Radio 3's Young Artists Day: Move over Mozart, it's time young composers called the tune

Reviews: Composer of the week, Radio 3; Performance on 3, Radio 3; In Tune, Radio 3

This Monday heralded Young Artists Day on Radio 3. It's a pretty radical idea, if you think about it. Young people and Radio 3 would seem, on the surface of things, to be as far apart as Neptune and Venus. The majority of Radio 3 listeners are upwards of 55 and, despite the network's best efforts, they ain't getting any younger.

Radio 3 has a broader problem too. Last year BBC6 Music overtook the network's listening figures, racking up an average of 1.89m compared to Radio 3's 1.88. The two may not be direct competitors, but, still, 6Music's steady rise compared to Radio 3's slow decline was food for thought. Clearly something has to be done. So a day devoted to youngsters? Why the hell not?

Thus, it was with some excitement that I prepared myself to be wowed by a new generation of composers reinventing the wheel by melding Nyman-esque minimalism with Tuvan throat singers and a splash of disco. The reality, on Composer of the Week, was a reflection on Mozart.

What? The fact that he started composing young appeared to be the justification for a whole hour devoted his life and music, to which I say pffffft. If you're going to devote a day to young artists, then actually devote a day to young artists, not artists who were young 250 years ago but are now very much dead.

On to Afternoon on 3, in which presenter Ian Skelly frothed excitedly about the possibilities of a day spent look at the work of choreographers, composers, photographers, artists and writers, all of them under 25. And they were, by and large, brilliant.

There was the 21-year-old art student and video artist with a fascination with dating apps, and a 19-year-old studying English at university who was moonlighting as a composer of fascinatingly discordant orchestral pieces inspired by literary works. The latter talked about "implications of causality" and "paratactic relationships", which was gloriously over the top and, coming from the mouth of a teenager, just glorious.

In Tune came from a studio in the Roundhouse in London with a programme aimed, according to presenter Sean Rafferty, at "celebrating the exuberance, talent and potential of youth". And it was genuinely exciting. Because in between works by Britten, Hugo Wolf, and more bloody Mozart, we got live performances of the carnival band Kinetika Bloco, a traditional Bulgarian choral song, and an acoustic version of Elizabeth Maconchy's Ophelia's Song.

Better still was a segment about BitterSuite, a group who are turning classical music into a multi-sensory experience by working with chefs, poets, neurologists and perfumiers. Purists may shudder at the thought, but as BitterSuite's creator said, such projects help "to counteract the idea that classical music is the opposite of young people, which I firmly believe that it's not, but somehow it's being sold as that."

This idea, that classical music is still seen as old-fashioned and the preserve of the elite, was what Young Artists Day was about. There will, of course, have been scores of moaners who will have seen the station's attempts to bring in younger listeners and new sounds as the end of days, but frankly they can bore off. A seam of programming aimed at a more youthful and open-minded demographic is just the shot in the arm that Radio 3 needs.

Twitter.com/FionaSturges