Requiem for Radio 2

Radio 2's long goodbye lasted all day yesterday. To be precise it lasted until 6pm. Everyone I know turns off that excruciating Katie Malloch and her insulting habit of telling me how I feel and what I'm doing: "You're driving home from work and you feel the need for...etc banal, mundane etc". At this point I have long since told the tedious creature to "STFU" and from 6pm onwards the radio was switched off. But Tom Allen felt like a friend and to listen to him mouthing the party line as he wound down "Music and Company" was sad and wrenching. No, many, many of us won't be coming with you Tom, not to listen to music that I can hear in the shopping mall or the supermarket. Tom, the former trombonist, taught me a lot of what I now know about classical music. Thanks to him, I can take that knowledge off to the internet and listen to BBC Radio 3. But it's not the same.

In his movie, "Radio Days" Woody Allen evoked the magic of a population linked by sound, by the voices coming out of the box in the corner. Of course those days are long gone but CBC's Radio 2 managed to continue the tradition. True it united people who love Beethoven, Bach, Brahms etc but what fascinated me when I first arrived in Canada seven years ago and discovered the then wonderful station, was just who these people were. The farmer on a Sasketchewan prairie who requested the Goldberg Variations,
the sculptor in a studio on a lake in Ontario who called, as so many of these cold country Canadians did for Sibelius, and the truck driver on the Trans-Canada who needed some roaring Beethoven to fill him with the energy to cross that vast, dark, transcontinental night.

Ah, but the apologists for the dog's breakfast that will be the new Radio 2, insist that they will provide the same service. Right - by giving us a mish-mash of music that can be found on commercial stations everywhere. Anyone who has ever been on a cruise knows that smorgasbords get very boring very fast. The sight of taramasalata, bean salad, smoked turkey, lasagne, chicken tandoori and ribs may look alluring on the buffet but once you've got that heaving mass on your plate it becomes strangely unappetizing.

And, throughout this whole miserable episode, nobody, with the noble exception of Russell Smith at The Globe and Mail, has dared to say that what we call Classical Music , for want of a better word, is superior to a lot of contemporary music. Something happened in the late 18th and 19th centuries that carried this art form to a summit. I'm not saying that there is only one mountain out there and another summit may well be reached at another time. But the vast mass of pop, rock etc has not got half way up the nursery slopes.

Yesterday, during one of the sad farewells ( was it Eric Friessen on Studio Sparks?) somebody played the Schubert String Quintet in C Major. I first heard this on BBC's Desert Island Discs when novelist Stan Barstow described it as music he would like to die to. It contains within it, a sense of the infinite and the eternal. And, unlike the four beat in a bar commercial pap that I am now being told I must love, never, EVER becomes an earworm - one of those infuriatingly banal tunes that get inside your head and make you want to rip it open and tear the thing out.

So CBC Radio 2 played the great Schubert piece and died before our very eyes. Goodbye Tom, goodbye Shelley (for we all know that Here's to You really died last year when the great Ms Solmes took her leave) goodbye to Jurgen and goodbye to the often too pious and smarmy Eric Friessen. (But Eric, you redeemed yourself in spades this week - the Brahms, William Styron reading was heartwrenchingly beautiful.)

Yesterday felt like a day-long requiem. I know I am not the only one who feels bereaved on this late-summer Saturday morning. Something noble and beautiful that linked this vast land is gone forever and the land is duller and darker without it.

The Slow, Painful Death of CBC Radio 2

When Shelley Solmes bid a muted farewell to her listeners on CBC's Here's to You back last autumn, I had a sense that the Radio 2 that I have come to love during my time in Canada was entering into terminal decline. Shelley represented all that was warm, funny and knowledgeable about this station. Along with Tom Allen and Rick Philips, she helped to complete this British visitor's classical music education. I knew my opera inside and out but classical music is another world entirely and in Britain had, for too long, been dominated by the gooey saccharin of Classic FM or Radio 3 which was showing that pretentious tendency of favouring Early Music or fast-forwarding to Stockhausen with a shudder of contempt for all the gorgeous stuff in between.

But my beloved Canadians took me travelling through a world of classical music as vast and varied as their own country. I did notice that they often featured 'cold-country' composers. I learned to love Sibelius, Mahler, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovitch in Canada - men, not surprisingly, from lands of mountains, forest and snow.

I also learned that Canada for all the immense space that its land mass takes up, is a small, cosy country where a grocer in Mahone Bay could share an opinion on a Bruckner symphony with the whole country through the simple act of sending an email to Shelley on "Here's to You."

When Tom Allen gave a charming, poignant account of Brahms' journey to Clara Schumann's funeral, I was so intrigued that I wrote to his show "Music and Company" for more information. Tom Allen took it upon himself to reply. Coming as I do from tiny, teeming far-less-friendly England, I was astonished at such personal service.

And now somebody called Jennifer McGuire has decided to turn this unique institution into a shopping mall. How can this be? How can you let this happen Canada? You have a national treasure here and you're letting them exchange it for some cheap bling from the dollar store.

I have a suggestion: Get some of the big guns of Canadian music to speak up. When the Royal Opera House management in London was making a monumental cock-up of keeping the place open during its renovation, Sir Colin Davis rallied pretty much all the world's great conductors in a letter and petition to The Times. That got their attention. Call on Zuckerman, Kent Nagano, Ben Heppner, Andrew Davis, Marjan Mosetich, Bramwell Tovey, Richard Margison, Gerald Finley (the man is getting rave reviews right now in London)Isobel Bayrakdarian - get them to get their American and European colleagues to speak up too. Canada is one of the few countries that still has a national radio network devoted to classical music.(And I agree with Russell Smith in the Globe and Mail that the term 'classical' is troublesome but time is short and this IS a blog.)Other nations envy you. Don't throw it away