest. From the throbbing pulses and swirling figuration of Marc Yeats' I See Blue to the concentrated beauties of Stuart Macrae's Witch's Kiss, and the almost Baxian texturing of Joby Talbot's Luminescence, one admired the ability both to invent memorable sonic images and control their musical growths.

The climax of the programme was provided by the Maxwell Davies, whose slow, inevitable unfolding - involving his own music and plainsong over passacaglia processes - established links with his big neo-medieval symphonic works of the Sixties. A fine, bold work with hints of seascape and the resonance of Viking exploration, it achieved evocative expression in the by no means helpful acoustic of Manchester's Studio 7.