Music heard all around the world
Douglas Kennedy on the global power of Radio 3
It was a moment brimming with modernist irony — waking up in the ever-antiseptic and Calvinist city of Geneva on Sunday morning to the sounds of one of the thorniest keyboard works of the 20th century: Pierre Boulez’s jaggedly remarkable Piano Sonata No. 3. As I immediately sat upright in my hotel bed I reminded myself that (as had been advertised on air for several weeks) this Sunday morning began an all-day immersion into the compositional and conducting legacy of the man who some have called The Count Dracula of Modern Music. And though I had writerly business later that day in that most Swiss of villes, through the wonders of the BBC Sounds app I was able to first work out in a local gym to what the ever erudite and exuberant presenter Tom Service called ‘a thrill ride which takes you to places unknown’: Boulez’s ‘Notations for Orchestra”.
The paradox wasn’t lost on me: doing my daily aerobic thing in the company of what looked like fully paid-up members of the international banking class while listening to music so challenging and transformative – by a composer whose oeuvre is now regarded as a defining one in the postwar musical world. And then there was Boulez’s electrifying body of recorded work as conductor, also broadcast throughout the day, as he married astonishing clarity and rigor with a remarkable ability to bring you into an elucidating sound world of immense orchestral colour and texture.
The very fact that BBC Radio 3 had decided to devote an entire Sunday to Boulez (who would have turned 100 this year) speaks volumes about why it remains the most important classical music service in the world today. Speaking as an itinerant writer — who, after 23 years in London now lives between Paris, Berlin, and Maine — Radio 3 has been a constant in my life ever since I discovered it while a student in Dublin in the 1970s. I am someone who doesn’t just write to music, but who writes exclusively to Radio 3. It has become my companion at whatever desk or table I find myself in the world: this essay is being written on the Milan-Paris Express, with Georgia Mann’s Essential Classics in my ears… and the great American pianist Stephen Kovacevich playing Brahms.
But while an alpine terrain of stern snow-dappled peaks defines the immediate horizon, an appalling thought strikes me: should the BBC go ahead with what appears to be a cost-cutting exercise, I may no longer be able to listen to BBC Radio 3 outside of the United Kingdom.
Reports begin to circulate that the BBC has decided that all its musical channels will no longer be available on the BBC Sounds app in the world beyond Britain. I called the BBC Radio helpline to discuss this, pointing out that, as the owner of a flat in London, I still paid the License Fee — so surely I should have access to BBC Sounds abroad. The answer was a firm ‘No’. Nor could the very nice person at the other end of the line explain to me if the proposed new subscription service, bbc.com/app, would have full access to Radio 3 programming. When I asked if I might be able to still get Radio 3 beyond the UK on the dreaded Alexa (via Amazon) or on a paid-for radio service like TuneIn, the answer was, in so many words: ‘We’re still working this out’.
I posed an absolute no-brainer: "Why is the BBC going to all this trouble to block BBC Sounds for those of us – and I sense there are many millions of us around the world – devoted to Radio 3 when they could make so much money by offering us the app on a subscription basis?” The answer was, in so many words: that’s not for me to say.
Hitler and Stalin and Mao failed to kill off the Voice of America, but the United States’ own president is giving it his best show — at this moment, how can the BBC justify the international blocking of a classical music service with such a global reach and intellectual rigour? The BBC, like the Voice of America, has always functioned as a ‘soft power’ — cultural exports are among Britain’s greatest strengths, and Radio 3 is one of the country’s glories, full stop.
Outside of the exemplary France Musique — which still doesn’t have Radio 3’s range of live concert broadcasts from around the world, let alone Radio 3 New Generation Artists scheme or live broadcasts of all the Proms — there is nothing worldwide to compare to Radio 3. Germany’s Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Australia’s ABC Classic and various public radio stations in the United States provide very good services, but you will rarely bump into the encyclopedic knowledge of recorded sound as displayed every week on Andrew McGregor’s Record Review, or the ongoing historical depth of The Early Music Show, or the biographical breadth of Composer of the Week. Radio 3 also boasts two exemplary jazz shows (including Soweto Kinch’s ’Round Midnight), an inventive nocturnal soundscape (Night Tracks), a weekly adventurous survey of the modern avant-garde (The New Music Show), not to mention Tom Service’s audacious take on all things musical for three hours every Saturday morning… this is to name but a few of the programmes to which I am devoted.
In Radio 3 the BBC has not only a classical music service that is recognized as sine qua non internationally, but is also the best advertisement imaginable for Britain’s still-remarkable musical life. In a world where we are all so interconnected, how can the Beeb stop a vast audience beyond British frontiers from listening to a classical music service that actually talks up to its audience — especially at a moment when philistinism runs riot elsewhere?
A story worth repeating: in my compartment on an overnight train to Hanoi last year (while spending a month traveling and writing in Vietnam) I dug out my little smart speaker. Thanks to a Vietnamese sim card I then clicked on the BBC Sounds app and listened to a broadcast of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. It was nighttime; I was typing in my laptop and sipping a whisky when there was a knock on my compartment door. When I opened it, there stood a Vietnamese man in his fifties, dressed in a suit, a clipboard thick with a spreadsheet under one arm. I figured him for an accountant — and was fully prepared to be subjected to a dressing-down for blaring Mahler somewhere north of what used to be known as the DMZ. Instead he was all smiles.
“Mahler Six!” he exclaimed. “Who’s conducting?”
“Simon Rattle,” I said. “It’s quite amazing.”
He then asked me if I had ever heard the Klaus Tennstedt recording with the London Philharmonic.
“It’s my go-to recording,” I told him.
“Mine too!”
We introduced ourselves and shook hands. Then we started talking about whether Bernstein was all genius or histrionics when it came to Mahler performances. The guy knew his stuff. And when I asked him how he’d learned so much about Mahler interpretations, he smiled.
“I listen to BBC Radio 3,” he said.
Douglas Kennedy is the author of 26 books, including The Big Picture, The Pursuit of Happiness, and The Moment. A film of his novel, A Special Relationship (for which he co-wrote the French screenplay), just finished shooting in Paris. He is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres.
Douglas is reading Jan Swafford’s biography of Johannes Brahms