"What is expressed to me by music I love is not too vague to be put into words but, on the contrary, too precise" – Felix Mendelssohn

The string quartets of Felix Mendelssohn have until recently been relatively neglected by record companies and in the concert hall. No recordings of them are extant from some of the great names of the quartet world: the Amadeus, the Quartetto Italiano, the Takács and the Lindsays. It is still the case that the chances of hearing a Mendelssohn quartet at a chamber recital or on R3 are slim – and if one is played, it is most likely to be one of the two early quartets Op. 12 or Op. 13. The perception remains that the six complete quartets are lightweight or insubstantial, not of the first rank in this repertoire.

Fortunately, in the last decade there has been a growing appreciation of this music among professional quartets and there are now a reasonable number of complete sets on CD. The latest manifestation of this revival of interest is the release of a set by the Emerson Quartet, coinciding with two London concerts at which they played all Mendelssohn's quartet works with the exception of the early 1823 quartet (which Mendelssohn did not publish). These concerts, broadcast in Performance on 3 over two successive evenings, provide an excellent opportunity to reassess the whole oeuvre in performances by one of the finest ensembles of our time.

What are the principal qualities of this music? Evident assimilation and mastery of the classical quartet form; apparently inexhaustible melodic invention; extended use of counterpoint and the active interplay of all instruments; string writing that always seems to be with the grain of the instrument rather than against it; transitions and developments that are never awkward or contrived; and, particularly in the later quartets, real intensity of expression. In other C19 composers after Beethoven there is often an uneasy conflict between the demands of the traditional quartet form and romantic sensibility, but in these works there is no such tension. The inclination of Mendelssohn in some of his works towards a 'too comfortable sweetness', in Charles Rosen's words, is also generally avoided here.

The E flat major quartet, Op. 12, was in fact written in 1829, two years after the A minor quartet Op. 13. Though the opening has a Mozartian elegance, there are echoes of Beethoven, not only in the main theme of the first movement allegro, which resembles the descending theme in the first movement of Beethoven's Harp quartet, but also in the C minor finale. There are two main innovations (which Mendelssohn did not repeat in his later quartets): firstly the use of a canzonetta in place of the usual minuet or scherzo; and secondly, the reintroduction of material from the first movement in the coda of the finale. The lyrical slow movement is also harmonically and thematically related to the first movement, as is the molto allegro finale which is propelled forward in C minor before the return to the first movement's theme in the coda, initially in the minor and then in the work's home key. The A minor quartet, op 13, Mendelssohn's first, clearly shows the influence of his Beethoven studies, and in particular the latter's late quartet in the same key. The material of the first movement, though, derives from an earlier romantic song Mendelssohn had written, 'Frage' (or 'Question'). The question posed by the first violin in the adagio introduction is 'Ist es wahr?', or "Is it true?'. The question is suspended for later resolution as the tempestuous first movement develops a theme which has affinities with material in Beethoven's A minor quartet. This movement is followed by a grave and centrally impassioned slow movement and a light intermezzo. The finale is heralded by a violin recitative directly echoing that in the Beethoven quartet, and is then driven forward relentlessly in the minor until the reappearance of the song's question in the coda – this time answered as the work ends quietly in A major.

The three quartets Op. 44 were written in 1837-8, shortly after Mendelssohn's marriage. Again opus numbers are misleading as Op. 44 no 1 was in fact the last of the three to be composed. These works eschew the innovations of the earlier quartets in favour of a more orthodox classical form, even to the extent of including exposition repeats. The D major quartet, Op. 44 no 1 has an exhilarating first movement reflecting Mendelssohn's happiness at this time; in character it has something of the quality of the opening movement of the Italian symphony composed a few years earlier. The spirit of the dance continues in the graceful minuet, is briefly interrupted by the delicate slow movement in B minor before returning in full flow in the saltarello finale (the form also employed in the finale of the Italian symphony).

If Haydn's most personal key was F sharp minor, Mozart's G minor and Beethoven's C minor, then the key of the next quartet, the E minor quartet, Op. 44 no 2, seems to have been Mendelssohn's. The main theme of the quartet's first movement echoes that of the finale of Mozart's late G minor symphony (and the finale of Beethoven's C minor symphony). The dark minor mood persists throughout the movement and, after two lighter central movements – a scurrying scherzo and a wistful andante – returns in the presto agitato finale. In contrast to the E minor violin concerto, there is no happy ending here, though in a Schubertian way the mood hovers between minor and major as different by-ways off the movement's main theme are explored before a decisive return to the home key at the end.

An unobtrusive five-note motto opens the E-flat major quartet, Op. 44 no 3, the longest and in some ways the most ambitious of Mendelssohn's quartets, in which textures and counterpoint are given at least equal weight with melodic invention. The motto is woven throughout the first movement and is accompanied by a secondary rising theme which is shared throughout the instruments, particularly in the extended development. The scherzo second movement is almost a darker version of the scherzo in the incidental music to a Midsummer Night's Dream, with hurrying, staccato quavers in the minor and a fugal central section. The beautiful adagio non troppo which follows is hesitant between major and minor moods despite a lyrical second subject, and as the music develops it is the minor key that is in constant attendance in intricately worked conversations between the instruments before the quietly pensive conclusion of the movement. The work ends with a virtuosic tour de force in the molto allegro finale, dominated by the first violin but again demonstrating Mendelssohn's contrapuntal mastery.

The last completed quartet, Op. 80 in F minor, closely followed the tragic death, from a brain haemorrhage, of Mendelssohn's sister Fanny in 1847. Mendelssohn wrote at the time, 'I could not at first think of music without experiencing the greatest emptiness and barrenness in my mind and heart'. Yet despite this confession, the quartet is an eloquent expression of almost unrelieved anguish, three of its movements being in the home key. The first movement has jagged stabbing dissonances and relentless rhythms, while the second movement is an unusual allegro assai punctuated with low mutterings, a world away from the typical Mendelssohn scherzo. The elegiac adagio in A flat has no quality of consolation, periodically echoing the mood of the first movement, and always hinting at the minor key, which is fully reasserted in the intense finale. Just as Mendelssohn's first completed quartet, the A minor, had started with a lover's question, his last ends in the despairing cry of a brother's grief.

These quartets deserve to be considered as major works in the chamber music repertoire. Together with the astonishing octet, and the two string quintets, they represent Mendelssohn's greatest musical legacy. It is to be hoped that the Emerson Quartet concerts, broadcast on R3, will bring them to a wider audience.

Dylan Watkins

A production of one of the classics of twentieth-century European drama is all too rare on Radio 3, and this one was especially welcome. Swiss-born Max Frisch, master of the modern moral allegory, wrote The Fire Raisers (Biedermann und die Brandstifter) as a radio play in 1953; it became a successful stage play and contains many of Frisch's recurring themes, of responsibility, complacency, self-delusion and guilt.

In the aftermath of World War II it remained, and remains, an enigma how so many could have absorbed Nazi doctrine and failed to see the enormity of what was happening in their midst. It is such a situation that Frisch presents in The Fire Raisers: amid a climate of general fear at the activity of arsonists in the town, the unscrupulous, hard-bitten businessman Biedermann, not minded to succumb to the unease all around him, demonstrates his unconcern, taking the fire raisers into his house, feeding them, allowing them every latitude to store their petrol cans, examines their fuse, and finally hands over his box of matches; while all the while they tell him that the best way to fool anyone is to tell them the truth.

The action is contained in a flashback, framed by an inquisitorial radio interviewer, hostile and insinuating ("Let me not try to prejudice you," he says to us, "you must make up your own mind about Gottlieb Biedermann."). This Paxman clone is, in fact, the Writer, the creator of the story, guiding us from one scene to the next as the play skips over the inessentials – the voice of the confiding narrator a device well suited to radio. Is this the 'trial' of Gottlieb Biedermann? The Writer tells Biedermann that we (the audience? the jury?) have been given the brief background to the story: "But – they don't know it's your fault." No, nobody's trying to pin it on you, Mr Biedermann.

This is not, of course, a drama of suspense; that's the point: it's obvious with the arrival of the sinisterly jovial Schmitz that a logical chain of events is being set in motion. Biedermann is deaf to the pleadings of the partner he has driven out from the business, and of the man's distraught wife; he is unmoved when the threatened suicide is carried out. Yet Schmitz and his accomplice, Eisenring, make ever greater demands on Biedermann – who owes them nothing – and they get everything they need.. This is so absurdly surreal, it's laughable. And yet, it happens; people behave in this irrational way in real life. But in real life it isn't funny. Frisch captures the psychological dichotomy, when your brain knows that all is not well, yet your words and actions are detached and unheeding, moving inexorably towards disaster.

As we hear the final crackling, smashing and whooshing, the voice of our narrator, the Writer, is drowned out as one gasometer explodes after another. But it's not quite the end. In a final twist the accusing, inquisitorial voice turns on us, and it's our turn to squirm. No longer the jury but the accused.

A classic playwright, a good, strong play, a very funny adaptation and an excellent troupe of actors: Steven Canny's unegotistical production allowed the action to career on its blackly comic way until the final brick wall stopped us in our tracks. Charles Wood's adaptation brought the voice of the author up to date, but otherwise left the bourgeois context in an undefined time somewhere in central Europe.

Jim Broadbent's Biedermann, ingratiating one minute, indignant and self righteous the next, was the play's Everyman, guilty as charged; Ralph Ineson and Phil Daniels were the fire raisers; Harriet Walter was Mrs Biedermann, Tamzin Griffin was the pert Anna, the Biedermann's maid; and Simon McBurney was the contemporary, contemptuous voice of the Writer, narrator, prosecutor, announcer, holding it together. More of this, please.

LP

Perhaps as much an Italian Schnittke as 'Lyrical Serialist', Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-75) was the subject of one of Radio 3's excellent 'Nights' on 22 November; 'Night' rather than 'Evening' because the sequence began at 7 pm and ran until midnight.

And 'sequence of music' – introduced by Andrew McGregor with the assistance of Pierluigi Petrobelli, rather than full and varied portrait – it was. Previous such evenings have tended to look at a composer or subject from multiple, contrasting angles and with contributors from more than one discipline.

In this case – although Dallapiccola's music was closely bound to his life in the world of rising fascism in Italy and the second world war – a decision was obviously made to concentrate on the music, not his life and that of those around this highly important C20th musical figure. In that sense tonight's broadcast was somewhat spare and clinical. Perhaps this would have suited the object of the enterprise, had he been around actually to hear it: his modest presence and somewhat retiring stamp on the evening were still quite strong and clear!

But this absence of talk about is not an adverse criticism: Dallapiccola's music is not so well known – and certainly not so well represented on R3 – as it ought to be, given his contribution to innovation in and synthesis of European traditions. Indeed one of several extracts from recorded Dallapiccola was a typically rhetorical and at the same time restrained siting of tradition against the lives of individuals.

(Another compelling little spoken extract we heard was from a rehearsal with Mary Thomas of the 'Quattro liriche di Antonio Machado'. Revealing though brief, but not really helping the flow which we have come to expect of these oh, so welcome marathons.)
We had had the opportunity to hear three of Dallapiccola's operas amply contextualized on Saturday night. Yet one felt tonight that the influences on Dallapiccola (especially Debussy, Monteverdi and Gesualdo) could usefully have been explored. Only those of Berg and Webern really were in any depth.

The composer's reaction to fascism in Europe from the 1920s onwards could have been profitably looked at more closely: after all, human freedom was central to Dallapiccola's world-view… "in a totalitarian regime the individual is powerless. Only by means of music would I be able to express my anger," he said. No clear exposition of how this anger worked its way into the fabric of his music was offered although the guests were clearly well-qualified so to do.

Yet Dallapiccola's music was at the centre of the five-hour sequence; anyone previously unfamiliar with its characteristics and the slow, logical development through the Florence years, those in hiding from Mussolini's suppression of liberty and involvement in American music-making included, surely gained a lasting insight into this major composer. Highlights for me were the 'Partita', 'Frammenti sinfonici dal balletto Marsia', 'Tartiniana' and 'Parole di San Paolo'.

It was a delight to hear contributions from Jane Manning and veteran R3 producer Misha Donat. They also helped us to see just how the artistic influences on Dallapiccola worked as they did. So, not a colour or full-motion portrait, nor yet a mezzotint; tonight's portrait in carefully tempered and aged oils met its objectives well, entertained and hopefully exposed to new listeners the highly lyrical music of one of Italy's most persuasive composers.

AK

Daughter of the Air is available On Demand here until 27 November, 2004

It is, perhaps, a compliment (less common these days) to the intelligence of Radio 3 listeners to plunge them into an obscure Spanish Golden Age play with a tricksy device almost wilfully designed to confuse an audience with no visuals to help them and with no prior explanations. It would be a shame, though, if that was an early turn-off for some people, since this play is packed with interest and was here given a polished performance by members of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The lives of Lope de Vega (1562-1635) and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-c1681) spanned the Golden Age of Spanish literature. If Lope is frequently called 'the Spanish Shakespeare', it's harder to find a counterpart for Calderón, either chronologically or in stature: but no one, certainly, would begrudge him the modified honour of 'second only to Lope'. Those familiar with the plays of Shakespeare will find much more in common with Spain's Golden Age dramatists than the cool classicism of the French playwrights, not least in the potent mixture of low comedy and tragedy.

La hija del Aire, which tells the story of the legendary Queen of Assyria, Semíramis (why, in this production, the pronunciation of Semi-RAH-mis which is neither classical, Spanish nor the standard English?), is a product of Calderón's later life, after he had won fame in the late 1620s and 30s in the noble courts of Madrid, and had entered the priesthood. Some priest, some priesthood, you might say, since he devoted himself to the study of pagan mythology and theology principally to provide subject matter for his plays.

Cue beginners: a bustling theatre foyer, a north country speaker addresses us, we're called to take our seats for the performance, the speaker makes his way backstage ("Hello, Trish"), preparing for his entrance, and engages in a barely comprehensible non-dialogue with a female speaker. It was perhaps a sign of my own disorientation, when the play began in earnest, that I thought I heard a reference to 'Radio King, Nino' and was beginning to feel alienated (it was 'radiant King', I later discovered). Unusually, Radio Times would have been useful here, since the production was one of William Gallagher's choices, and his tip-off would have been helped to locate the opening scene. Did Chato, the gracioso figure, act as a kind of Prologue in the original? I don't know, but it held reminders of the Prologue in Henry V, referring to the theatre in which the performance was about to take place. This play was given a one-off Performance Reading in Newcastle, before being recorded for R3 in Stratford: perhaps the audience was able to grasp what was happening more quickly than a radio audience. Or (as they say), 'Was it me?'. As the story unfolds, Calderón's familar themes begin to emerge: Semíramis, fated to bring about disasters and the death of a king, is held captive by the priest Tiresias in obedience to divine edict – an echo here of Calderón's most famous play, Life is a dream. But Fate always has its way, and with its twists and turns confronts the characters with impossible dilemmas: they are free to make their own choices, but this is no more than the freedom to decide the manner of their own destruction, and that of others. Should Tiresias defy the gods or defy the man determined to release his prisoner? In the end, it doesn't matter.

The beautiful Semíramis, born of an act of wickedness – the rape of her mother, is set free by Menon to wreak her own wickedness, as Venus has decreed. The second Calderonian theme is that of honour. Menon, the conquering hero, falls in love with her on sight, and she with him. But King Nino, Menon's sovereign, also becomes infatuated with her. Menon owes a debt of loyalty to the king, but Nino owes a debt of gratitude to Menon. Which of them will cede the object of his love to the other? And what will be the outcome? Menon at least has a clear choice: give up Semíramis or give up everything else.

Woven into the complex fabric of the plot are the doings of the comic servant Chato, irreverent to his superiors, scornful towards his wife, gloomily resigned to his own situation but always with an eye to the main chance. The comedy was amusing, the tragedy awesome and the interplay of noble and vulgar conveyed, generally, to the advantage of the latter. This was Part I of Calderón's two-part play, of which the second part coincides – chronologically, at least, if not in detail – with the plot of Rossini's Semiramide, itself derived from Voltaire's play. If you're already familiar with the opera, then the story starts here…

Rebecca Johnson's Semíramis was suitably passionate and demented; a noble Menon and slightly effete Nino were played by John Ramm and William Buckhurst; and the warring couple Chato and Sirene conveyed their mutual disdain with robust humour. The play was newly translated by Dan Lewenstein and adapted for radio by Sarah Woods. The music, by Anders Södergren, was used to good effect with chanting choruses and drums of war. The director was Jonquil Panting. The production was a Radio 3-Royal Shakespeare Company collaboration.

LP

Howard Barker's play for radio is thematically typical of his work in many ways. A second hearing (it was first broadcast in January of this year) confirms the rich, dense writing, the tightly woven motifs seeming to shed light on each other while leaving so much that remains unexplained. Barker is not one to spell his message out plainly.

This is a play of ideas which resists literal interpretation, the characters larger than real life; and though scenes make sense in isolation, the play moves on, juxtaposing situations which must be related – but how?

Set in 1450, the drama centres on the young monk, Hoik. At 17, he is the greatest calligrapher of his time – perhaps of any time. His days are spent copying out the Book of Luke with infinite care and skill, and within that labour are crammed his conflicting emotions: pride in the perfection of his own work, humility in putting his talent to work for God and spread His word; arrogance in his attitude to others, petulance when disturbed at his work, a petulance which bursts into violence when he is taunted. He rants, he storms; loves God, hates men.

Hoik's world is plunged into turmoil with the arrival of the new invention which threatens his life's work, and therefore his place in the universe: the printing 'engine'. In the time it takes Hoik to copy one book, the printing engine produces 1,000. Not as fine, not as beautiful as Hoik's but what, after all, is the point of the labour? If to spread the word of God, then how much better to spread it a thousand times further! While Hoik strives for perfection, the machine is satisfied with a smudged imperfect image which nevertheless serves the essential purpose. Conflict lies here in the rivalry between Hoik and his brother monk, Slee, chosen to learn the printing trade and so finally to triumph over Hoik, so it seems: 'We the inferior, will no longer need to suffer our inferiority.' The Old and the New, the Unique and the Many, the Frail and the Strong, the Perfect and the Imperfect, the Past and the Future. Hoik and Slee. And then a new strand is introduced: the new printing press comes to the abbey from Germany, and from Italy the local lord, Lord Toonelhuis, has imported the 'new death' – the gun, with its fearful power to snuff out life in an instant. In parallel scenes Hoik learns the terminology of the printing press: the bed, the baby; then of the gun: the butt, the barrel, the pan, the bullet.

As Slee and his printing press seem set to destroy Hoik, Hoik borrows the gun and shoots Slee dead, a repeat of his earlier attack on him: the sharp point of his pen had been ineffectual, the gun was not. Perhaps something of the individual battling contra mundum here: a futile battle, a cry of frustration, pain and despair which will necessarily end with his own death: tried for murder and burned at the stake.

Woven into this tale are the characters of Tram, the High Master of the Educationalists, the collector of beautiful manuscripts – Hoik's – and poet, who succeeds in sexually dominating the younger man and ends up as his prosecutor; and the 'lout', a huge peasant figure whom Hoik at first fears and then recognises as an ally.

The gnomic utterances abound: 'All things that are beautiful are also necessary': is this the defence of beauty for its own sake? 'Beauty moves, it is not stationery'; or does it mean that the concept of what is beautiful changes, that perhaps when an object ceases to be necessary it also ceases to be beautiful?

'I prefer you,' the lout constantly repeats. Why? Who is he, this lout? Is this strong character who can tuck Hoik under his arm and run like the wind, leaping over hedges, is this God, showing his love for the individual who has devoted such care in his service? Who could have plucked him from the cell where he was awaiting execution, if Hoik had wanted it. 'You have not found sufficient reason why you should not die.' 'You are a suicide – I see that: a raft of obstinacy in a sea of terror,' says Lord Tram. And, indeed, it does seem an exercise in self destruction. At the end, as Hoik prepares to die, he is ordered over and over again to kiss the crucifix, an echo of the earlier hissing commands of the Lord Tram: Kiss, kiss. As the flames crackle and Hoik's terror rises, the emotions are engaged; yet, finally, the reaction of the listener is an intellectual one, still trying to work out how it all fits together, the moments of anguish, pettiness and the faintly ridiculous.

The Moving and the Still is beautifully written, certainly fitting Barker's own description of a Theatre of Catastrophe. Where do the names come from: Hoik, Tram, the abbot November, Slee, Light, Toonelhuis? Is the abbey of Calceto the priory of that name in Sussex? Ionides of the Feathered Style and Martin of the Sliding Line are half believable. All one can say for sure is that through it all humanity struggles, at odds with the world and itself.

Chris Moran as Hoik was never short on emotion, from seething anger to near hysteria; and John Wood's Tram was all sadistic menace. Peter Kavanagh directed a play which never flagged and which deserved more attention than it apparently got. This was a good, highly inventive play, well performed.

LP

This broadcast, deferred on account of the Prom season, was aired tonight and well worth waiting for.

Ilan Volkov, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Edinburgh Festival Chorus, National Youth Choir of Scotland, National Boys Choir and Paragon Ensemble with Olga Guryakova, Mark Padmore and Christian Gerhaher combined to give a vibrant but thoughtful account of the War Requiem.

In the 42 years since its first performance in Coventry, this work remains controversial for some, due to its juxtaposition of the Latin Missa Pro Defunctis and the poems of Wilfred Owen. Britten, a lifelong pacifist, was adding a very big question mark to the old Latin tag of 'Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori'.

The use of the soprano voice plus the full choir and orchestra to erect a formal mourning ritual is contrasted with the ethereal boys choir plus organ, and the tenor and baritone, representing two soldiers, who sing with the chamber ensemble. Britten had a clear focus on this being as accessible as possible without compromising his message.

The Latin text is interspersed with Owen's very direct experiences of trench warfare and its consequences for the participants and victims. As the work progresses from the Requiem Aeternam, Dies Irae, Offertorium and Sanctus to the Agnus Dei and final Libera Me, the listener becomes increasingly aware that we are moving purposefully toward the individual from the general.

It is in these final two sections that the oracular certainties of formal Christian ritual are being given a very personal perspective through the two male soloists; one English and one German, both dead as a result of the conflict, now become movingly reconciled in the Libera Me. It is this movement where the ritual and secular are finally combined, after the potent but short Agnus Dei which contains the chillingly apposite lines 'the scribes on all the people shove and bawl allegiance to the state'.

The extensive use of the tritone throughout the piece ( C-Fsharp ) was clearly done but without undue emphasis and became the very disquieting subversion of conventional religious consolation. This very fine performance in best BBC sound exerted a grip from beginning to end and reflected great credit on all concerned. Mark Padmore was in especially good form in the tenor role and Volkov, once again, revealed himself to be a remarkably talented young conductor.

In the light of recent world events the status of this masterpiece can surely only be enhanced in a moving performance like this.

Steve Dean-Wiley

What a delight the last late Prom of the 2004 season was!

The interestingly-named Psappha, collaborators with Peter Maxwell Davies, and based appropriately in Manchester, played an inspiring ninety minutes of music by Max himself, on his 70th birthday, and Stravinsky.

Works from Max's 'tearaway' days in the 1960s, the Fantasia on a Ground and Two Pavans, after Purcell and Missa super L'homme armé, Fiona Shaw providing the grotesquerie followed by the more recent Linguae ignis with Jennifer Langridge, cello, were interspersed with Stravinsky's Ragtime and Renard with soloists Peter Bronder and James Oxley (tenors), Pavel Baransky (baritone), and Maxim Mikhailov (bass). The whole was ably and excitingly conducted by new music champion Nicholas Kok.

What also helped to make this such an entertaining and informative concert was the apposite and thoughtful presentation of background material – including, particularly, (excerpts from?) an interview with Maxwell Davies by Verity Sharp. He explained how his firebrand image as a young composer was both deserved and useful; spoke about the value of shocking audiences; the way in which he used parody in response to a sense of betrayal, at Vatican II, for example; and the substantial walkout at his Worldes Blis Prom. Perhaps most fetching was the encounter he described at Dartington with Stravinsky – then and now a big hero… Max was in the kitchen when Stravinsky entered and mistook him for the 'lad' who'd prepared that day's vegetables. He was too taken aback to disabuse 'the great man'.

Tonight it was Max's turn to receive his own just adulation. Soloists and ensemble played with insight and dedication; much of the music is technically very demanding. But clearly this did not intimidate Psappha, who now have a record label of their own which promises to contribute – along with MaxOpus – to the (re-)release of Max's music since Collins Classics is no longer in existence.

The soloists in Renard, for example, were full of verve and bite and a sense of the crispness required by the score; similarly, as Ms Sharp pointed out, the dexterity which informed the percussionist, Tim Williams', cymbalom playing clearly delighted the audience as much as this reviewer. Jennifer Langridge's playing in Linguae ignis was virtuosic yet grounded; we could concentrate on some of the interior lessons of the piece as much as on the impact it made as sound. With obvious splendid professionalism as well as enthusiasm for the music itself, this group should go far!

Frances Burde

In the 70 years since its first modern performance, the 'Vespro della Beata Virgine' published in 1610 while Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was in the service of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, has become a staple for the big choral occasion. Recordings abound. Few of them (perhaps only Andrew Parrott's on Virgin Classics Veritas with The Taverner Consort, Choir and Players) are fully faithful to the sacred integrity originally intended. Perhaps each of them tries in different ways to echo (literally!) the purpose for which Monteverdi wrote the settings: as a showcase for the large basilicas and Duomi in northern and central Italy which had permanent choirs and wanted to express their adoration of their God in a very extrovert manner. And for his own skills as a composer: this was Monteverdi's first large scale non-secular publication. Each of John Eliot Gardiner's two recordings (on Archiv then Decca, feasible rivals to the Parrott) plays to this more showy approach.

Tonight's performance attempted – successfully – to combine both aspects of the music.

Clearly the soloists and The King's Consort and Choir of The King's Consort under Robert King (who are in the middle of recording a complete cycle of Monteverdi's sacred music) are not only amply familiar with the Vespers, but take a suitably reflective and even introspective view of the music's strengths and power. The performance of the 'Audi coelum', for example, had a strikingly plangent quality which was refreshing in the extreme. Never hurried. Yet never muddy.

At the same time this Proms performance – without an interval and with a good background introduction before and after – did not neglect the thrilling.

The rhythmic consistency and impetus never lapsed. The allocation of voices to parts and the articulation were compelling. Pauses between each of the 13 movements and indeed between solo and ensemble segments were far from perfunctory; but added a cumulative sense of this as music to be revelled in, enjoyed and which would do justice to the object of the performers' praise. The pace at the end of the 'Laudate pueri' and 'Ave maris stella' was perfect; we had time to think about what we'd just heard. Although those more used to – and comfortable with – the spectacular might well have found the forward motion sagging here. Nor was it clear that the best use was made of the spaces and resonances of the Albert Hall – eg in the closing 'Magnificat'. Nor whether this positioning of voices was in keeping with the restrained and respectful style adopted tonight and with a wish to avoid the speciously spectacular. If it was, then Robert King (whose edition this was) is to be thanked.

A central challenge to performers and audience alike originates in our perhaps reluctant acknowledgement and acceptance that not only did Monteverdi probably never hear the work in its entirety. But almost certainly did not expect it to retain the kind of set sequence and arrangements common to most modern concert performances – varied though they are. Somehow tonight's performance had a consistency and conviction to it which made us think we were listening to the only 1610 Vespers possible: the 'Sonata sopra Sancta Maria' towards the end sounded for all the world like the private ministrations of a devout group of clerics bent on traversing the cloisters of the Gonzaga Palazzo before sundown, or monks aware of the rising venetian waters in the Piazza San Marco as they sang. In other words, very real. Very functional. Yet most musical. Directed indeed at the Counter-Reformational Marian cult which sustained them.

A Prom to be remembered for its sobriety. And for suggesting that such thoughtful and dignified stateliness does not preclude excitement, majesty or beauty.

Soloists: Carolyn Sampson, Rebecca Outram (sopranos); Charles Humphries, Charles Daniels (counter-tenors); James Gilchrist, Daniel Auchincloss, Nicholas Mulroy, Matthew Vine (tenors); Robert Evans, Robert Macdonald (basses).

David Tanner

Portugal by the young Hungarian playwright Zoltán Egressy was announced as a modern 'classic', and up to a point it is. Written in 1997, it has already been performed elsewhere in Europe and comes to the UK in a translation by Ryan Craig specially commissioned by the National Theatre Studio where it was performed as a rehearsed reading, along with three other contemporary Hungarian plays, earlier this year.

Egressy has made a name particularly for writing plays which have a sporting background and with a focus on the dynamic relationships within a team. It was something of a relief to me, after a moment of doubt, to discover that the play was written too long ago to be about the European Cup. In fact, Portugal has no sporting connection.

It is the classic scenario of an outsider (Nick) entering a claustrophobic community – here, a small Hungarian village – and acting as a catalyst to drama. The action is centred on the village bar where the presence of the landlord's daughter (Ribbon) provokes the conflict between her fiancé (Turnip) and the new arrival. The antagonism between Nick and Turnip, however, is low key, more talk than do, compared with the emotion behind Nick's personal motivation: the need to move away from his life in Budapest to seek his land of Cockaigne – Portugal – where life is simple and the men sit contemplating the great ocean, smoking their pipes, where there is freedom to move and air to breathe. And there, perhaps, is the central idea behind the play. Can we ever escape from the prison that we create for ourselves? Nick persuades Ribbon that we can.

Satan sits in the corner of the bar, drinking into oblivion the sorrow of being abandoned by his wife, the village priest goes back and forth from the communion wine in the presbytery to the Unicum in the bar; Peg, a bit of a wide boy, comes in to escape his wife, and leaves again before she turns up, as she inevitably will, three quarters cut, looking for him. They all have their sorrows and dreams which, so it seems, they will never manage to fulfil.

The ideas are there, but in the end the play is rather tame. The characters are observed from afar – they don't engage, except perhaps briefly when Nick describes his vision of Portugal to Ribbon, and we are not sure at that moment whether he is some admirable free spirit or just a dreamer.

This play loses nothing by being adapted for radio, but, on the other hand, radio offers little to it. The noises of shuffling feet, doors opening and closing, glasses chinking, drink being slurped, begin to sound limited and unimaginative (perhaps that was the idea?). It spent 105 minutes illustrating that life is mildly bloody and, a bit of hope here, a bit of hope there, but there's not a lot we can do about it.

No great enthusiasm for the play, then, but no criciticism at all for bringing it to R3 where we have little enough exposure to contemporary European culture. If we had more, there would be more chance of netting a winner from time to time. This play promised rather more than it delivered.

Among the actors, the experience of Alun Armstrong as the landlord stood out. This is a voice made for radio: the resonance, the inflections, the timing, the non verbal utterances, were exemplary. Bertie Carvel, too, as Nick, did well.

LP

Youthful fire meets studied cool

This Prom, just like last year's, showed what a remarkable orchestra this is. Yes, there were the odd fluffs and mistakes but with so much palpable commitment all of that is forgivable. Indeed one should wonder at their skill and accomplishment and be proud of our next generation of musicians.

The orchestra is very large: well over a hundred players were assembled, occupying the whole stage and set out in sections – ten basses, placed centrally across the back of the woodwinds, ten horns left, eight trombones and trumpets right with three tubas and over 30 woodwind and a body of strings to match, the firsts and seconds divided. Tympani and percussion ranged at the back from centre to left. The four harps were first arranged two at each extreme, left and right, but at the interval they were all grouped at the extreme left. They spent several minutes tuning up section by section, a good discipline especially given the occasion.

This was a well attended Prom compared to last year with few seats vacant; the Arena was well filled but the Gallery did however have plenty of space available. On such a hot evening that was probably much appreciated up there.

Roger Norrington is not the obvious choice for this band, one might think, but he certainly brings an experience and outlook that these young players need to be exposed to as they make their way towards a professional career. There certainly was clear mutual regard at work: their appreciation of his contribution to last night's achievement was fulsome and they continued to applaud him warmly as he returned several times after their performance of Mahler 1. Incidentally, when the audience applauded between movements Norrington seemed appreciative. The concert began with a selection from Smetana's Má Vlast, 'Vysehrad', 'From Bohemia's Woods and Fields' and 'Vltava'. These pieces certainly exercise the orchestra but somehow fail to excite, lift the spirits and heat the blood. Apart from that personal disappointment with the music itself, they acquitted themselves well and clearly enjoyed it, Norrington dancing occasionally on the podium! With such a large orchestra I expected greater projection of sound, the trombones and string basses were rather muted for example, and despite their numbers the woodwind got lost in the general sound. Individual solos were generally admirable though.

The Mahler was the centrepiece of the concert and here is where the influence of Norrington came to the fore. His experience in the sonic asceticism of authentic performance surely shaped his view of this work, the first symphonic exercise of a composer whose heart was mostly on his sleeve. A recipe for some controversy one might think. There was no great exuberance and extremes in the interpretation but that is not to say the performance was devoid of feeling or indeed excitement. Simply that Norrington is not Bernstein and so we were treated to an interesting, almost cleansed, Olympian view of the work which was fascinating with minimal vibrato, for example, sharply pointed rhythmic playing with controlled portamento characterising the performance. Perhaps the echoes of Mahler's youth in Moravia and the hints of village band music could have been more idiomatic and given greater rhythmic flexibility; but perhaps we quibble.

Whatever Norrington's view was and however different it might have been from a more expressive Mahler interpretation the orchestra were with him all the way, fluffs and all, and in this respect one could confidently say that this performance, whatever its musicological merits, was inspired. One did miss the full attack and power of a fully professional orchestra but very few concessions need to be made for these youngsters for their commitment and dedication to delivering Norrington's wishes. Perhaps a few stroppy pros could learn a thing or two from this!!

Gordon Drury

Elgar, a professional violinist in his early life, wrote a first violin concerto as early as 1890 but destroyed it and moved on to write Froissart. Later, after his success with the Enigma variations, Kreisler approached him in 1902 and asked him to write a concerto. It took Elgar until 1906/7 to start sketching it (he was also working on the first symphony at this time) and by 1909 he was, according to his wife Alice, 'possessed' by it. It was Elgar's compositional practice to make sketches and play them through to see how they sounded; in the case of the concerto, his friend Willy Reed, leader of the LSO, obliged. Reed records the frantic enthusiasm that gripped Elgar when he was composing the piece. The first play-through was a private one given by Reed at the Three Choirs Festival of 1910.

The first public performance was given by Kreisler in London's Queen's Hall with Elgar conducting on November 10th, 1910. It was greeted with great acclaim and was soon taken up on the continent by other players including Ysaye who performed it in Berlin in 1912. Sadly the Great War prevented further performances on the continent and Kreisler, being in the Austrian Army, could not perform anyway. Post-war, it seems that Kreisler did not take to the concerto and eventually dropped it from his repertoire, as did Ysaye, but, in his case, after disputes about performance fees from the publishers.

It is on a large scale and demands considerable virtuosity; nevertheless, according to Zukerman, it lies well under the violinist's hands. He says that "in performance its 50 minutes seem like 12" and, for him, it is the most pleasurable of the concertos to play because of its unique Elgarian orchestration. He claims that it suits his nature and, in a way, it is very holy to him.

Elgar's own description of the work when he finished it was that it was "very emotional, too emotional" and indeed its typically shifting emotional flow balances bravura and wistful delicacy in equal measure. A player must have stamina and strength, once started it seldom rests, but also sensitivity to the softer moments such as the first appearance of the 'windflower' themes of the second subject group. The score is famously headed in Spanish "Here is enshrined the soul of… " Elgar indulging in one of his 'Enigmatic' puzzles. The general consensus has been that the 'soul' was that of Alice Stuart-Wortley, a close friend with whom he corresponded and for whom he had the personal name 'windflower'. The piece is inspired throughout with hope, but also tinged with sadness.

Zukerman's long association with this work shows – he recorded it with Barenboim and the LPO in 1976 – and it seems he was very pro-active at the orchestral rehearsals. In his interval talk on Thursday, Andrew Davis recounted that when playing the work with American orchestras Zukerman has to explain the orchestral playing style required. Not so at rehearsal with the BBCSO, it seems, although the orchestra had not played the work for sometime, receiving an extra rehearsal; Zukerman sent over his own marked up parts for the performance. The score is littered with expression markings, placed carefully by Elgar as a result of the various run-throughs with Reed. The piece has echoes of Beethoven and Brahms and should have their majestic classical elegance – 'nobilmente' – yet with the flexibility to let Elgar's own style emerge.
The work started with a spirited, typically Elgarian exposition splendidly performed by the BBCSO under Davis, no mean Elgarian, with swagger alternating with sudden withdrawals into wistful introspection. The violin made a strong entry finely realised by Zukerman with rich and husky tone. Davis picked out many of those Elgarian touches and flourishes that make his orchestrations unique, e.g. the bass lines and whoops in the horns. One nice touch is just before the violin entry where there is a brief snatch of theme for the solo horn, often missed in some performances as a result of too much haste or lack of insight. The "windflower" second subject group was beautifully done.

The slow movement was well judged, moving nicely along at the required andante; if one was being ultra critical one could have wished for a little more wistfulness at times but this is a small complaint. Zukerman's tone was well to the fore here with a sweetness and lightness that was supported well by Davis and the orchestra.

The finale, marked Allegro molto, is another fine Elgarian movement strong in thematic richness and with great demands on the soloist's virtuosity. I always get the idea that Elgar has quoted the Brahms (try around 40 seconds in) but it sounds such a natural part of the flow of inspiration that this was probably not conscious or intended. The cadenza is unique in its use of the famous thrumming from the strings to create atmosphere where time seems to stand still and over which the violin floats beautifully. It seems that Elgar intended this cadenza to be the spiritual centre of the work and once again is related to Alice Wortley and 'windflower'. Commentators have speculated about this and the personal emotional meanings that Elgar had embodied in the work. After this introspection the movement makes its majestic and energetic way to its close, recapitulating the opening themes on the way.

Geoffrey Norris, writing in The Telegraph, found the performance lacking, some comments on the R3 message board suggested intonation problems. I, for one, could not hear them, but I don't have perfect pitch. One correspondent on the Proms message board suggested that Zukerman was using a printed part, odd considering the close association he has with the work and it was further suggested that this adversely affected the performance. Judging by the long applause at the end I guess that the audience were with me in thinking that Zukerman and Davis gave us a very satisfying performance.

Gordon Drury

Well, off we go again, this time amid a welter of trailers and statistics. The Proms message board has been building its own anticipation, some of it darkly critical of the programmes. We shall see how they turn out.

The refurbishment of the Father Willis organ at the RAH had raised great expectations over the music to be played on it and much debate rumbled on the message boards regarding the apparent token use of this 9999 pipe monster in the three works scheduled for the opening night.

The organ was actually inaugurated in a concert broadcast on July 9th, including, most notably, solo improvisations by David Briggs on the theme from Purcell's Abdelazar also used by Britten in his Young Person's Guide.

Somewhat curiously the concert opened with a hybrid of the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor commencing with the former on the organ but the latter in Sir Henry Wood's orchestral arrangement during which the 64 foot pedals seismically underpinned the BBCSO in full cry under Leonard Slatkin. It was great sonic splendour, of course, but why not a bit more of it then, we thought?

The orchestra was then joined by the BBC Symphony Chorus and mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, famed for her Handel, in a performance of Elgar's The Music Makers, selected as part of this season's 1934 theme. This piece uses quotes from the Enigma Variations, Gerontius, the violin concerto, both symphonies and Sea Pictures as well as Rule Britannia and La Marseillaise to weave a pleasant, evocative and sometimes moving tribute to creative artists. This was well-performed with the soloist in fine form in repertory she is not associated with normally; R3 provided a richly balanced sound from the RAH suggesting that this venue is better at choral than orchestral works. Debate on the Proms message board suggested that the Elgar was a tad too long for its material and I tend to agree, while others consider it to be an 'endearing and unjustly underrated' work.

The interval was taken up with more of the organ's refurbishment history, an interview with Leonard Slatkin in his last year as Chief Conductor and some of the living composers – Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies and Judith Bingham – whose work features this season.

The introduction to the final piece – Holst's Planets Suite – involved Stephanie Hughes and Heather Couper, an astronomer discussing the context of the piece now and at the time of composition from a musical and astronomical perspective. Curiously undertaken without mentioning Sir Adrian Boult once but including extensive reference to Colin Matthews' addition of Pluto, it was most notable for revealing that Pluto is 'not a planet but a swarm'; perhaps Holst's omission was singularly prescient?

The performance went well enough, despite the odd hint of ensemble failure, here and there, with the full dynamics of Mars pounding out, contrasting with the delicacy and lightness of Mercury. The final movement – Neptune – the Mystic – fading away most atmospherically, certainly one of its better realisations and the R3 soundstage revealed a tangible quiescence from the audience. Some animated debate ensued on the Proms message board over the actual location of the chorus but this was resolved by an eye-witness who confirmed that they were in the Gallery east of the organ!

All in all, a good, if not spectacular start to the season and an arguably missed opportunity to make more use of the newly refurbished organ. Let's hope that it will make its presence better felt at later Proms!

Gordon Drury

Oliver Knussen has produced some very strange works in his time but this is not one of them. It is lyrical and thoroughly approachable, exploiting the beauty of the instrument's sound and blending it well and skilfully against the orchestra. Pinchas Zukerman, the work's commissioner and dedicatee, played the solo part, having given the premiere at Pittsburg in 2002. He gave the first London performance at this Prom, and it is clear that the work matches Zukerman's particular qualities, rich tone and great virtuosity, very well indeed. Who said that contemporary works have to be difficult?

A three-part but continuous piece, comprising Recitative, Aria, then Gigue, it lasts only 16 minutes or so, comparable with some of the great baroque violin concerti. The implied baroque frame should not lead one to assume something of pastiche as the very opening bars show with an orchestration pitting tubular bells against a high note on the violin. The Recitative provides the rhetorical and expansive expression one might expect and the Aria floats majestically and lyrically. The triple time of the Gigue skips along requiring virtuosity from both soloist and orchestra. It ends, as it begins, with the tubular bell stroke and the high violin note in quiet contemplation.

I was very impressed by this work at the Prom (August 14th 2003) itself and have not been disappointed on hearing this repeat performance. The work has been described as vertiginous and requiring the skills of a tight-rope walker. Whatever technical difficulties there were in delivering this most enjoyable piece they did not show in this performance. This gem of a work richly deserves more outings – Tasmin Little would make an excellent soloist if her performance of the Ligeti at last year's Prom with the Berlin Philharmonic is anything to go by. This work and performance was an excellent choice with which to begin the run up to this year's season starting on Friday evening.

Gordon Drury

Quite a fête of riches this weekend. We began on Friday evening with the Monteverdi Vespers, live from Liverpool, Paul McCreesh directing the Gabrieli Consort with his usual panache and ear for sonority. This was a trenchant and splendidly resonant performance in a vast space; the R3 engineers did well to tame it sufficiently to capture what must have been an awe inspiring antiphonal experience. Some of the tempi were notably slower than usual to allow for the acoustics. Music like this, designed for this kind of space, is best appreciated by being there; Hi-Fi fans eat your hearts out!! A fitting piece to precede an interesting, if somewhat staged, series of illustrated conversations on various religions and their music.

On Saturday we continued with Pavlo Beznosiuk on CD Review talking about the Biber Rosary, or Mystery, sonatas and then the ever-enthusiastic Lucie Skeaping explored the evolving piano. On Sunday, Andrew Manze eavesdropped on one of the Baroque period's celebrity highlights, a virtuosic meeting of masters, a celebration of the alleged keyboard duel between the Saxon, Georg Frideric Handel and the Italian, Domenico Scarlatti.

Violin and keyboard instruments have developed side by side since the earliest times and remain essential parts of modern music making. The late 17th century saw a golden age of violin making and composers all over Europe wrote ever more challenging and virtuosic pieces. Whilst we think of the Italians as the centre of this development others, further North, were also involved,including Heinrich Biber (1644-1704), working first in his native Bohemia and then in Salzburg from 1670. The intricacy of the music of the Rosary sonatas of circa 1676 and its demands on the player, including frequent scordatura, show a musician in total command of his instrument but also possessing a vivid musical imagination inspired by a wide range of influences. This set of 15 Mysteries, one for each Rosary, and a final unaccompanied passacaglia, is clearly connected with the use of beads as an aide memoire to prayer, inspired a musical dimension to the words of the prayers and vivid portrayals of some of the more dramatic moments.

Pavlo Beznosiuk discouraged the idea that one should treat this graphic and colourful music as purely programmatic or in any way self-indulgently virtuosic. It is remarkable music with a strong spiritual component and well worth exploring as such, independently of the pictorial elements embedded in them. Surely an influence on the great works of Bach one might think; however the pieces appear never to have been printed and only one manuscript has survived.

Keyboard instruments with plucked strings and the clavichord with hammered strings were well established before and during the 17th century and organ virtuosi added to the core of players that increased the demands on the instruments and inspired makers to improve their products. The heyday of the baroque harpsichord and organ featured some spectacular instruments and great virtuoso builders and performers. In 1685 three of these were born: Bach, Handel and Scarlatti, destined, in their different ways, to become musical giants of the age. Handel was Saxon by birth but no stranger to Italy or the Italian style.

His youthful formative years were spent in the company of the best: Corelli in particular, taught him elegance and taste in instrumental music and Alessandro Scarlatti in opera. He also met and circulated with Caldara, Pasquini, Lotti, Gasparini, Vivaldi and Albinoni, learning all the while. The reputation of these musicians went before them and patrons vied for their services, producing what might be considered today as 'celebrity fever'.
One such patron was Cardinal Ottoboni who commissioned works from Handel and who hosted the alleged keyboard contest between him and Domenico Scarlatti. Both men were outstanding harpsichordists, and, in keeping with the professional requirements of the day, were expert improvisers. The result was judged a draw; Scarlatti just winning at the harpsichord and Handel at the organ, a decision even acknowledged by Scarlatti himself. It was said that Scarlatti's playing was the more elegant, whilst Handel's the more powerful in expression. After the contest the two men remained firm friends, mutual admiration cementing the bond for many years.

However, the only record of this contest is from Mainwaring, Handel's biographer, who wrote his account some 50 years after the event was supposed to have occurred, some time in 1709, using material drawn from Handel's amanuensis Christopher Smith. Manze illustrated this contest with the music that has survived; the well known Scarlatti sonatas written during his court service in Spain, the mature voice of an earlier precocious talent and Handel's keyboard works, fewer in number but of no less quality. What we missed, of course, was the improvisatory aspect, inevitably prominent in any contest of skill such as this. Nevertheless, it was fascinating to hear the juxtaposition of the two styles and Manze's enthusiasm and enjoyment of the spectacle was much in evidence.

In 1709 Cristofori invented a new keyboard mechanism that struck the strings with hammers which allowed rapid repeated notes with more facility, producing a different and distinctive sound. Its main feature was the ability to produce both loud and soft playing by touch alone, hence piano-forte, from a single manual keyboard. It was slow to develop however, for reasons of expense and bulk. The whole baroque era tended to use the harpsichord, in an advanced but ultimately terminal state of technical development, for solo and continuo work. By the mid 18th century Cristofori's instrument had become the forte piano, used as a continuo and solo instrument by the likes of Haydn, and Bach's sons, CPE and JC, but not JSB himself. Beethoven's Bonn period sonatas, one of which being illustrated in the programme, could be played on harpsichord or forte-piano but do sound well on the latter. Beethoven encouraged use of the early piano and, from his 9th sonata, Op 14, wrote expressly for it and corresponded with some of major makers; he particularly liked the harp-like sound. When he moved to Vienna in 1792, he had access to a range of local makers which influenced his compositions greatly, as did his later acquisition of an English Broadwood.

Around the new century we get nearer to the modern instrument and the 'Moonlight' sonata, Op 27 that exploits the sustaining qualities of the contemporary instrument. Here we are a considerable distance away from the plucked sound of the harpsichord, entering an era when technical development, e.g. pedals, and, later still, the use of metal frames to sustain greater string tension appear, permitting greater sonority, compass and dynamic range. The path to the mighty 'Emperor' Concerto, Op 73 and 'Hammerklavier' sonata, Op 106, with the 'Tempest', Op 31 and 'Waldstein', Op 53, en route, was opened and beyond these, by the mid 19th century, the piano had become a major influence on composers.

Lucie Skeaping was a persuasive, unobtrusive guide; the hour sped by in a most entertaining, informative and educative manner, what more could one wish for?

Thanks R3 for a splendid weekend, how did you know it was my birthday?

Gordon Drury

As with Berlioz Day, the Sunday schedules were largely cleared – until the late evening – to make way for Janáček Day, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the composer's birth. And again the challenge was huge: on the one hand, the material is part of a single concept, a continuous unravelling, on the other, how do you hold your listeners for at least a substantial part of twelve and a half hours?

The potential musical and cultural scope here is enormous and the Radio 3 team made a very good stab at covering a lot of it: folk culture; the social environment; the socio-cultural worlds of Brno as compared with Prague and Vienna; Mendel and Freud; the relevance of all to Janáček the man and musician was seriously explored. Dennis Marks was a capable anchor man, knowledgeable and articulate; John Tusa, chairman and interviewer, extracted from contributors as much as each had to contribute. Marks made only a passing reference to his own Russian ancestry and the fact that Tusa had been born in Moravia, a self-effacing style of presentation which is, sadly, becoming rarer, even on Radio 3.

We were taken to the village of Janáček's birth, and the wooded landscape of Hukvaldy, met the people who lived there, were given an account of the family background, Janáček's upbringing, education and interests, the folk culture and the natural world. From here on, at every point, a context was given for each piece of music: the death of his children, followed by On an Overgrown Path; the night-time expedition with the forester, followed by The Cunning Little Vixen; the letters of Kamila and Leoš, followed by the String Quartet No 2 (Intimate Letters): it all seemed to bring the music very close.

Among the 'postcards' from individuals, one of the most entertaining was that of Milan Kundera commenting on Karel Kovarovic's alterations to the orchestration of Jenufa ("Vere could you find a lunatic who vould vant to read an improved Prrrroust?"), with his own waveringly sung examples. Mackerras described the difficulties presented by Janáček's manuscripts after he took to drawing the staves by hand, lines colliding with each other so that it was difficult to tell whether notes were on or between the lines, which does matter, as Mackerras observed. Among the studio guests the opera director David Pountney was particularly illuminating.

Repeating a particular success of Berlioz Day, there was a short drama by Hattie Naylor, again focusing on an important woman in the composer's life. Zdenka sketched the emotions of Janáček's wife at the moment that her husband was leaving her for the young woman who was such an inspiration to him at the end of his life. Naylor captured the way that suffering is often viewed, momentarily, with wry humour. "She makes him laugh," says Zdenka, bitterly. "Yes," replies Masha, the maid, "but probably in a vulgar way." And it was hard not to cheer when Masha refused, with great firmness, to carry the great man's luggage to the station.

Above all, there was good coverage of the operas – Vixen, Makropoulos, Jenufa, Katya, From The House of the Dead, in particular – which embody Janáček's greatest work. The power of the drama, the originality of the subject matter, the way he captured the rhythm of ordinary speech – all were pointed up and illustrated.

In the light of his love of country and his love of women, the operas and the highly emotional chamber music all made perfect sense, and Janáček emerged at the end as most of his devotees would surely wish: not merely as an important Czech composer but as an original and, as a result, perhaps one of the truly greats. He was born only twenty years before Schoenberg, and it is hard not to speculate as to what might have become of that originality if he had been born twenty years later. His remoteness from the musical mainstream would probably have preserved it nevertheless.

The evening finished with Performance on 3: Mackerras conducting the violin concerto (with Roman Patocka) and the powerful Glagolitic Mass with the Brno Philharmonic, as part of Brno's anniversary celebrations; and, with the Berlin Philharmonic, one of Janáček's most widely known works, the Sinfonietta.

As with Berlioz Day, questions remain as to whether such a marathon is a justifiable use of twelve hours. How many listeners remained glued to their radios for most of the broadcast? Would a Janáček evening not be more practical? Have we reached a stage where a large proportion of the audience wants to engage in timeshift listening? But those who stuck with it for the whole day would have found little to grumble about other than the demands on their mental and physical stamina. Content, performances and presentation were excellent.

LP

So far The Wire hasn't said a lot to me. It's 'new writing', and lodged in my brain is a prejudice which has me reaching for the off-button as a reflex action: the invariable 'strong language alert' and what-a-good-idea novelty, accompanied by a dose of épater le bourgeois for good measure. Boring, trivial problems of our time, like teenage pregnancy, disability, race hate, drugs, transvestism, war, famine, pestilence.

The Colony, Dennis Kelly's first play for radio, had the ingredients for automatic switch-off: strong language on a London council estate. But the synopsis offered a flicker of hope (was there a distant echo of the opening scene of Ian McEwan's Enduring Love where a group of people are transfixed by a picture of imminent tragedy?): from various vantage points on the estate, the characters separately view a baby which has crawled out on to a balcony, perilously close to the edge. They don't panic, they don't do anything – they just watch it.

As a noisy party is taking place below, the play explores the various obsessions which engross the characters, preventing each from engaging with other people and with life. Nothing unusual about a man living in a council block who has an all-consuming passion for ants (if it hadn't been ants it would have been snakes, stick insects or budgerigars): Paul, contemplating suicide, recalls with resentment the occasion when, as a 12-year-old, he had been humiliated on the 'Blue Peter' programme, the moment when everything in his life turned sour, the broken relationship, the daughter he has lost.

Then, all at once, we're plunged into a maelstrom of explosions and shooting. A running commentary urgently describes the horrors of war ("Vinnie, Vinnie," calls the voice on the other side of the bedroom door). Vinnie, a 17-year-old tearaway working in Matalan, with no qualifications, dreams of being a television war reporter and spends all his spare time recording tapes of imaginary battle scenes. His mother, worried at his social isolation, is constantly at his door, constantly rebuffed.

Louise tends her mother, elderly, wheezing, dying, and remembers the 'lessons' her mother taught her as a child: you let your dog out when you were told not to and it gets killed? – then you must be forced to watch it dying in pain. You've got to be taught a lesson. Louise is torn between her natural attachment to her mother and anger over the emotional suffering she has been caused.

Ade, with a soldier son recently killed in Iraq, is invited out of sympathy to the party downstairs but stands apart watching the television to avoid contact with other people.

Then, they all notice it: the baby.

Paul turns away, self-absorbed, back to his ants and his own hurt. Vinnie tensely describes for non-existent viewers the party-goers, the horror as the baby gets closer to the gap in the railings… Louise carries on doing her mother's hair as the old woman gets more agitated… let her suffer. And Ade blots out the panic-stricken shouting by building up thoughts of his own tragedy. The baby falls.

"There are some moments in your life when everything stops," says Paul.

In a series of monologues the play takes us into the minds of the characters as the dramatic event unfolds, and beyond, as they engage with others, Paul with the bereaved mother, Louise and Vinnie together, Ade with Vinnie's drunken mother, accusing and self-justifying, all forced to take stock of their lives. The colony – of ants – is a central image: ants, the only species, apart from human beings, who kill their own kind. All individuals are linked. Cause and effect.

The style, slightly wordy and rhetorical at the beginning, in the end served to enhance the unreality of the speakers' lives. They seemed oddly classless in spite of the setting, with only a hint of stereotypical working-class fecklessness: what comfy middle-class mum allows her toddler to fall from a balcony?

The Colony, fortunately, did not suffer from the disadvantages of being a piece of a social comment. Drama is not about social problems: it's about people. Dennis Kelly's intention was well thought out and pretty well achieved: a radio play, conceived in terms of sound, lacking in gimmicks but not originality.

Directed by Pam Marshall, with Adam Godley, Brian Dick, Jude Akuwudike, Gillian Wright and Carolyn Tomkinson.

LP

The week has started well for humour. The excellent short series Icons ended on Sunday with Tom Robinson talking to the horn player Michael Thompson about his hero, Dennis Brain: an endearing portrait with some wonderful playing from Brain, famed for his performances of Mozart and Britten.

We heard the anecdote of Karajan stopping a rehearsal and giving spontaneous thanks for at last hearing Brain make a rare slip; this reflected Brain the consummate professional. But two musical pieces here above all told us what kind of man he must have been. We heard the legendary performance of the third movement of Leopold Mozart's 'Concerto for Hosepipe and Strings' at the 1956 Hoffnung Festival, with Brain's spectacularly virtuosic playing of a garden hosepipe. Tom Robinson's laughter was genuine and infectious as he talked about it.

The second work was the one-minute encore piece by Marin Marais, Le Basque: 'a little French dance, which also happens to be the shortest piece I know', we heard Brain describe it to an audience. Light and amusing, with a spring in its step, it spun us quickly away from the contemplation of the night in 1957 when, driving back from a concert, Brain 'didn't make it home'. He was 36; and Hoffnung himself, architect of his own barmy musical fun palace, died two years later, aged 34.

Tonight we heard the English Concert playing in Bath Abbey as part of the annual international music festival and celebrating the tercentenary of Heinrich Biber's death with a rarity. The opening chorus of the Missa Christi resurgentis told us right from the start that this wasn't going to be an ordinary performance. Peasants they were, and peasants they sounded like. Under Andrew Manze's direction the work fizzed along to its astonishing ending.

The Nightwatchman's 'serenade', sung – or perhaps bellowed – in what was probably the most sturdily raucous voice to be raised in the abbey since its foundation must have taken a few people by surprise. Peter McCarthy, normally the double bass player of the English Concert, performed the sign-off accompanied by the audible mirth of the congregation and, no doubt, the mirth of many listeners at home.

Good to hear R3 making us laugh. It was reminiscent of the old Third Programme days, from the oh-so-serious take-off of a serious arts station to the coverage of the premiere of the ten-act opera, Emily Butter. What R3 needs is more people who can see the gravity in humour and the humour in gravity.

LP

This ROH production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the first at Covent Garden since 1964, was the first ever in the original version.

Shostakovich's opera, completed in 1932, is a bleak but compelling drama of brutality, domination and frustration, culminating in double murder. It was based on a story by Nikolai Leskov which appeared in 1865 in Dostoevsky's journal Epokha and is a combination of tragedy, satire, lyricism and power. The action unfolds swiftly and both shocks and amuses.

It was received with acclaim at its premieres in Leningrad and Moscow in 1934. In 1936 Stalin attended a performance and stormed out in disgust. Shortly afterwards an editorial in Pravda entitled 'Muddle instead of Music' denounced the opera on the grounds of naturalism and formalism. 'Singing is replaced by shrieking' the article raged. 'The music quacks, hoots, growls and gasps to express the lovemaking. The ability of good music to enthral the masses has been sacrificed on the altar of petit-bourgeois formalism – this is playing at abstruseness – and such games can only finish badly.'

Lady Macbeth vanished almost overnight and from that moment onwards Shostakovich lived in terror of the secret police knocking at his door.

Set in a dull Russian province Katerina (sung here by Katarina Dalayman) leads a life of barren stultification as the wife of a wealthy merchant, Zinovy (Stefan Margita). The Cook, Aksinya (Susan Bickley) is brutally assaulted and this ignites further Katerina's erotic frustrations. In her husband's absence she has a passionate affair with a new farmhand, Sergey (Christopher Ventris). Her bullying father-in-law Boris, who would also like to bed her (John Tomlinson), finds out and she murders him with rat poison. When Zinovy returns and catches the lovers he too is murdered.

Katerina and Sergey wed, but fate catches up with them, the corpse is found in the cellar by a tramp (Peter Bronder) and they are arrested and interrogated by the police. In a Siberian convict camp the inevitable finale of Katerina's tragedy is played out. Sergey tires of Katerina and humiliates her by flirting with Soretka (Christine Rice). In total abject desperation Katerina throws herself into a frozen lake pulling Sergey's new love with her.

The plot has all the elements of a Russian epic and the music, swinging between farce and tragedy is intense, powerful and absorbing. Antonio Pappano conducted the Royal Opera House Orchestra and Chorus with energy, emphasising the many elements of satire, against the backdrop of the unfolding drama. The graphic rape scene of Aksinya is played at a white hot pace followed by Sergey's conquest of Katerina, diving from aria to gallop and back, keeping momentum, the trombone glissandi at the end wickedly vulgar. The wedding scene with the drunken guests is superb, possessing an almost tangible reek of the disaster to come. The final scenes of total despair and suicidal screams are of heroic proportions.

The opera possesses a heady mix of music possessing incredible power, switching from episodes of garish vulgarity and swagger, festering eroticism to haunting melancholic beauty yet all the while keeping a simmering underlying tension, a palpable feeling of sinister undercurrents. The momentum never falters and the listener is totally absorbed until the end.

Altogether a hugely enjoyable and gripping production from ROH under the direction of Richard Jones.

It is very difficult to compare a live performance with a studio production. Mstislav Rostropovich with the London Symphony Orchestra released the original 1932 score on LP in 1979, released on CD in 1990. To me, that CD is perfection: raw, colourful and compelling, and radiantly sung, the orchestra slightly more hard-edged than this ROH version. However, this production brought out the satirical comedy side more strongly, which judging from the audience reaction was appreciated.

Stephanie Hughes presented the programme in her usual friendly and unaffected manner and all praise to the ROH and R3 for the broadcast of this historic and unjustly neglected opera. Let us hope it will not be too long before its next revival.

Anna

Those who have felt that R3 has in recent years neglected classic poetry will have welcomed this production of what is held to be Shakespeare's first published work. The 199-stanza poem Venus and Adonis is based (like the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe in Midsummer Night's Dream) on a story from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The goddess Venus falls in love with the youth Adonis who rejects her advances. As night falls, she unwillingly allows him to leave her but the following day, when out hunting, he is gored to death by a wild boar. As Venus laments over his lifeless body it melts 'like a vapour' and from his blood a purple flower springs up.

The poem is by turns passionate, tender, robust, humorous (especially in the depiction of Adonis's determined refusal to succumb to Venus's pleadings), and ends in gentle pathos. Although an early work, there are some lovely lines, for example, as Adonis slips away into the darkness under Venus's despairing gaze: "So did the merciless and pitchy night/ Fold in the object that did feed her sight." As the goddess comes upon the boy's hounds, which howl in anguish at the loss of their master: "When he hath ceas'd his ill-resounding noise,/ Another flap-mouth'd mourner, black and grim,/ Against the welkin volleys out his voice…" And as Adonis lies dead: "No flower was nigh, no grass, herb, leaf, or weed,/ But stole his blood, and seem'd with him to bleed."

To present 1,200 lines of Shakespearean verse to a modern audience is not an easy task, and director Sarah Benaim chose to help matters along with a 'dramatised' version, the individual voices of narrator, Venus and Adonis highlighting the story. This worked quite well except in the one stanza where the interjection of a plethora of "quoth he"s and "quoth she"s was just too noticeable.

Of the sound effects, only the goddess's breathless gaspings threatened to become monotonous. The birdsong, the barking of the hounds, the urgency of Venus's panic-stricken race through the rustling undergrowth, provided atmosphere, and the build-up of a wind which dropped abruptly as Adonis's body was found was effective. A folk fiddle accompanied much of the narrative and added a Forest of Arden-ish rusticity.

Nicholas Boulton was an excellent narrator, speaking the lines well and extracting every iota of meaning. His lightly rural accent captured the flavour of Shakespeare's England. Claire Skinner managed the wooing passages well but could have made the haranguing of Death more passionate, and she seemed to run out of steam a little at the end, rather too quickly reconciled to her loss. Her voice is naturally rather girlish, and perhaps a more mature voice would have suited the temptress better, making Chris Moran's Adonis then sound more of a boy.

The delivery of the lines in such a work is crucial – as it always is with Shakespeare. On the whole this was quite good, though some unevenness was evident where syllables were missed or added, and there was an occasional unwillingness to shift the stress where necessary (obdurate, presage) which also broke up the metre. Rhyming 'mead' with 'dread', and 'decease' with 'confess' was probably not a good idea either, but these were minor blemishes; Boulton in particular was very sensitive to the poetry.

With the newly introduced 'Poetry Library' it seems as if R3 is waking up to the lack of poetry on the network (although there don't seem to have been that many readings from it as yet). Showcasing new writing (as on The Verb) may be admirable but ignoring the classics seems perverse. This 75-minute production was encouraging, though it's a pity it couldn't have been found a separate place in the schedule from Drama on 3 which consequently had short measure this week.

LP

Der Fliegende Hollander of 1841 is the first in Wagner's great series of ten operas emerging after his stylistically inconsistent early works and is an extraordinary torrent of invention. It remains a number opera but the leitmotif technique begins to saturate and unify the texture and the characteristic striving onward momentum is well developed.

One can tell something about an interpretation even from the remarkable piercing opening chords, and in Litton's hands its visceral power was underplayed. There followed only a conventionally episodic conception of the overture, fast and slow sections contrasted rather than seeking the intuitive flow and movement of ideas – lurches back to the stormy sea were self-conscious. Here and throughout the concert the playing lacked something in confidence and the tuttis hadn't acquired that primal Wagnerian force and finality; some good woodwind playing but the brass could have made more of it. All well managed and smooth, but hardly announcing one of the greatest creative forces in art: Litton is American, but English dignity prevailed over white heat, though I did wonder about the microphone placing.

A 60-year jump forward brings Mahler's Five Rückert Lieder of 1901-2, but the shifting character and harmonic complexity of these elusive songs reflects the composer's admiration for Wagner. Charlotte Hellekant was a confident soloist, though with a wide vibrato and perhaps making too much of the word-painting in places; she understands the idiom well with fine sense of pacing and dynamics. Not the most beautiful voice but making a good partnership with Litton's wistful expressiveness. The bitter-sweetness and mercurial moods weren't overdone, though Litton had difficulty holding together the linear fragmentation and wide orchestral registers of 'Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder', the complex third song.

Strauss's An Alpine symphony, finished 1915, was the last of the sequence of powerfully individual tone poems that lie at the centre of his achievement. However, though employing a similar harmonic simplification and statement and response technique as the penultimate Sinfonia Domestica a decade earlier, an insecurity in its sense of grandeur and open-air vistas displaces the former swagger and brilliance. As Strauss's attention turned to the theatre his extraordinary ability to clinch intricate lines of argument began to wander and he resorts to hollow diatonic devices in suggesting pantheistic rapture.

Litton brought across well the more otherworldly, luminous passages, though the principle motifs that serve as landmarks through the convoluted dialectic sank away from the texture's surface and he didn't always prevent the many diversions from weakening his grip on the canvas as a whole. The slow tempos leading up to the storm made the ideas seem more lost than they already are, with percussive interruptions more artificial than they have to sound, though tension here was very well controlled and the first drops of rain as the air cooled and the pressure dropped brought effective relief from the lugubrious tone-colours and longueurs. Many of the work's more contrapuntal of its 22 sections also came off well, but overall Litton's was a retiring view, lacking suavity.

Even with 150 or more in the orchestra the young players frequently produced an insubstantial sound, wanting in Straussian wholeheartedness; the violin tone lacked sweetness, for instance in the exposed lines after the storm, while a few insecurities emerged from the horns. But also the work's desultory thinking prevented the inclusion of the larger number of performers from conveying the orchestra's abilities as it might have. Despite this being a repeat concert, the feeling overall was of an evening carefully negotiated.

Sean Austen

These days any performance of an opera by Vaughan Williams is, all too regrettably, a rarity. There are a number of quality works to choose from: The Pilgrim's Progress, Sir John in Love, Hugh the Drover, Riders to the Sea. All these are familiar in one way or another and make very occasional appearances in the concert hall, although I have never seen any of them in a British opera house. There is, however, one more in the very extensive output of RVW: The Poisoned Kiss.

From the title, one would be forgiven for presuming that it is a dark Wagnerian tragedy but it could be better described as a romantic confection, or extravaganza; and a delightful work it is too!

The plot, such as there is, is closer to G & S taking the stuffing out of Wagner, than a full-blown romantic opera and the music supports this. There is more than one strand of tongue-in-cheek humour and relaxation here, for example the morning sun peeping up slyly to weak strains of Brunnhilde's awakening in Götterdämmerung!

The briefest summary then: girl (Tormentilla) has been brought up on poisons, arsenic and prussic acid, by her father (Dipsacus the Arch Magician), so that her first 'poisoned kiss' will kill Amaryllus, heroic son of Empress Persicaria, who herself had previously jilted Dipsacus. Amaryllus, however, has been brought up on antidotes, so the kiss is very Tristanesque and does not kill him, but brings about true love.

So, man plots against woman so that girl really 'gets' the boy, to kill him, as revenge on the woman. However, the ending is typically happy: girl romantically 'gets' the boy, the older couple are reunited and cheerfulness abounds. All of this is narrated here and there by the three goblins, whimsically named Hob, Lob and Gob and supported by some of the most entrancing and lyrical music RVW ever produced.

This rare work, falls between Sancta Civitas, Flos Campi and Job. The libretto was started by Evelyn Sharpe and was later extended by Ursula Vaughan Williams in collaboration with her husband, the plot is deliberately light-footed rather than serious and it is clear that all involved had fun with this confection.

Michael Kennedy points out "Whenever the work has been performed, its libretto has been strongly criticised. This criticism is not unjustified but it is wrong to extend sympathy to the composer for being, as it were, 'saddled' with it. He wanted this kind of work and he could have refused the libretto; but he didn't! What is more, he spent much time and ink pulling it into shape."

It is a wonderfully uplifting and lyrical work which deserves to be more widely known: once you have heard the ravishing and delightful 'Blue larkspur in a garden', 'Your spirit bade me follow', 'Love breaks all rules' or 'Love has conquered hearts united', you will want to hear them again.

For far too long, only the overture has been available and it is good to see the full work now recorded, with excellent singers too, though too many to name here. I can say though, that James Gilchrist and Janice Watson are a well-matched pair as Amaryllus and Tormentilla, with warm, vibrant support from the BBC NOW under Richard Hickcox, who play superbly.

If I have one single quibble, it is the constant claim that this is the 'premiere' recording. It is not, it is the premiere professional recording. I was present at a live recording in October 1997, with Ursula;Vaughan Williams. This was made by The Wandering Minstrels of Brighton; an excellent recording with a very small circulation.

Hickcox continues to excavate a rich seam of undiscovered Vaughan Williams. All credit to the RVW Society for sponsoring this recording and to R3 for broadcasting it so soon after release.

© 2004 Kurwenal

The BBCSO under Leonard Slatkin gave the UK première of the 'Concerto for Orchestra' by Jennifer Higdon tonight to an enthusiastic Barbican audience. This 41-year-old composer, flautist and Curtis Institute teacher, a pupil of George Crumb and Ned Rorem, is hardly known outside the US where she has a rapidly growing reputation, but tonight's concert was guaranteed to stimulate considerable interest in the UK.

The 35-minute work in five movements was commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra to commemorate its centenary in 2002 and has since been taken up by 10 other American orchestras. It is a demanding piece requiring considerable virtuosity from the orchestra, especially the principals, stretching the audience's ears with persuasive musical argument. The clever use of a rich but not cloying orchestral palette leads the listener to want to hear what will happen next and the occasional use of dissonance is employed to propel the musical argument rather than shock the listener.

The overwhelming impression is one of exuberant joy in composition and the performance of the BBCSO under Leonard Slatkin was highly convincing and convinced of the piece's worth. I would recommend Jennifer Higdon as a composer to keep an ear open for; there is even a highly informative website.

The second work was Bruch's G minor, with Leila Josefowicz an elegant and expressive soloist with firm views on a broadly noble slow movement and ably supported by Slatkin and the orchestra. This was no run-through of an old war-horse but a considered performance of some substance.

The Walton 1st symphony concluded the concert and is still not an easy work to bring off successfully. Slatkin's experience with English music paid dividends but it has to be admitted that a less taxing first half would perhaps have left them with a little more stamina for this flawed masterpiece. The three coherent movements plus the finale written 15 months later still demand a lot from any orchestra some 60 years after its composition. Slatkin and the BBCSO rose to the challenge and mostly succeeded with a hefty yet mobile first movement, a scherzo that, arguably, could have had sharper teeth, but a touchingly heartfelt slow movement. The finale, however, did lack something in the ecstatic final pages for it to be entirely successful.

Overall a very fine concert indeed and if the Walton's final pages were a little short on energy, it was hardly surprising given what we had heard before. Many thanks to all the participants and R3 for broadcasting this important event.

Steve Dean-Wiley

There are few major pieces in the choral repertoire as stunning in their beauty, depth and vision as the very English oratorio, The Dream of Gerontius. Elgar composed this taut, rich drama (no less) at the end of the nineteenth century as the first of three reflections on death and the afterlife and said – in the words of John Ruskin, contemporary of the librettist J H Newman's – that the work was 'the best of' him.

A staple of the Three Choirs Festival – in Elgar country – and with four creditable recordings (by Sargent, Boult, Barbirolli and Britten) reflecting different styles of English music-making from the third and fourth quarters of the last century, The Dream is otherwise relatively rarely performed. With one like tonight's, it is hard to see why: thanks to everyone involved and to R3 for the excellent broadcast.

The BBC Philharmonic and City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus under Vassily Sinaisky with soloists Jane Irwin (mezzo), Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts (tenor) and Jonathan Lemalu (baritone) clearly thrilled the audience at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, in a performance which was blessed with an almost tangible sweetness, a strange kind of intimacy and strong sense of structure.

Tonight's performance was also conceived in such a way as to bring a freshness (not to say, a shock) such as that which must have struck Victorian audiences when the work was first performed, unsuccessfully. It was the first major choral piece of its kind in Britain at a time when only the works of Brahms, Wagner were on this kind of scale and used letmotifs as Elgar did here and in The Kingdom and The Apostles; and the first English work where the orchestra played such a major part in what Elgar preferred to think of more as operatic than oratorio.

A good deal of love went into what we heard. The relationship between the Angel and Gerontius is an interesting one: the tenderness and vulnerability which each experiences as Gerontius breathes his last on Earth and makes his way 'before his God' has to be developed with sensitivity and a somewhat detached respect for Roman Catholic ritual and Gerontius' own 'soul-heavy' suffering by which none of the other protagonists is unaffected. Any sense of progression, of an intense musical and spiritual journey, is otherwise lost.

The choral singing, had better be detached, observant and come from 'above', rather than be dry commentary. That way it conveys the tension, and sense of anger, threat and survival during passages like the Demons in 'But hark! upon my sense comes a fierce hubbub'. At the same time the chorus must gently and inexorably achieve the necessary serenity in 'Praise to the Holiest', with which the work ends. They must not run out of pathos and compassion. Tonight they didn't.

The orchestral tutti fortunately avoided the pitfall of presenting a rapt audience with a series of mere climaxes and calmer moments, ups and downs, at each spiritual turning-point: 'Take Me Away', 'Sanctus fortis, Sanctus Deus' early on and the riveting 'Proficiscere…' which ends the first phase. (Regrettably, there was applause at that point tonight.) Momentum is required, honest emotional strength; not mere hanging highlights. The performers achieved these too.

The soloists sang well, although a degree less of 'personality' and perhaps more of a sense of 'crisis', of dismay at what was at stake without any hint of self-pity would have been welcome. That way the active role (adumbrated – for me, always rather puzzlingly soon in 'My work is done, My task is o'er') which each plays in resolving Gerontius' suffering and effecting his translation into eternity – through the sublimest of music – then clearly applies to all of humanity. That seems to be what Elgar wanted.

I would still not want to be without any of the classic recordings of what is perhaps Elgar's greatest (choral) work. But Sinaisky's affectionate interpretation was new, certainly more upbeat than Barbirolli in particular and sheer delight from start to end.

David Tanner

Performance on 3 on March 22nd was a little gem: the intimacy of Wigmore Hall and a chamber concert given the previous Saturday by the Nash Ensemble with soprano Lisa Milne as part of a longer chamber music season of which, sadly, R3 did not carry more.

Chamber music is all too rare on R3 at the moment and almost unheard of as part of Performance on 3; yet tonight we had not only chamber music but an all-English concert of two comparative rarities and the Elgar Piano Quintet in A minor, Op.84.

The ninety minute-long treat began with Vaughan Williams' early (1898) Quintet for clarinet, horn, violin, cello and piano in D major. This is one of the pieces of which the Nash Ensemble made a glorious recording (on Hyperion, 67381/2) a couple of years ago. Described at the time it was written as 'English Brahms', tonight's lively performance of this novice work – obviously well-appreciated by the Wigmore audience – looked longingly in the direction of northern Europe. Indeed further east: the third-movement intermezzo contains a minuet alternating with quicker trio sections as if it were an English 'Dumky'.

The players obviously enjoyed this and the rudimentary counterpoint with which Vaughan Williams was then experimenting. The Quintet is more characteristic of the composers to whom the young Vaughan Williams was listening in his twenties than of the elegiac and self-confident genius he was to become. But well worth an outing and a good start to get us right into the evening.

Next – with a particularly good introduction from Petroc Trelawny, emphasising the composer's love of words – four songs by John Ireland. These were 'I have twelve oxen' (an anonymous early English verse), 'Earth's Call' (a 'sylvan rhapsody' with words by Harold Monro), 'The Trellis' (words by Aldous Huxley) and 'My true love hath my heart' (Sir Philip Sidney). Well-performed and well-placed between the two string works, these tuneful and rather dour examples of a comparatively under-performed repertoire supported the wistfulness of the theme of the series, 'Those Blue Remembered Hills'.

Elgar's sublime String Quintet was actually premiered at Wigmore Hall – in May 1919. This is one of the more pastoral pieces of the composer's instrumental output; somewhat more bucolic than his String Quartet – indeed, more economical in composition. Yet the almost 'magical' feel for the winter landscape near the Elgars' cottage at Brinkwells in Sussex was conveyed superbly by the Nash players.

They seemed to have rethought the flow of the three-movement work and lovingly, yet unsentimentally, re-examined the sonorities, the textures and architecture. And almost rejected the 'autumnal sigh' which often characterises performances. Instead something more robust, yet equally wistful and poignant.

One imagines Elgar's wish to weave an opaque curtain to draw over his horror at the first world war. Tonight's players felt it time to pull that shield away with the richness of driven but almost caressing lower registers in the strings: the way the piano complements the others' lines has always amazed one. The applause which greeted the final recapitulation at the end of this concert (there was no broadcast encore) was fitting and hardly unexpected.

The Nash Ensemble is at the top of its particular tree – occupied or haunted by the remains of Spanish monks or not – and has been for some time. With music-making as finely-honed yet creative as this, one can see why. More on R3 please!

Naomi Carter

This highly impressive account of Bartok's only opera came from Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov with Peter Fried and Andrea Melath. The advantage of casting singers whose first language is Hungarian removes the inevitable problems of articulating and projecting the text under non-native speakers.

The story concerns Judith's 'journey' not merely to Bluebeard's Castle but to the innermost depths of his personal history and psyche, with disastrous consequences. The seven doors symbolise both Bluebeard's life history from youth to old age and the emotional costs thoughout the process, culminating in Judith joining the three previous wives as the final fourth wife of his life's own 'midnight'. Bluebeard's own enforced reliving of past experiences, courtesy of Judith's persistent quest for the keys to these symbolic doors, reveals that he has paid a high price in his blood and tears for survival and success.

Bartok's score is hugely evocative employing a large orchestra with organ to flesh out the pyschodrama being portayed; in this case highly effectively in a semi-staged version. The central symbol of shed blood permeates the score in the form of a minor second (G#-A or G-G#) throughout and it is this that gradually grows to the point where Judith's music is entirely restricted to this interval in the final scene where she joins the other wives as the final memory of love.

Both singers exercised a massive grip on the nuances of the libretto and communicated their characters situations superbly. Andrea Melath's (Judith) final realisation that there are areas of the male psyche that are 'forbidden' was touchingly conveyed as Bluebeard unavoidably crushed her with his past emotional life, released by her intrusive curiousity. Peter Fried, although a little dry of voice, was also highly impressive in the way he handled both Bluebeard in his prime as a creative persona (4th door), his lands (5th door) and his tears (6th door); they are his tears but he is malely evasive about this! The reason for the tears is revealed by the last door by which time Judith has just gone too far into his darkest regions ever to return as herself.

A superb and moving account and full marks to Ilan Volkov, both singers and the BBC Scottish for bringing this taxing score to vibrant life in top grade BBC engineering too!

Steve Dean-Wiley

R3's splendid evening of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (PMD) certainly led to a voyage of discovery for me, familiar only with later works such as the Symphonies 2 and 3, from the early 80s, and the Violin Concerto of 1985. The more trenchant, theatrical and aggressive style of his music around 1969 was quite a revelation. In the late 1960s PMD had returned from the USA, studying with Sessions at Princeton and had re-established associations with colleagues in the avant garde, like Harrison Birtwistle, forming the Pierrot Players (The Fires of London-post 1967) specifically as a vehicle for performances of their own works.

The three works in the main concert with the BBCSO under Rumon Gamba from the Barbican were St Thomas Wake, written for the City of Dortmund, 8 Songs for a Mad King and Worldes Blis, a piece for large orchestra. A real boon to listeners was the inclusion of copious commentaries from PMD himself in two 20 minute intervals (needed for the stage changes between works ). The distinct PMD style is characterised by complex and intricate multipart counterpoint deriving from PMD's affinity with medieval plainchant etc. This is also overlaid by a very modern, powerful style of expression that is theatrical, owing something to Ives in its juxtapositioning of sounds and aural impressions, as in St Thomas Wake where a separate band playing foxtrot is pitted against modest orchestral resources, rich in percussion. It is notable that the piece ends almost exactly as it begins and could easily simply repeat da capo without one noticing (try it on the CD player!!). The evocation of PMD's childhood experiences of wartime and his parents' record collection was a part of the inspiration. For me it was too long and had made its point well before the end.

The 8 Songs for a Mad King, ideally requires listeners to be present, to see as well as hear the performances, and something is lost with a radio relay. The sound world and strange outlandish vocalisation alone being a challenging start to an exploration of PMD's work; similar vocal techniques are used in Henze's Versuch uber Schweine and El Cimarron from the same period. The 8 Songs are not the easiest of PMD's works for beginners and the portrayal of George III's 'madness' was, for me, not convincing, aurally, despite being based on accounts of his behaviour. They were in fact very hard, not to say grating, on the ear there being a massive gulf between this vocal world and that, say, of bel canto in the form of the Mad Scene from Lucia. But one cannot deny the imaginative aspects of this piece. A most touching aspect of one song, based on Handel's 'Comfort Ye' from Messiah, did emerge through the unfamiliar sound world with the King asking plaintively for relief from his predicament. However, one could imagine Handel's wig getting seriously askew were he to hear the piece, the harsh vocalisation certainly got in the way of any conventional pathos even in this song. A most troubling and disturbing work and not one that I would return to readily from choice.

Worldes Blis, a motet for orchestra based on a 13th-C English song, is written for large forces; it is a score full of colour and continual change of perspective with serial counterpoint much in evidence, still sounding quite fresh despite its age. The language of the two orchestral works is more acceptable at first listening than the songs and bears rewards more readily. In fact, I found them surprisingly approachable and will certainly return to them again.

The main concert was followed immediately by a concert of choral pieces recorded earlier in St Giles Cripplegate, a stone's throw from the Barbican Hall. The excellent BBC Singers directed by Nicholas Kok performed three works, the central one a short new piece, Angelus, based on words from Michelangelo and commissioned by the BBC, dedicated to the Singers and given its first performance by them. The other two works were Corpus Christi with Cat and Mouse, written for Balliol College choir, Oxford, with words taken from a 16th-C "cornucopial" book, full of all sorts of information and advice on many subjects, in the college library, and Westerlings, impressions of the Norsemen's arrival in Orkney, written for Uppsala University in Sweden. All three were delightful works, very approachable and superbly sung.

There was time between the two concerts for a short filler; this took the form of a Purcell Fantasia arranged by PMD and this was also delightful in its playfulness and witty sound world. Most enjoyable, but one does wonder what Henry might have had to say about it!!

GD

"In the past, the difference has been between dissonance and consonance; in the future it will be between noise and so-called music" (John Cage)

When those of us who are now middle-aged were growing up and attentive to the new in music, to the ground-breaking and the avant-garde, we were aware (if not necessarily fond of) the world and music of John Cage. To be honest, much of it was controversial, daring and eccentric to us then – and impressed us for those reasons. Then. But we should take a leaf from Merce Cunningham's book when asked whether Cage would ever be 'caught up with'. "By that do you mean assimilated?" he asked? "Never!"

This January's BBC Symphony Orchestra's Composer Weekend at the Barbican did try to cut through self-conscious reflection on reputation and concentrate on Cage's music qua music. This reviewer came away yet again with a sense of how stunningly beautiful and central to a wider musical experience Cage's compositions are.

Although R3 didn't broadcast all the events in their entirety and although there was perhaps just too much of Cage's contemporaries and influences and not enough of Cage, the background and introductory talks (including an obligatory ramble on Hampstead Heath for mushrooms) complemented the music nicely. John Tusa was at his trenchant best in the concerts he introduced and the presenters of 'in house' talks and music features communicated some of the vigour and purely musical accomplishments of Cage.

Where the weekend did not work quite so well was in explaining exactly what Cage's experimentation in his long musical career has given us – musically. And why. With examples. Insufficient in-depth discussion about the role of chance, the broadening of the sound palette – about silence even! To have heard more from musicians familiar with Cage would have helped immensely. A R3 with higher expectations of its audience could and would have been much more active in providing this, rather than trying to wrap Cage up as 'wacky' and 'spectacular'.

Still, eight live or relayed concerts plus a special edition of Music Matters on Sunday and a recording of the wonderfully DebussyanIn a Landscape on Friday's In Tune to set the scene, was a feast of this still unjustly-neglected and misunderstood composer.

Friday's Performance on 3 concentrated on Cage in his American context. Lawrence Foster conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in pieces by Schuman, Cowell, Ives, Antheil and Copland – as well as featuring Cage's The Seasons and 4'33", described by David Tudor on the Cage Weekend website as 'one of the most intense listening experiences you can have'. And indeed it was: forget the jibes, the jokes and the ridicule, Cage managed with this piece to invite the sensitive and open-minded music-lover to re-examine, if nothing else, what is meant by sound and duration and by multiple presences and impacts of sound in whichever sensory environments we live. Late on Friday a piano recital with Nicolas Hodges gave us Schoenberg's (Cage's teacher at UCLA) Pieces for Piano, Opp 33a & 33b and two pieces by Cage's pupils, Feldman's Piano and Bread and Roses by Christian Wolff as well as Solo for Piano by Cage himself. These pieces in some way stood for an appropriately unspoken theme of the weekend: understatement. Saying much with little; restraint and packing a tremendous amount of meaning into music seeming to hold back all the time. A true Cage characteristic.

Saturday's highlight was a deferred broadcast expertly introduced by Ivan Hewett as Hear And Now: a lunchtime concert from St Giles Cripplegate showcasing the Duke Quartet in Cage's String Quartet in 4 parts (1949-50) and the euphonic and eminently melodious Four (1989). Richard Benjafield (percussion) led Sound Intermedia and students from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama for 'Constructions In Metal' by Cage. This concert also featured Living room music, Credo in US, Child of tree and Third Construction for 4 Percussionists by Cage as well as The Three Strange Angels by Peter Garland and Ostinato pianissimo by Henry Cowell, perhaps an odd choice to illustrate the latter's strengths. Cowell – such an influence on Cage – is surely one of the C20th's most overlooked innovators, writing purely percussion music in the 1920's – before either Varèse or the famous passage from Shostakovich's The Nose. In true Hear and Now fashion just the right amount of background information was offered at just the right places. Lest we forget, Radio 3 is not just a radio broadcast enterprise. The Cage Uncaged weekend also included some events never intended for radio transmission. Two of these were the Musicircuses on Saturday afternoon and a relay performance of Satie's Vexations from 6pm Saturday, through to about 12.30pm Sunday. Bryn's view of the Vexations performance can be found on the Radio 3 Classical Music on Radio 3 Message Board. For an alternative viewpoint, try the rec.music.classical.contemporary usenet group.

The Musicircus events were the highlight of the weekend for Bryn. Composer Stephen Montague gathered together some 341 performers in 52 groupings to perform works or associated with Cage during the same two 45 minute performances. Using Cage's favoured I Ching mode of divination, he determined which groups would play when during this three quarter hour period. So throughout the foyers and walkways inside the Barbican could be heard soloists and ensembles ranging from Stefan Buczacki lecturing on fungi, through four separate BBC choirs, to Hard Cell, the Herts University new music group playing Wolff's Burdocks. All combining to produce a wonderfully rich diversity of simultaneous aural joy! Sunday's broadcasts were four: a lunchtime concert at St Luke's with pianist Rolf Hind, mezzo Deborah Miles-Johnson and the BBC Symphony Chorus conducted by Stephen Jackson called 'Praise and Be Prepared' with hymns by Billings and Thomson, psalms by Hovhaness and Ives and Copland's In the Beginning as foils to a selection from Cage's own Sonatas and Interludes and Variations I for Stephen Montague (1958/90), which was actually a world premiere. This was perhaps the most American of these sketches of influences and background. And – like some of the other programmes – into it seemed to creep just a little misgiving on the part of the programmers that Cage's music – even the well-established Sonatas and Interludes could not somehow stand on its own and had to be 'contextualised' with more familiar music; even though by Sunday afternoon, Cage's accessibility had surely been proven.

At 4 o'clock three more 'compare and contrast' pieces were presented by Porcelijn with Clio Gould (violin), Ralph van Raat (piano) and the London Sinfonietta. This time to explore Cage's connection with the East Coast. Reference had been made during the previous night's Hear and Now to the tensions between the 'zanier', freer experimentalism of the West Coast and the more formal expressionism prevailing in New York when Cage was based there. The items for this concert were well-chosen, and succeeded in pointing up that difference. Feldman's Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety, Christian Wolff's Spring and Earle Brown's Centring surrounded the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Apartment House 1776 by Cage. Music Matters was a special live edition from the Barbican in which Tom Service discussed the 'life and legacy' of John Cage with three musicians and writers who really understand Cage as a musician; not as an 'experimenter dealing in mayhem and chaos' but as a genius composer whose approach to music matured and evolved significantly over his life.

These specialists managed to show how the music – as opposed to Cage's 'ideas' – really does 'hold up'. Starting with detractions from Stockhausen, Virgil Thomson and Boulez, the discussion examined ways in which Cage's ear for music (despite the alleged Schoenberg comment that Cage had no gift for melody) produced some of the lyrical pieces (the Sonatas and Interludes, Music for Piano, The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs and even Litany for the Whale for example) which it did.

There was a useful assessment of Cage's influence