Music on Radio

It must have been sometime in 1954 that, switching from the BBC Home Service, I chanced upon a programme entitled Talking about Music presented by a young composer called Anthony Hopkins. Indeed, it may well have been the very first of an epic series that was ultimately to run until 1992. It seemed he was going to discuss the Concerto for Double String Orchestra by Michael Tippett, whom, I had somehow gathered even at the tender age of 14, was a composer with a daunting reputation for complexity.

But I was not to be put off, having - doubtless with many of my generation - been somewhat prepared for this kind of listening by a lady with a strong German accent called Helen Henschel who used to announce herself on Children's Hour in the late 1940s with a firm piano rendition of the big tune from Brahms's First Symphony, and then invite us to listen carefully to the difference in tone between the oboe and the clarinet, and other such basic ear-training routines. In any case, Hopkins's dissection at the piano of the music's characteristic motifs, harmonies and methods of development proved so clear and sympathetic that, by the end of his half-hour, I had not only become a lifelong Tippett fan - or, at any rate, of his earlier output - but an enthusiast for Hopkins himself, only later deserting to the more searching analytic inquiries put out on the Third Programme by Deryck Cooke, Robert Simpson and Hans Keller.

I was strongly reminded of Hopkins by last weekend's Radio 3 Sunday Feature on George Gershwin, presented by the pianist Jack Gibbons. No doubt the programme could have dwelt on the glitzy career, or the significance of Gershwin as a prophet of crossover, or whatever - except that Gibbons was so evidently driven by a passion to show how the music worked: how Gershwin could heighten a phrase with a single unexpected passing-note, or subvert a best with a wicked left-hand cross-rhythm, and how he got steadily subtler at such things over his brief working life. Nothing particularly esoteric emerged, perhaps, but it reminded one just how comparatively rare such inducements to close listening have become on Radio 3 in more recent years - the odd short series from Michael Hall or occasional concert- interval feature apart. True, there is also Record Review and Interpretations on Record, but these tend to focus on performance rather than composition as such. Surely an hour per week in the network's new 24-hour coverage could be found for the insightful explication of a chosen work. There is no shortage of musicians with a gift for this sort of thing, from the youthful George Benjamin to the venerable Wilfrid Mellers.

Or indeed this paper's Stephen Johnson, though the brief he was required to fulfil for last Saturday's Kaleidoscope Feature (repeated today on Radio 4 at 9.30pm) was more typical of the programme on music we now tend to get. Entitled Johannes Brahms - Rhapsody in Brown, this seemed far more concerned with the great composer's image than his notes; with a panel of musicians pondering whether he was conservative or progressive, whether he pulled his emotional punches, even what colours his music suggested. Since the participants included such thoughtful performers as Sir Colin Davis, Peter Frankl, Joshua Bell and a bevy of distinguished academics (though, symptomatically, no composers), and since Johnson himself is well up in 19th-century aesthetics, some promising points were raised, yet the end result remained frustratingly unfocused. When Andrew Clements of the Guardian complained, for instance, that he found something a bit "machine-like" about the finale of the Fourth Symphony, one longed for someone to cry, "Oh, yeah? Well, get over to that piano, then, and prove it to us. In detail." Bayan Northcott