MUSIC / Prague spring bloom: Anthony Payne on Radio 3's Prague Weekend

BBC Radio 3 has twice devoted weekends to broadcasts from a foreign centre of culture. Berlin was chosen in 1990, a year later it was Minneapolis / St Paul, and each constituted an ultimate experience in thematic broadcasting, with interviews, discussions, concerts and on- the-spot comment. The idea was a brilliant one, and it was taken up again last weekend when a splendid array of programmes was transmitted from Prague.

The city's architecture, its literature, its press (mostly foreign-owned), cuisine, history, politics, the very feel of the streets were all dwelt upon; and at the programmes' heart lay Prague's outstanding contribution to Western music. The Spring Festival is in full swing, and it afforded rich opportunities for broadcasting operatic, chamber and orchestral performances.

The seriousness with which Czechs take their music was movingly suggested by the festival's ceremonial opening, an oration and a procession visiting the graves of the country's great musicians from Smetana to Dvorak. This mood of exulted cultural awareness continued with the ritual performance of Smetana's Ma Vlast, which traditionally launches the festival's musical programme. Performed by the Prague Symphony Orchestra under Neeme Jarvi from the Dvorak Hall, it carried the most powerful expressive charge, and was characterised by sumptuous instrumental sonorities, with a passionate address bred of intimate corporate understanding.

At lunchtime on Saturday, we heard one of the most recent additions to Czech musical life, the New Czech Chamber Orchestra, in a programme of Pavel Haas, Mendelssohn, Mozart and Schoenberg. It was beautifully done, but it was a subsequent dip into local archives that produced the most haunting listening: Karel Ancerl's incandescent reading of Suk's marvellous symphonic poem Ripening, given in the fatal year of 1968, an equally electrifying performance of Dvorak's Noonday Witch in the mid-1950s with a defiantly anti-Communist audience, the young Fischer- Dieskau singing Schumann's Dichterliebe quite miraculously in 1957.

There was always just one more programme to demand you stayed tuned: a live relay of Smetana's opera Dalibor from the Prague National Theatre, for instance, with Leo Marian Vodicka, Eva Urbanova and Jirina Markova in heroic voice, then a recording of a much talked about a concert by the Guarneri Trio Praha. And so on.

Interspersed between these programmes there was a constant flow of talks and discussions. For example, Mozart's connection with Prague was explored, followed by a concert focusing on the work of his Czech contemporaries, and then another featuring the beautiful Second String Quarter of the Czech composer Sommer. Between them, current thinking about arts funding was examined.

It could all have degenerated into bits and pieces, but somehow the density of information, verbal or musical, held our concentration. If anything was missing, it was a serious look at the younger generation of composers. Still, Prague Weekend was a daring enterprise superbly carried through.