MUSIC ON RADIO

Here's a question: what does Radio 3 think questions are for? Once upon a time, if you'd caught an on-air voice asking "What went into the make-up of an artist admired equally by Wagner and Offenbach, Brahms and Rubinstein?", you'd have expected a serious attempt at an answer. Now, on new Radio 3 Lite, all you get is a shrug: "We'll never know". But, the voice burbles brightly on, "while the Waltz King is Composer of the Week, we can at least sample the magic that will endure as long as the Danube continues to flow." Which only goes to show that Chris de Souza (for the shrugger was he) hadn't bothered listening to Sunday's "Sounding the Century" feature, Settling the Score. Billed in the Radio Times as an attempt "to unravel the financial paradoxes of 20th-century musical life", it was of course just another excuse for professional doom- and-gloom merchant Norman Lebrecht to parade his familiar thesis that the whole classical music "industry" (as populist pundits and politicos will insist on calling the sacred art) is about to collapse, thanks entirely to the Three Tenors, their greedy agents and the massive fees they all charge. To hear Lebrecht spout, you'd think Pavarotti was already planning to damn up the source of the Danube himself.

A truer reflection of the real economies at work came from Peter Redman, of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. Such are the basic costs of modern orchestral life, he noted, that, without sponsorship or subsidy, his orchestra would lose up to pounds 30,000 on every sell-out concert it gives. No, Norman, the real crisis in classical music stems not from the greed of the few, but from the aspirations of the many. Musicians are no longer the bonded servants of upper-class patrons, but middle-class professionals, serving a mainly middle-class audience, and they expect to be paid accordingly. The one question that anyone who loves classical music really needs to have answered - how are we middle-class masses of today to go on enjoying the musical profits of past economic exploitation? - here went completely unasked, while you'd have listened in vain for any mention of the words "education", "society" or "shared cultural values". Whatever questions writer Paul Vaughan thought he was addressing in this discussion (if that's not too grand a description for this haphazardly edited collage of often inconsequential soundbites), it would surely have been better if he'd asked them himself. Intoning such portentous links as "So, where did it all go wrong?" actor Sam West showed no interest whatsoever in the answers.

But then, neither does Joan Bakewell. At least, in interviewing opera singer Samuel Ramey, this week's Radio 3 Artist of the Week, she seemed to be in the same room as her guest - unlike Susannah Simons, whose "questions" to Yehudi Menuhin, subject of Classic FM's bank holiday edition of Masters of Their Art, were so obviously grafted in after the event to punctuate the meandering verbosity of the violinist's "replies". It's not just that Bakewell's questions are so often inane in themselves ("You've sung in many opera houses across the world," she asked Ramey: "so what matters to you in the quality of an opera house?"), but that, even when she manages to think up a real question, she can't be bothered to press for a reply. "So, what did you learn from Karajan?" she asked, after allowing Ramey to ramble endlessly on about the four-year flirtation that led to his becoming the great gauleiter's Don Giovanni. "It was just, I mean, the whole atmosphere," he succinctly replied. The phrase "Can you be more precise?" never even passed her lips. What's worse, Bakewell (or her producer) almost went out of her way to prevent the "conversation" shedding any light whatsoever on music itself. When Ramey recalled that his "first exposure to opera" was hearing Ezio Pinza on a borrowed library record, wouldn't it have been more revealing to hear Pinza singing "Non piu andrai" than Ramey? When the latter said that he "had never seen an opera until I was actually taking part in one", wasn't it simply perverse to segue not into anything operatic at all but into an Aaron Copland voice-and- piano arrangement of "Long Time Ago"? But then, over on Classic FM, when Menuhin stated that he could never play Beethoven's Violin Concerto without recalling the single word "Worship" which his teacher, Georges Enesco, had marked in his score just after the first movement cadenza, did Simons play us that bit? Did she heck.

Perhaps, though, the single most revealing indication of the current state of inquiry on BBC Radio 3 was the puff that preceded Bakewell's blather, in which Ramey was trailed as "the most recorded bass in history, apparently". Apparently? Couldn't anyone be bothered to check? Now, there's a question.

Mark Pappenheim