Facing the Music Radio 3/BBC Sounds
Tara and George: Last Rights Radio 4/BBC Sounds)
Why Is Amy in the Bath? Grab Bag Collab & Because It’s True Productions
Between the Ears: A Symphony of Cicadas Radio 3/BBC Sounds
“It’s almost midnight,” purrs Dominic West, all honey and velvet, straight after we hear the famously doomy, four-note opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The wild-eyed composer is in a cart, West tells us energetically, his latest piano sonata getting ruined by the rain, after throwing some coins at the driver and growling his preferred destination. West relishes every syllable of it: “Vi-ennnn-a!”
New 10-part Radio 3 podcast Facing the Music, according to the BBC blurb, offers “a fresh perspective on some of classical music’s most established composers”. On paper it sounds a bit luvvie-ish – here’s Michael Sheen on Shostakovich’s terrors during the Stalinist 1930s, Kit Harington on Rachmaninov’s fear of failure, Toby Jones on how Sibelius’s anger freed him from his musical torment; famous names adding extra drama to the swoosh of batons.
But it’s more than that. Wrapped around the actors’ words are the voices of experts in psychology, gerontology and more, as well as ordinary people facing situations similar to those experienced by the featured composers – to give their stories a modern-day impact, which requires a delicate balancing act. Thankfully, this counterpoint works a treat. Lesser-known lives, such as those of the English suffragette composer Ethel Smyth (read animatedly by Maxine Peake) and Florence Price, the first African American woman to have her music performed by a major US orchestra, who battled prejudice against her gender and colour, hold as much power as the tales of the big boys.
That said, my favourite episode so far (I’ve heard about half the series) has David Suchet recounting the last week of Joseph Haydn’s life in war-torn Vienna, a French soldier coming to his house to sing him one of his arias. The fact that Suchet is 78, a year older than Haydn, who, at 77, was very old for the time, wasn’t lost on me as I sat in the car, listening to the end, a blubbering wreck. This is powerful, symphonic storytelling; not for the faint-hearted, but I loved it.
More emotional radio could be found on Radio 4, with the return of award-winning journalist Audrey Gillan. You may remember her powerful 2018 series Tara and George, about two rough sleepers, neighbours of hers (“of sorts”, she said, in her lovely Glaswegian accent), who she got to know curiously but kindly over 18 months. It deservedly won Radio Programme of the Year at the 2019 Broadcasting Press Guild awards.
Tara and George: Last Rights updates the story sadly. Tara died, the circumstances unknown. Her brother, Shaun, who Gillan hasn’t met before, emails for help to find out what happened. The next 28 minutes are a whirlwind, including a shocking second death and the arrival of Tara’s youngest daughter, Paige, who was taken into care, then adopted into a loving family. There’s a sweet moment when she chats on the phone to her “mum mum”, but we discover she also spent years trying to get back in touch with her “tummy mummy”.
This is a programme about complicated families, and a state system that struggles with depleted resources to support people, or show sensitivity. Tara died with no next of kin noted, with one person at her funeral, despite having so many connections. The moment when Tara’s name is read out at a funeral for homeless people who died that year – she is one of 126 – is deeply affecting.
We also find George, too, by chance, but I’ll leave that moment for you to encounter. Gillan has made another great programme, brave, fearless and true.
A couple of lighter shows to leave you with this week. The first is the bizarre but oddly compelling podcast Why Is Amy in the Bath?, presented by American journalists Brandon R Reynolds and Gabby Lombardo. Inspired by Reynolds noticing film actor Amy Adams’s many bath scenes (and no, he doesn’t tackle the perviness behind that observation from the off), it delves deep into the history of bathtub and shower scenes in cinema, bathing data for Oscar best actress nominees, and whether Adams has a hidden agenda as she lurks in the foam.
The presenters are too arch and self-satisfied at times, but I’m enjoying how the podcast format still allows mad ideas like these to swirl into new wormholes (rather than disappearing down plugholes). Three episodes are out, with three more to come. I’m desperate for Adams herself to make a bubbly appearance.
Finally, Between the Ears: A Symphony of Cicadas finds radio producer Mark Burman experiencing an event not seen, nor crucially heard, for 221 years. This is the simultaneous emergence of two broods of cicadas whose 13- and 17-year life cycles rarely cross over. Billions of them were mating and noise-making until they die two months later.
Burman’s use of historical quotes to sum up their magic is beautiful (“a few brief weeks of life, in the open air, in the fellowship of their kind” runs one, by the fabulously named entomologist RE Snodgrass), as is his exploration of their percussive melodies and rhythms. What a sound they make too, loud and almost electronic (Between the Ears is definitely a programme for headphones). This is slow radio turned up to 11, fizzing with life.
