Autumn shake-up in Radios 2 and 3 scheduling

This time round in the autumn shake-up of the schedules it’s Radios 2 and 3 who are on the frontline of change. They have had to face ‘tough decisions’ and to address ‘the financial challenges due to the licence-fee freeze’. Radio 3 has lost most of its ‘live’ Saturday-night transmissions from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, on the grounds that they cost too much to set up. It’s also given the chop to one of my favourite weekend programmes, World Routes, because of the ‘high costs’ of sending its presenter Dr Lucy Duran to far-flung places round the globe in search of unusual music. But this was never travel for the sake of it. Duran is an ethnomusicologist as much as a musician, and she woke us up to what music can sound like in the deserts of the Sahara as well as the frozen wastes of Greenland, making new connections through sound.