The third way

By the time you read this, the new Radio Three schedule will be up and running — more jazz, more words, fewer ‘live’ broadcasts (as opposed to live recordings) and Choral Evensong switched from Wednesdays, where it has been for decades, to Sundays. There was a terrible hoo-ha at the time these changes were announced back in the autumn, from the listening press as well as from the station’s cohort of Friends. ‘A bullet through the heart of Radio Three,’ warned the Daily Telegraph. But where’s the victim? If you look through what’s on offer in the coming week, there’s Janacek’s fabulous, wrenching opera Jenufa, live from New York, two recorded concerts from the Queen Elizabeth Hall in Performance on 3, and some truly old-fashioned ‘word’ programmes that could have come straight out of the Third Programme, including an essay on the elusive poet W.H. Auden, the centenary of whose birth is celebrated this month.