Classical: On The Air

The Week on Radio

RADIO 3 could repeat a good many more programmes than it does if only the rigid schedules would allow it. The summer has been a good time to catch things like Susan Marling's Designs for Living on weekday evenings, which dealt with celebrated buildings, so the series doesn't come within my brief, though it made piquant use of music at selected moments. Why, though, was Role Play, Michael Billington's famous series of interviews with actresses and opera singers, repeated last week? On Wednesday Gwyneth Jones and Zoe Wanamaker shed no light whatsoever on Sophocles's and Strauss's Elektra - Jones speaking in a ridiculously distorted, rootless accent which I suppose is the lot of international stars who belong nowhere and whose minds function in perpetual translation. Josephine Barstow, on Friday, was a lot more sensible about Salome, though we didn't need her to tell us that the "Dance of Seven Veils" is musically gross and dramatically boring.

Sunday inevitably brought a repeat of Natalie Wheen's "celebration" of the life of Michael Tippett, whose oratorio, A Child of Our Time was in the Prom that evening. Sir Colin Davis, who has conducted the first performances of seven major Tippett works, was alone in recognising his shortcomings. His scores looked dreadful, unplayable, said Davis, because, as the composer Steve Martland explained, Tippett wrote what he wanted - by which he meant, an approximation of the intended sound rather than instructions to performers.

Otherwise, the programme was hagiography, and Tippett was painted as a thoroughly nice chap. Even his most devoted admirers have always admitted he was a less than lucid communicator, both as a person and as a composer. Yet he was, and remains, compelling, probably because his humanity and intoxication with life seemed more important than mere professionalism. And when the wicked Wheen asked him how many puberties he had experienced, he became coy and girlish - "Oh, you're not getting round me like that. Try again!"

Almost the last word was given to Harrison Birtwistle, who said that if Tippett's music was "flawed", then a perfect, or wholly achieved work was probably predictable, and, in effect, that it was better to travel hopefully than to arrive. He, again, was interviewed in the interval of last Thursday's Prom, following the European premiere of his Exody, and was drawn to make one of those rash and sweeping generalisations few of us can resist. The two most important artistic movements this century, he said, were cubism and serialism. At least, nothing could be the same afterwards. When you consider that neither Kandinsky nor Matisse were touched by the one, nor Varese by the other, you wonder. And Varese, as much as any composer, is supposed to have affected Birtwistle's sound world.

In The Year, continuing each Sunday afternoon as part of the mega-series, Sounding the Century, Natalie Wheen's choice for 1943 had one serial work, Webern's orchestral Variations, but nothing else that was at all affected by serialism. It was a stimulating, motley programme, in which Wheen was not too rigid in setting a context - indeed, that was very much the point as I understood it. Harry Partch's US Highball represented the social and musical dropout - though Partch got a Guggenheim scholarship that year - in the form of a hobo melodrama with untempered splashings on tinny- sounding instruments, which provided the main musical interest. A primitive curiosity. Equally splashy in its very English way - unintentionally comical and frolicsome - was Tippett's solo cantata, or song-cycle, Boyhood's End, resonantly titled in view of his imprisonment as a conscientious objector who refused to follow directions for alternative war service. The War had no direct effect on any music in the programme except Bernard Herrmann's unsentimental berceuse, For the Fallen. In their various ways, Kurt Weill's One Touch of Venus, Messiaen's Visions de l'Amen and Vaughan Williams's Fifth Symphony ignored it.