Classical: Music on Radio 3

Working far from home a few years ago, I found myself with plenty of spare time in the evenings, and it was possible to catch up on some long-contemplated listening projects, most importantly getting to know more of the music of Guillaume Dufay. I'll never forget listening in the dark one evening to some of his chansons and feeling that this marvellous composer was physically present in the room and holding out his hands to me. The fact that his music speaks so directly and vividly across a span of five and a half centuries marks Dufay as one of the giants of European music, and his lasting contemporaneity and humanity have been most touchingly celebrated in Radio 3's Composers of the Week.

Christopher Page's commentary was a model of its kind. Early 15th-century music is still something of a specialised area, but Page gave enough vital biographical, historical and musical information to enable the least knowledgeable listener to relate to the music. And what music! The high plainness of Dufay's style, as Page memorably described it, sings so readily to the late 20th-century heart, and the ravishing chanson "Adieu Ces Bons Vins de Lannoys" and the majestic celebratory motets we heard made for heart- warming and deeply impressive listening.

There is a vital lesson to be learnt from Dufay, who established a new simplicity after the incredibly complex manner of preceding generations of composers. The music of our own time has seen a similar attempt to simplify after the development of an extreme complexity, and it is doubtful whether anyone can be said to have approached Dufay's masterly solution of the stylistic conundrum: how do you simplify while retaining intellectual substance and profundity of emotion?

The exploration of those areas of late-romanticism which the early 20th- century revolutionaries appeared for a time to have rendered irrelevant seems these days increasingly worthwhile. Our century is extraordinarily rich in its range of styles, and our lives can be enhanced by the likes of Enescu and Medtner, no less than by Schoenberg, Webern, Stravinsky and co. The BBC Philharmonic is currently focusing upon the orchestral music of Enescu, and a superb performance last Sunday of his Symphony No 3, under Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, made a magnificent impression. It is hard for works like this to break into a repertory that is saturated with the music of Mahler - a marvellous composer like Suk has suffered similarly - but this splendid symphony, which encompasses a dark and passionate dynamism in its scherzo and an unearthly serenity in its extended choral finale, offers an utterly original vision. We should have more chances to hear it live.

Another work of enormous elaboration was given a tumultuous performance by the late John Ogdon in a BBC archive recording on Saturday. Medtner has perhaps always sounded a little too close to Rachmaninov to establish his own identity, but the intellectual power with which he organises his rich harmonic structures and his endlessly inventive rhythmic sense are very much his own. The transcendentally difficult Second Sonata was given its head by Ogdon in an interpretation both wild and fantastic. How often would we hear such masterpieces if it were not for Ogdon's generosity of spirit?