What has happened to Lyric FM? It arrived as a harbinger of civilisation, bringing a wide choice of classical music to airwaves that were deluged with the detritus of popular culture. RTE Radio 1 almost totally neglected classical music, with the welcome exception of the unashamedly middlebrow Des Keogh and Jack O'Brien, and the occasional symphony from the National Concert Hall. But otherwise, there was little or no serious music to be heard emanating from any Irish radio station, writes Kevin Myers.
That was an appalling dereliction of RTE's duty to provide public service broadcasting for the people of Ireland. We were paying our licence fee, and certainly as far as radio was concerned, we were getting little enough for it. It's doubtful if there was a comparable population anywhere in Europe that so bereft of classical music on its radio stations.
Then along came Lyric FM, and suddenly one could find good classical music throughout the day. To be sure, concessions had to be made to popular taste; and I for one will go my grave a happier man if I never ever hear the "Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves" ever again. My feelings on the matter are that they thoroughly deserved to be slaves, and if I'd had anything to do with it, I would have cut out their vocal chords and put them on the Murmansk-Greenland galleys.
Indeed, comparable emotions are aroused in my breast at much of the Verdi opus. How a man who could write such a sublime Requiem could also saddle the world with the vulgar, brash concatenation which is the Grand March from Aida is one of the mysteries of civilisation.
But for all the variations in quality of Verdi compositions, they are recognisably of the genre of what we loosely call classical music. We may also listen, numb and dumb with misery, as Lyric FM might give us, yet again, the "Anvil Chorus", Pachelbel's Canon, one damned Ave Maria or another, the "Flower Duet", the duet from the bleeding Pearl Fishers, the bleedinger Blue Danube, Albinoni's bleedingest "Adagio for Strings and Organ!", and of course, our own home-grown Balfe and his "I Dreamt I Dwelt In Ballymun", or something on those lines: but tired though all these items have now become through overplaying, they are of themselves delightful pieces of music, possessing structural and musical complexity underlying outwardly pleasing contours.
They were the populist price to be paid, usually at around midday, for full concerts, for unexpected motets, for sly quartets, for subtle explorations of largely unknown areas of the world's music. It was good too that Lyric pushed on the boundaries of music: rightly it accepted that some of the great American musicals genuinely belong to the canon of intellectually serious work. And - so far as I know - it pioneered the rediscovery of Marnie Dixon, who provided the singing voice for Audrey Hepburn, Deborah Kerr and Natalie Wood in film musicals (which explains why Maria in West Side Story sang in an English accent).
Lyric FM's primary duty was to give us music, not music discussions, for there are hours of broadcasting talk-time on RTE Radio One for that. Yet increasingly in recent times, we have been getting "programmes" about music. It's understandable that presenters get bored disc-jockeying their way, hour after after hour, day after day, month in and month out. However, Lyric FM wasn't put on this earth for them to exercise their creative programme-making talents, but to give us, the licence-payers, classical music.
Worse than these tiresome exercises in voice-editing are the folksy attempts to feature local arts weeks as matters of interest for the entire country. Sorry, but I really don't care to hear an interminable item about the Hone-na-muck Arts Week, including an hour long interview with the director of the Pit-na-Bo Amateur Dramatic Society's new and challenging version of The Field, featuring local national school teacher Bríd Ní Bollocháin.
And perhaps even worse still than these dire departures from the musical format are the broadening of the definitions of what is classical music to the ludicrously unclassical. Not even the most generous definition of what is classical music could possibly include Angela Lansbury croaking her way through "Send in the Clowns" like a frog that's swallowed a pin-cushion, though I have heard this twice recently on Lyric FM.
I also heard Colm T. Wilkinson singing a song from Chess, the music for which was written by the well-known Abba songwriters, Bjorn Sjomethign and Benny Sjomethignelse. Whatever that is, it is not classical music. Nor was what followed, some bossa nova vapidity by, I think, Astrid and Joao Gilberto, the Joe Dolan and Dana of Brazil; moderately accomplished, to be sure, but not remotely high art.
If I really want to endure such Latinate vacuities, I can do so free by getting in any hotel lift and serially pressing the top and basement buttons. But Lyric FM is not a lift. It's a classical radio station that we're all paying for, not for some producers to indulge their programme-making appetites, nor for others to indulge their instincts in banal populism.
So what happened? Is there no longer any quality control in the station? And why did Lyric decide to sound like a cross between Belmullet Community Radio and Drivetime Eezee Hour on Bland FM, with the occasional Pavarotti to suggest the IQ level was high? And is it going to stay that way? Because it if it is, I'm going to put a satellite dish on my car and listen to BBC Radio 3 instead.