A special evening at BBC Proms 2017 (25 July, 6.30pm, Radio 3) begins with Holst’s The Planets played by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and finishes with The Songs of Scott Walker (25 July, 10.15pm, Radio 3), which features Jarvis Cocker, John Grant and Susanne Sundfør performing his songs with the Heritage Orchestra conducted by Jules Buckley. Walker will also be talking about his music and playing songs from his first four solo albums on Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service (23 July, 4pm, 6 Music).
Henry James is a tough sell in a world where most people’s idea of a demanding read is something tricksy that has just won the Booker prize. In Love Henry James: The Master (27 July, 11.30am, Radio 4) Sarah Churchill engages the help of Colm Tóibín, who wrote a fiction about him, plus literary biographer Hermione Lee, to convince us that, although there may be times when James’s prose is as dense as a page out of the statute book, there are riches to be accessed by those prepared to make the effort. To prove the point, coming up in the next couple of weeks will be dramatisations of James’s Daisy Miller, Portrait of a Lady and Roderick Hudson.
Test Match Special (25 July, 7.30pm, 5 Live) celebrates the 60th anniversary of the first TMS via the memories of its devoted listeners, who range from mothers bringing children into the world to sailors trying to bale out sinking boats. It’s followed by the reminiscences of Jonathan Agnew, Henry Blofeld and visiting Australian Jim Maxwell. Of course, they merely presented the programme. They don’t remember it the way we do.
Most magical sound of the week is a recording of Stravinsky conducting a South African orchestra on a visit to a township in 1962. Recently located on a shelf in the SABC archive, it’s played for the first time for the benefit of some people who were there. The Documentary: Stravinsky in South Africa (25 July, 1.30pm, BBC World Service) has choirmaster and conductor Michael Dingaan telling the story of the great man’s unprecedented visit and talking to a few living witnesses.
I’ve added Radio Isla Negra to the select handful of music stations broadcasting uninterrupted music from overseas that I regularly turn to when I have exhausted the delights of British music radio (the others are KCRW’s Eclectic24 from California and FIP from France). The station is named after the region of Chile that was the home of Pablo Neruda and plays the kind of mix that moves from Ethiopian jazzer Mulatu Astatke to MOR balladeer Albert Hammond without blinking. It’s not only non-profit and commercial-free, it also seems to be equally free of station idents, would-be atmospherics, appeals for money and the rest of the clutter that comes under the name “station imaging”. It’s good for working to and blessedly free of exhortations to enthuse.
