The joy of Radio 3’s Building a Library

So, you’ve fallen in love with a piece of classical music and you want to buy a recording. The problems begin when you hit Amazon. Any reasonably established classic will have been recorded numerous times: do you go for the performer you’ve already heard of? The crackly vintage recording with the gushing five-star reviews? Or the budget-priced unknown with the vaguely Slavic name; after all, it’s the same music. Isn’t it?

Radio 3’s Building a Library sorts it out so you don’t have to. Tucked away within Record Review each Saturday morning, the format is simple: every week, the BBC details a critic to listen to as many recordings of a given work as is humanly possible. Then they present their findings, playing one recording off against another before settling on a single recommendation. Over the decades, it’s been an incredibly stable formula. True, fashionable biases come and go. The library choice is invariably in squeaky-clean modern sound: if the greatest ever performance was recorded on shellac in 1938, that’s just too bad. More recently, there’ve been rumours of recordings being bumped down the list by jittery producers on #MeToo grounds.

The weekly masterclass Building a Library is as Reithian as it gets

Generally, though, Building a Library is as Reithian as it gets: a weekly masterclass in the art of listening, disguised as a breakfast-time chat. This week, the subject was Chopin’s four scherzos for piano. There are at least 60 available recordings and the pianist Iain Burnside namechecked around 20 before choosing a winner that he could just as readily have picked 40 years ago: a recording from 1977 by the Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter. ‘Nothing is light or throwaway, it all has meaning,’ he concluded; which might or might not sound like your idea of fun.