A Radio 3 doc that contains some of the best insults I’ve ever heard

A recent Sunday Feature on Radio 3 contained some of the best insults I have ever heard. Contributors to the programme on the early music revolution were discussing the backlash they experienced in the 1970s while reviving period-style instruments and techniques. Soprano Dame Emma Kirkby remembered one critic complaining that listening to her performance was ‘as about as interesting as eating an entire meal of plain yoghurt’. Another critic, writing in Gramophone, pronounced the strings of the new ensembles ‘as beautiful as period dentistry’.

Those strings were mostly made of animal guts. There was, as one of the musicians interviewed recalled, ‘a DIY atmosphere’ to the movement, which developed alongside a spate of others in 1973. A fresh interest in medieval and renaissance music and historical treatises had spawned an appetite for ‘authenticity’. Singers turned to the Tudor-centric Clerkes of Oxenford for inspiration. Other musicians were awakened to the folly of making 18th-century music sound like 19th-century music by using metal strings.