Hearing voices | 1 November 2012

It’s business as usual for the BBC’s radio stations. While the boardroom burns, the production teams are busy creating — weekloads of entertainment, information, erudition. The doomsayers love a crisis, and this latest disaster is a devil of a mess, but we should probably remember that the Corporation depends for its survival not on the superiority of its management techniques but on the continuing excellence of its programmes. Once that goes, we should be really worried.

Anyone doubting this should spend the afternoon with Simon Callow and his Tasting Notes programme on Classic FM (Sundays). Sponsored by Laithwaite’s Wine, the programme’s format obliges Callow to match each and every piece of music on his playlist with a suitably blended glass of wine. Why not open up a bottle of Sicilian red, aged in an American oak barrel, suggests Callow, as he slips into his CD player the Sanctus from Verdi’s Requiem? Even Callow sounds subdued by the commercialism, the banality of what he’s being paid to do, his plummy-voiced exuberance toned down almost to inaudibility.

Over on Radio 3 at the same time you could have heard Choral Evensong, live from Liverpool, swiftly followed by Aled Jones’s The Choir and the strange, exciting music of Yantra, a group of three singers who blend Bulgarian throat singing with south Indian ragas and English church music. Their first session singing together was for a Radio 3 Late Junction programme. Out of it came the weird and wonderful sound of the a cappella ‘The Bagpiper’, a Bulgarian folk tune given a shot of staccato basso profundo and wailing raga. Hearing it on the first day of winter, as the chilly night air drew in, was like receiving a shot of adrenaline. Not to everyone’s taste, for sure, but that’s what we pay for in the licence fee: the chance to hear something unexpected, not predictable, out of the ordinary.