I'm a big fan of Radio 3 controller Roger Wright, and I'm not saying this just because he once gave me a complimentary ticket to Twickenham for an England v Wales rugby international (Wales, unfortunately, were crushed). I won't even subscribe to Charlotte Higgins's doubts about his dress sense. If a man wants to wear loud shirts and strangely patterned socks, that's his business. But I think she's on to something with her questioning of his vision of the future.
Yes, get rid of Brian Kay's witterings on Percy Grainger, fawning profiles of obscure jazz artists, and second-rate Broadway musicals. Great idea. But - and here I must use capital letters, I'm afraid - PLEASE DON'T REDUCE THE AMOUNT OF LIVE MUSIC. That is the essence of Radio 3. The live lunchtime concert; Performance on 3 at 7.30; live relays of operas and festivals. Expensive, of course, but vital. Take them away and Radio 3 merely becomes Classic FM for people who can, wow, listen to an entire Brahms symphony. Hasn't he learned from the failure of Stephanie Hughes's short-lived Sunday morning programme, which packaged recorded concerts from around Europe, or her lifeless Sunday afternoon "gala"? Recorded music is recorded music; unless the performance is staggeringly good, of no greater or lesser value than playing a CD.
Wright has invented a smokescreen phrase which, if you think about it for a nanosecond, is meaningless - "live as live". There is no such thing as "live-as-live" music. There is live music and there is recorded music. What he means is that the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra will be recorded on a Monday and broadcast on a Wednesday. All very nice - but I am whatever the aural version of a voyeur is. I want to be there, remotely, on a Monday. I don't wish Marin Alsop ill, but there's always the chance she might fall off the podium, or she and the principal cellist will have a bust-up on stage following a public disagreement over the tempo in the adagio. Live is live - it's fun, there's a sense of occasion, and a whiff of danger. I don't want to hear the muffled sound of Marin's tumble two days later, if indeed it would even be broadcast.
The serious point, to use Welsh comic Max Boyce's resonant phrase, is "being there". I was at Bayreuth a couple of years ago for a Ring cycle and sat next to an Italian who was doing the inter-act fillers for a live broadcast on Italian radio (quite a job, as the intervals last about an hour). He was incredibly excited and I bet that communicated itself to his audience. They were participating in the ritual through him, feeling his devotion, his pain, his exhaustion. It just wouldn't have been the same to listen to it a week later, with 10-minute breaks between the acts. It needs to be experienced in real time, with the sense that this is happening now, in my world. I have perfectly acceptable recordings of the Ring which I can play any time I want; what I can't do very often is get to a performance. By broadcasting live, Radio 3 can give me that.
There is also the practical point that 7pm is simply too early to start the main evening concert. Even 7.30 is too early, though concert promoters in Britain haven't cottoned on to the fact. An 8 o'clock start would be far healthier - a chance to wind down after work, eat, read the programme, think, talk with friends. But because lots of patrons of classical music are retired and feel the need to dash for the 9.58 to Dorking or Cheadle Hulme (often, insultingly, when the artists are still taking their bows), 7.30 it must be. A 7'o clock start is ridiculous. It will guarantee I never hear Performance on 3 again.
So please, Roger, think again. Give us the red meat of live performance on as many nights as is humanly possible; hang the expense; axe an orchestra if you have to (does the BBC really need - can it really afford - five?). And drop that absurd phrase "live as live". It doesn't exist. Nor should it on a station whose aim ought to be to bring classical music lovers together for unrepeatable moments of music-making.
