After the grumblings and talk of (no doubt temporary) desertions to Classic FM that followed Radio 3’s Beethoven and Bach jamborees, the BBC opted to pace itself for the 250th birthday celebrations of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Instead of a week or ten days’ patience-straining saturation coverage, we will have a Mozart Year, with programmes about his life dotted about the schedules of Radios 3, 4 and even 2.
All well and good but, as we approach the actual birthday next Friday, I’m already Mozarted out. No offence to all the organisers of this year’s global celebrations, but just reading the name is enough to send the same snatch of melody tripping through my head. Mozart wrote an awful lot of stuff and things have reached the point where it’s all beginning to sound the same.
As a result, the most attractive programme of the birthday week is Tuesday’s What Mozart Did for Us (Radio 2, 8.30pm), in which Charles Hazlewood provides a modern context for Mozart’s life in the way that Radio 2 music documentaries always do so well. Actually, it isn’t even specifically about Mozart. Instead, we get to hear Roger Waters, occasionally of Pink Floyd, Will Gregory of Goldfrapp and XTC’s Andy Partridge comparing their own experiences to his.
Then there’s the fictional Mozart of Neville Teller’s adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, read by F. Murray Abraham (who won an Oscar in the film version) in tones so sinister they should carry a mental health warning (Friday, Radio 2, 9.15pm).
For the rest, it’s wall-to-wall concerts. Once the birthday’s out of the way, could we have a bit of a rest? Maybe the schedulers should have learnt the lessons to be derived from the identity of two others born on January 27 — Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who gave his name to masochism, and Edwin John Smith, the captain of the Titanic.