Music matters

There’s nothing new about Radio 3 tearing up the schedules, temporarily abandoning regular favourites such as Private Passions, The Early Music Show, Choral Evensong in search of creative freedom. Its first controller was not just given permission but instructed by the director general, Sir William Haley, to ignore the demands of Big Ben and the news schedule in favour of allowing concerts to run on beyond the hour and to be heard just as they would have been in the concert hall, with ‘live’ operas broadcast in full from Paris or New York. There was to be ‘no annotation’, no commentary on the music that had just been heard. Pauses, for as long as four minutes (unimaginable now with our demands for wall to wall sound), were encouraged, to give the music room to breathe.

More recently, under the inspired programming initiatives of the former controller Roger Wright, whole days and weeks have been devoted to the works of a single composer, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, seeking out new understandings, different insights into these giants of the canon, too often taken for granted and almost played and heard without thinking. But on Sunday, in a bold stroke by Alan Davey, the current controller, and his team of creative producers, 12 hours of air time — from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. — was given over to a continuous sequence of music in an unusual celebration of the station’s 70th anniversary, modelled on one of 3’s most successful (and most inventive) programmes, Words and Music.

It sounds easy — to take a theme and string together a selection of music, poems and extracts from prose works that illustrate, convey, conjure its meaning or atmosphere. But it takes many hours to put something together that sounds effortless and yet will also resonate with the listener.