Radio : Music - the food of Pepys' love

IN JUNE 1660 Samuel Pepys and his cousin Edward Montagu set off for France aboard the Naseby. Being musical types, they had brought along their viols and gitterns but they lacked percussion, so they put some coins inside a pair of candlesticks and lo, they had cymbals. Their trip was, you might say, significant. On the return journey, the ship was renamed The Royal Charles and its passenger was the about-to-be restored Stuart king.

That was the year Pepys began his diary. Though we tend to think of him as an old roue, he was in fact only 26. His life spanned the most dramatic events of the century and he was always at their hub. But Julia Eisner's "Friday Feature" was the first programme about him not even to mention the Great Fire. It was concerned with music, which was, for Pepys, The Thing of the World That I Love Most (R3). It sparkled with wit and good humour and dazzled in its re-creation of the boundless enthusiasm of this most appealing Restoration yuppie.

Alex Jennings played Pepys with dash and verve. We heard him recount his progression from a Puritan disapproval of jigs and frivolity to a firm resolve, not only to dance himself, but to get his wife dancing. At one point he feared he had gone too far and developed a furious jealousy of her interest in the dancing master, checking to see whether she was wearing her drawers and gloomily predicting: "I fear I shall go near to lose my command over her''. We heard his own first tentative compos-itions, exquisitely played by Lucie Skeaping's City Waites, and we followed him as he tried to understand the movement away from composing in hexachords and gamuts towards thinking in terms of a G minor scale. He gave up in the end and, with typical self-confidence,decided to devise his own system.

Packed with information and leavened with humanity, this was the best kind of radio documentary. As it ended, Pepys was giving his opinion of "little Pelham Humphrey", also newly returned from France and "an absolute monsieur". To hear his boasting, wrote the disgruntled diarist, "would make a man piss". Yet it was Humphrey who was to be the teacher of this year's star composer, Henry Purcell. The tercentenary began with a full broadcast of Purcell's extraordinary work The Fairy Queen (R3). This "semi-opera" takes for its text a strange, bowdlerised version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, possibly adapted by Thomas Betterton, who should have left it alone. One line he

retained could be applied to him. Lord, we thought, what fools these mortals be.

Still, Diana Quick gave of her breathy best as a highly sexed Titania and Bernard Cribbins's Bottom was tremendous. Jack Klaff's Oberon was not.

It was downright whimsical. He addressed his wife as Tightaynia, which seemed unfair, and his servant as Park, which was more reasonable as Park's accent got lost somewhere in the Midlands (Centre Park? Ambridge Country Park?) only to re-surface as StageIrish in Phoenix Park. The music, performed by the London Classical Players and the Schutz Choir, was marvellous. To those of us familiar only with the little bits of Purcell that have been credited to Jeremiah Clark, it was a revelation, full of dancing rhythms, clashin g trumpets and glorious melody. Yet the whole piece remains mysterious. Why should this play contain a Chinese duet, a monkey's dance and a passionate flirtation between a rustic maid and her swain? The answer must be simply that they liked it that way, though even Oberon was provoked to enquire: "What think you of this masque?"

If you can make an opera from a play, perhaps you can do the reverse. That is the principle of the "Operama" series and it sometimes works. But last week's offering was too sour and salt even to be good red herring.

Peter Grimes (R4) first appeared in 1810 as a powerful poem by George Crabbe, the Suffolk parson whose mesmeric language and furious indignation so impressed Dr Johnson and Edmund Burke, and inspired Britten to write his best opera. You couldn't help missing both the earlier models in Martyn Wade's play, a dark, sinister piece full of the sounds of sucking surf and sinking souls. Maybe the "Operama" team will do a double reversal and run a season of opera originals: Crabbe in heroic couplets and Gawainin Middle English.

Finally, some information from the World Service, last refuge of insomniacs - it's only a snippet, but with such a jot or tittle reputations and sometimes fortunes are made. (What on earth is a tittle? Smaller than a gamut, anyway). Here it is: the word "qi", which means the life force in Chinese, is now to be allowed in Scrabble. You never know, it may come in handy. John Thompson on Outlook told us and then said goodbye in that special way they have, when it's 1.30am here but goodness knows what in Bangkok or Yucatan. "We'll be with you again at the usual time," he said, before adding warmly: "In the meantime, lots of love." How nice - or, as Pepys so often signed off, And so to bed.