Value for money | 29 November 2012

It’s been challenged as ‘elitist’ and at times in its more than 60-year history it’s been threatened with deletion from the schedule. But CD Review, with its specialist ‘Building a Library’ slot, has been around since I was old enough to listen. Radio 3’s keynote Saturday-morning show is probably the programme I miss most when I’m away. You know exactly what the format is going to be, recognise most of the voices behind the mikes, yet you’re never quite sure what you might hear, what you could discover.

Its survival, in a format virtually unchanged as far back as I can remember, always strikes me as extraordinary in this age of constant makeovers. It alone is probably worth the licence fee, if you think how much a year’s worth of private tutorials on classical music would cost (try to find a class, let alone a tutorial, for less than £48.50 a term). As for the charge that it’s only for musical toffs, take a listen to Saturday’s programme (produced by Kevin Bee), which gave us a 45-minute breakdown of a Mozart piano sonata.

Stephen Plaistow was our tutor this week, seeking out the best recording of the Piano Sonata in A minor, No. 8, and setting up a session that was perfectly balanced between exposition and explanation. First he gave us the Portuguese pianist Maria Joao Pires, and the fiendishly fast streams of quick notes at the beginning of the first movement. ‘Flowing like oil’ is how Mozart asked for them to be played, Plaistow explained, before moving on to the same passage played this time by Andras Schiff.

‘Did you prefer his view?’ asked Plaistow. ‘I don’t.’ And you could really hear why. After the Pires, Schiff sounded too rushed, too volatile, too uneven — not at all flowing like oil.