It’s business as usual for the BBC’s radio stations. While the boardroom burns, the production teams are busy creating — weekloads of entertainment, information, erudition. The doomsayers love a crisis, and this latest disaster is a devil of a mess, but we should probably remember that the Corporation depends for its survival not on the superiority of its management techniques but on the continuing excellence of its programmes. Once that goes, we should be really worried.
Anyone doubting this should spend the afternoon with Simon Callow and his Tasting Notes programme on Classic FM (Sundays). Sponsored by Laithwaite’s Wine, the programme’s format obliges Callow to match each and every piece of music on his playlist with a suitably blended glass of wine. Why not open up a bottle of Sicilian red, aged in an American oak barrel, suggests Callow, as he slips into his CD player the Sanctus from Verdi’s Requiem? Even Callow sounds subdued by the commercialism, the banality of what he’s being paid to do, his plummy-voiced exuberance toned down almost to inaudibility.
Over on Radio 3 at the same time you could have heard Choral Evensong, live from Liverpool, swiftly followed by Aled Jones’s The Choir and the strange, exciting music of Yantra, a group of three singers who blend Bulgarian throat singing with south Indian ragas and English church music.
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