Update on Three

It’s several years since I’ve attempted in these columns an overview of the state of Radio Three. Perceptions are sharpened by an actual absence from these islands of some three months, followed by a season in the country, where its beams do not penetrate. So I come to it refreshed, with a wider perspective from which to measure benefits and disabilities than if, glued to the tacky Radio Times, I’d never been away.

Positives first: plenty of the network’s manifold and manifest excellences remain intact. A passionate addict of ‘serious classical music’ (ugh) and the idea, and actuality, of a service wholly devoted to its dissemination, I find this ideal still holds, if precariously, despite the depradations of current ideology. Chez R3 one can still bank upon living music-making every day. Each weekday, a live broadcast (or repeat) of a piano or song recital, or other concerted chamber music, comes from the Wigmore Hall or somewhere equally suited; each weekday evening guarantees a live (or relayed) orchestral concert; each afternoon deploys the BBC’s house orchestras (as well as London, those in Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester and Ulster) in (mostly) standard rep; current opera productions are decently covered; and the regular Winter Season of direct transmissions from the New York Met have yielded some of the most intense musical pleasures to be heard in recent years.