Make a play for the early birds

music on radio

After listening to a broadcast of Beethoven's Choral Fantasy, Otto Klemperer telephoned the pianist in the performance, Edith Vogel, to tell her he'd like to work with her. She went to see him, and together they played through Brahms's D minor Concerto on two pianos, Klemperer managing the orchestral part quite adequately even though he had virtually the use of only one hand. For whatever reason, nothing came of it. Vogel, who died four years ago, never had a high-flying solo career and didn't want it. But for more than 40 years she broadcast quite regularly for the BBC and was remembered last Friday afternoon in Mining the Archive, presented by Stephen Plaistow, one of her producers, in conversation with the pianist James Gibb, her colleague on the piano faculty of the Guildhall School.

Schumann's Allegro in B minor, a bravura piece that's seldom heard, was quite a find. Vogel was nothing if not fearless, and passionate. In Schumann's Davidsbundlertanze, she really went for some of the perilous, hectic pieces which other pianists are inclined to treat with circumspection. But sometimes she also hit the keys and misplaced accents, and in the very last piece she adopted a limping rhythm which marred its simplicity.

Latterly, Vogel was associated particularly with Beethoven and Schubert, so it was curious to hear a 1973 studio recording of Chopin's B minor Sonata. You could say she played the first movement with a foreign accent, because of her idiosyncratic rhythmic shaping. But the slow movement was unusually thoughtful, intellectually charged, and the finale was proud and furious - and very fast.

Vogel was greatly respected as a teacher and became something of a monstre sacre. In Hear and Now, later the same evening, another keyboard ikon was paid elegant tribute by the composer Howard Skempton. David Tudor, whose obituary appeared in the Independent last Saturday, died on 13 August at the age of 70. One of the least likely events in London in the 1970s was when Victor Schonfield, who ran a heroic little one-man operation called Music Now, hired the Albert Hall for Cage and Tudor together to perform with a tangled mass of electronic gadgetry. By that time, Tudor seems virtually to have given up playing the piano, and amassed a huge collection of devices, many of which he invented himself. In this country, we rather lost track of him, except when he accompanied - though that's hardly the word - the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on tour. As a pianist, he gave the first performances of Cage's Music of Changes, Concert for piano and orchestra and Stockhausen's Piano Piece XI. More than that, he actually influenced the way Stockhausen wrote, or revised, his piano pieces, and Skempton implied that, in the 1950s, he was something like Cage's muse. As examples of what Cage called Tudor's "prodigious sense of the qualities of each sound", we heard Tudor playing two quite early, short pieces by Morton Feldman and Stockhausen's Piano Piece VII. It seemed like history, for we rarely hear avant-garde music of that vintage today. Earlier this year a CD of Tudor's Cologne Radio recordings from the 1950s was released on the "hat ART" label, which is available in Britain.

The specially recorded music in Hear and Now on Friday was by British composers and covered a wide range, including Skempton's jaunty little Chamber Concerto. Some of the pieces were as serious as you would expect, but the one that tickled my fancy for being so sweet and unusual was Luke Stoneham's O (Marinero), suggesting a sort of Aeolian harp, with idle tinkling on percussion and harp wafting about long, wordless notes from a soprano.

It's a pity Hear and Now is broadcast so late, as if it weren't worth the attention of anyone besides listeners already committed to present- day music. Yet, contradicting that assumption, the presentation often seems distinctly confined, as if afraid to put people off. Surely it could dig a bit deeper and, perhaps, take in some argument. And at least part of the programme merits a repeat at a more convenient time.