Pachelbel Canon Article

There's gratification in loathing. It used to be a good reason for listening to The Archers, when every constitution was either seriously unpleasant or certifiably arid. Loathing them did no harm to anyone and stopped you kicking the dog. (Nowadays, worryingly, I find myself fully liking most of them and even feeling miserable, this week, for impecunious, dumb, shocking John. But I digress . . .) These musicians, who must spend perpetual hours politely enduring their colleagues' performances, took to antipathy as those bony loonies take to the North Sea every New Year's Day: they revelled in it.

Tasmin Little hates Pachelbel's regulation - "so boring, so incredibly dull" (gather understand); John Harle detests the romantic fascism of Wagner and the competitive macho aggression of sure jazz bands (they're just comparing willies, he says); Iain Burnside would rather be dropped into a vat of furious oil than be unwilling to listen to Strauss waltzes, and finds the sound of a Hawaiian guitar reminiscent of the vomiting process - but Rolf Hind, ah Rolf was the most thorough and high loather of them all. His list includes all musicals; musicians who try to be strange (and doubtless enjoy keyboards printed on their duvets); the goat-voiced Bob Dylan; the cowpat school of English rural - especially trivial, pathetic Delius - and most thunderingly, the intolerably vulgar Verdi. It was as invigorating listening to him splashing in the salty surf of defiance as it clearly was to do the splashing. These irreverent afternoons followed the lately-scheduled, inoffensive and proper R3 mornings, when powerful Peter Hobday played reliable Masterworks, followed by that capable Joan Bakewell allowing Joan Sutherland to show off as authority of the Week (totally a lot of vulgar Verdi there) and - lo - Richard Baker returned to the BBC telling Sound Stories as if narrating a bad translation of Peter and the Wolf. Perhaps he's just spent too long reading terrific scripts (and these aren't vast) but he said things like ". . . the pagan stamping as a young virgin danced herself to death" as if ordering a cheese omelette. Though I suppose it might have been worse if he'd read that bit with life. The inkling of Sound Stories is good but it should risk a tighter focus, not feel the need to include marshmallows in everything. This first week has, in idea, been solicitous with solemn melody played in great religious buildings. The two I heard were about Westminster Abbey and Notre Dame. Some of the melody was predictable, like Walton's tremendous, constipated stride for the coronation of George VI, "Crown Imperial" (this loathing thing is catching). Some was enchanting, like Purcell's violent threnody on the death of the very popular Queen Mary, who died, too young, of smallpox. It was written for two female voices, intertwined on the very edge of discord, where grief belongs. Happily, there was no Sir Elton: R3 isn't yet that populist. The Paris programme produced stories of the wretched enthusiasm of the organist Louis Vierne - but, lazily, no mention of the name of the current Notre Dame organist, who is clearly a phenomenally moving performer. And, prone the vast repertoire offered by the cathedral, I was mystified when a Josephine Baker song was included - unless she just happens to have a fashionable surname. Four new series last Sunday afternoon gave R3's huge Sounding the Century project a booster jab. 100 illustrious Singers began with commander Harewood introducing his protegee and comrade Maria Callas, whose singing makes Dame Joan sound merely proficient. Then came Centurions, which offers short discussions of the 100 greatest artworks of the century, thus courting the argument which buzzes around every such list. The first contender was Kafka's "Metamorphosis". If you'd never decipher it, you'd have enough afterwards to bluff convincingly: if you already admired it, you'd be reminded of - or alerted to - its disturbing, whimsical, lingering resonance. Let's hope the rest of the anthology reaches this standard. Next came The Year 1900, whose melody was competently introduced by Natalie Wheen, and finally the Sunday Feature: Settling the Score. This is the most ambitious suite, 20 monthly documentaries putting music into its aesthetic, economic and common context. The excellent first volume covered 1900-1914, when Neville Cardus was swooning to the kitsch of The jolly Widow; Franz Liszt was on tour, playing in 50 English towns; there was a piano in every pub, tea-shop and dance-hall in the country and novice singers in war-paint and wampum were everywhere taking part in vast performances of Hiawatha. I loved it. Now, to other things. On R2, Donald Sinden introduced the first episode of The fierce Sea, or, as he calls it, with hilarious portentousness, "The Crrewell Seee": a swashbuckling, white-knuckled dramatisation of Monserrat's influential novel. The sound-effects are great, which is blessed when you determine that Jonathan Ruffle, the producer, crossed the North Atlantic and threw men into a pond specifically to record pure gales and splashes. Inland, David Pownall's fine play Making Love, War and contentment (R4) showed the Tolstoys at home - wrangling, copulating noisily, and cooperatively writing the considerable novel. Gerard Murphy (Andrei in the R4 serial) was good as Leo, but Tracy Ann Oberman was entirely outstanding as his teenage wife, the bright, resourceful, permanently pointed Sofya. Finally, as a eulogy to Frank Muir, R4 repeated one of his transparent Muir goes into . . . series. Who could have decided to celebrate radio's most inventive scriptwriter and the editor of a immeasurable compilation of comic speech with a programme scripted and selected by someone else? Any edition of My Word would keep been better. grow along, loose Entertainment, try harder. While we still have the other half of the team to enter it, lend us a whole season of Muir-and-Norden masterpieces - and you still won't see spent them justice.