THOSE of us who might like to take the odd shot at BBC Radio 4's "complacency" have now got both more ammo for our accusations and better to hold our fire.
I mean, what's the point? The listeners' survey reported on Feedback (BBC Radio 4, Friday) is the best grounds for complacency I've ever heard.
Some 93 per cent of listeners - don't ask me about the survey procedures, I don't know - rated the service as "good" or better. On everything from programming to pronunciation, Radio 4's audience loves its Auntie Beeb. A solid case could be made that this constitutes a decent stab at public service.
Meanwhile, those other unfortunate broadcasters, "public service" or whatever, who rely on the advertising buck of the great big private sector could be facing new competition - from schools.
That wasn't exactly the angle the BBC took on Friday's story, arising from a survey of sponsored "education packs" by Britain's Consumer Council. However, even with fairly superficial coverage on both The Breakfast Programme (BBC Radio 5 Live, Monday to Friday) and Today (BBC Radio 4, Monday to Friday), it was evident that British companies aren't spending £300 million annually on such material and other sponsorships out of unsullied civic mindedness. They've spotted the classroom as a crucial, cost effective medium for many corporate messages.
Some twos per cent of Britain's education spending, we heard, now comes from such private sector beneficence. Take for example the World of Chocolate "resource pack", from Cadbury's, which informs 12 year olds about the nutritional value of chocolate, "a wholesome food" packed with "important nutrients".
The Consumer Council chappie on Today was taking the liberal line that, of course, much of this stuff is just fine and terribly valuable, but some firms get a bit "naughty and careless" (he really said this). "Naughty", perhaps, but I would have thought great "care" indeed had been taken to insinuate the slickest promotional plug into these glossy wonders of pedagogy.
Surely encouraging companies to "behave responsibly" - i.e. not seek to advance the own self interests in material they pay for is like advising a hyena to go vegetarian? Maybe the Consumer Council could produce a convincing resource pack.
If the proto skirmishes are anything to go by, the historiographical battles of the future about Irish traditional music in the late 20th could make debates about Famine or the GPO look like puppies at play.
When those historians of music and culture get down to business, one of their "documents" might well be a solid, intriguing two hour a documentary broadcast over the fortnight, Wandering Notes: O'Riada to O Suilleabhain Campus Radio, Tuesday).
Brady produced the programme for the Cork station, which is a joint project shared by UCC and Cork RTC. In it, he probes the notion that Cork, and UCC in particular, have been home to something of a trad renaissance, a "cultural explosion" in the words of Micheal O Sulleabhain - though one contributor wonders whether the man who was himself, until recently, the university's musical guru should be coining such a phrase.
Judging by the interviews here, the members of the trad group Nomos, the most notable fallout of the "explosion", are sceptical - about the term. Nonetheless, the developments at UCC make fascinating listening, however big or important to the larger history of the music they are judged to be.
Among other things, O Suilleabhain convincingly argues that nowhere else in Europe has a university music department facilitated and involved itself so profoundly in the evolution of a popular, "folk" art form. It required, he says, a shift from academic paradigms that equate virtuosity, difficulty and complexity with value - and therefore elevate - the European art music canon above all other traditions.
It's a complex story, of dramatic change since about 1980, that is still unfolding. However, the distinctly back handed compliments paid here to O Suilleabhain's UCC predecessor, Sean O Riada, would make any revolutionary wary about his or her place in history.
Brady's programme is a model for this sort of station, unabashedly provincial yet confident of its wider significance. What else would you expect from Cork?
THE director Peter Brook once compared form and expression in opera to a pipe and the water in it. In Mozart's operas, he wrote, you get "a perfect marriage between the artificial and something that's fully alive - here's an example of the rigid pipe and the water flowing through it". But the problem with opera, he went on, was that, as it had developed, the "pipe is taking all the attention and less and less water is trickling through it." Opera Theatre Company, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary with its tour of Handel's Amadigi di Gaula, has done much to put the flow back into a form that had become, for my taste at least, rigid to the point of sclerosis.
Under James Conway, OTC has turned the extraction of virtue from necessity into an art form all of its own. A small, relatively poor opera company cannot afford any of the things long deemed essential for the production of operas - heavyweight stars, big orchestras, lavish spectacles. OTC has therefore asked the simplest of questions: are any of these things really necessary? Might it not be better to have young singers play the parts of young people? Might the absence of lavish spectacle allow an audience to concentrate instead on the action? Can't singers, when they don't have to compete with an orchestra too loud for the voices, be more free to move in a way that makes sense of the action, rather than having to face the audience and stay near the front of the stage? Can't opera go back to being what it once was - a form of theatre?
It is at least partly because of questions like these that Handel's operatic works, having all but disappeared from public view between the end of the 18th century and the middle of the 20th, have come back into vogue. The very characteristics that made them unfashionable for so long now make them deeply attractive. Their intimacy and directness, the fact that they bear the marks of an era when the line between theatre and opera was much thinner than it is now, probably told against them at a time when opera was becoming ever more romantic in tone and epic in scale. But those same qualities give them an extraordinary freshness now, and it is hardly accidental that Amadigi is the third Handel opera produced by OTC in as many years.
James Conway's production makes an unanswerable case both for Handel and for OTC's whole aesthetic. As well as being beautifully sung and musically delightful it is also, as a piece of theatre, funny, sophisticated and wickedly playful. With just four main singers and on a single set that is brilliantly contrived by Neil Irish to provide a dazzling variety of spaces, it creates a richness of texture from wit and skill rather than from physical opulence.
Both the sophistication and the wickedness are deployed on the same problem. As so often in opera, the complexity of the music is at odds with the silliness of the plot, in which Amadigi (Jonathan Peter Kenny) has to escape with his beloved (Anne O'Byrne) from the snares of the enchantress Melissa (Majella Cullagh) who is obsessively in love with him, and who is aided by Amadigi's rival Dardano (Buddug Verona Jones). Sending up such a plot is easy, and Conway does it with great glee. The hard part, though, is to do so without diminishing the emotional power of the piece.
CONWAY achieves this by exploiting one of the inherent characteristics of opera itself, the fact that the emotional weight of the music is always in excess of the actions that supposedly produce it. Making thin plots seem to produce the powerful feelings of the singing is one of the great challenges of opera. Here it is met, somewhat paradoxically, by stressing the artifice of the action. Instead of trying to make the magic spells and hexes that the action calls for credible, the production makes them patently unreal. The magic is the magic of theatre itself - the fact that, under certain conditions we are willing to pretend that a few streaks of red paint represent a fire or that a female singer (Jones) is a macho male warrior.
This works for two reasons. One is that, at the core of the plot, for all its apparent silliness, is a play about the cruelty of love and the way it refuses to match the emotion with its object. In a dangerous game of pass the parcel, each character in turn learns what it feels like to be a rejected lover. What we see is something utterly unreal - the emotion of love - that is yet deadly serious. The other reason is that Handel's music, for all its rapturous lustre, has a drama all of its own, a continuing conflict between its urge towards harmony and its harder edge of unsatisfied yearning. In giving compelling expression to this drama, James Conway's production manages to be at once beautifully artificial and fully alive.
