Friendly fire | 21 February 2019

With the upsurge of listeners to Classic FM (now boasted to be 5.6 million listeners each week) and the imminent launch of a new commercial station, Scala Radio, dedicated to classical music and fronted by the former Radio 2 DJ Simon Mayo (who has said about his new home: ‘Some of it will be familiar, some new and exciting but all timeless, beautiful and all absolutely relevant to today’), Radio 3 badly needs to regain our attention. Last weekend’s focus on Berlioz, ‘The Ultimate Romantic’, could have been such an opportunity, but either because of funding cuts or a confusion about its purpose (to find new audiences, to teach or just to entertain) there was little buzz about the weekend.

Wisely, no doubt, a decision was made not to turn over the schedules entirely to the works of the French composer, who died 150 years ago. Non-stop Berlioz for 48 hours might have been hard on the ears and emotions (unlike those magical Bach ten days in 2005, or the Mozart and Beethoven immersions that followed). Berlioz offers us too much feverish excitement and exuberant orchestration. Instead a mixture of recorded and ‘live’ concerts gave us the major works, Symphonie fantastique, Béatrice et Bénédict, Harold in Italy, and some minor songs and choral music.

Tom Service endeavoured to conjure up the spirit of Berlioz in this week’s edition of Music Matters, and to find an explanation for the strange power of his music to heighten the senses, provoking an intense emotional response. We heard, for instance, how as a teenage viola player with the National Youth Orchestra, Nicholas Collon had felt himself floating upwards to meet the mushrooms hanging from the dome of the Albert Hall as he bowed away frantically in the last eight bars of the Symphonie fantastique.