The Long View | Spare me Radio 3’s Celebrity Choral Evensong

At the risk of sounding like a crusty old luddite (I’m under 45, promise!) I remember the days when you only knew in advance who was singing Choral Evensong on Radio 3 on a Wednesday afternoon if you’d surreptitiously fingered a Radio Times you couldn’t afford to buy.

These days, you tend to have it rammed down your throat via social media weeks in advance – in much the same way you can stumble across a forensically detailed photo of the set and costumes for an opera you’ve booked to see. Do these spoilers heighten or dampen anticipation? That probably depends how you’re wired.

Anyway, something odd has been happening around Radio 3’s weekly Choral Evensong broadcast over the last few years. It was once the corporation’s longest running outside live broadcast. These days it’s so often pre-recorded that Twitter might well show you an image of a ‘service’ you won’t hear for a month or more. Very often, it doesn’t look like a service at all, with a choir in an empty church in a setup that looks remarkably like a sterile recording session.

Last week I saw a tweet from someone purporting to be ‘really pleased to have nabbed a ticket for BBC Radio 3 Choral Evensong in a couple of weeks.’ Turns out this is a ‘celebrity’ choral evensong (my adjective), presided over by the Reverend Richard Coles – late of Radio 4’s parish but now at a loose end – and conducted by star organist and choir-trainer Anna Lapwood.

As a retired organist who consistently failed to make the instrument communicate, let me state my admiration for Anna Lapwood up front. With her right hand (and left hand, and feet) she hath done marvellous things for the instrument, increasing its reach in a way I would never have thought possible. And what a player she is. She also seems super-humanly energetic and conscientious. Respect! As for the good reverend, I don’t suppose he can be blamed for accepting broadcasting work since being abruptly shewn the door by Radio 4.

Still, something about this whole ticketed Choral Evensong, led by famous names, leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Further investigation reveals it was recorded in June for broadcast in November – that’s right: November! If you sense the fading afternoon light, huddled atmosphere and wintry expectation in the broadcast when you finally hear it, you’ll have been hoodwinked. The prayers and readings will make out everyone in the room is bracing for Christmas. In reality, they were probably thinking about their summer holiday.

You can judge for yourself how the service sounds when it’s finally broadcast. I will too, I promise, but without pre-empting that critical reaction I’ll say right now that, on paper, the whole enterprise flies in the face of what the BBC’s weekly Choral Evensong broadcast should be: authentic, live, communal, local, ordinarily wondrous. There have been plenty of examples broadcast recently that have managed to bypass all of those things while sounding strangely bereft of the spiritual.

I’m all for celebrities in classical music. They are brilliant lubricants to access and understanding. Broadcasting and concerts need them. But Choral Evensong doesn’t. This is an hour in which we should be led away from personality and into community. It serves as a reminder of the extraordinary singing that happens daily in churches up and down the land, while managing to be less about performance and more about focused meditation. It’s at its best when we feel we’re eavesdropping on a particular place, on its longstanding traditions and on the anonymous people who make it what it is – rather than a scratch choir or professional ensemble filling its diary. The Choral Evensong broadcast is at its best when the occasion isn’t special and when the music hasn’t been assembled to make a non-religious point. That’s what concerts are for.

A decade ago, Choral Evensong was apparently among the most re-visited Radio 3 programmes on the iPlayer. It was an oasis of sorts, even for those, like me, of shaky faith or no faith at all. I haven’t missed an episode since the iPlayer was introduced and have only missed half a dozen since 1999. When it’s authentic, it remains unsurpassed, whatever the standard of the music making. When it’s sterile, contrived, cooked-up and belies pretensions towards performance and ostentation, you can sniff it a mile off – even if you missed the announcer telling you where it’s coming from. I usually don’t get past the psalms.