Beloved little corpse
The new continuity announcer on Radio 4 has a lovely Kinross lilt that makes you think of knitwear and sheep in the glen. No matter what she says - and it can sometimes be quite . . . strange - you want to enter the radio and kiss her until the spectacles fall from her face.
“Apologies for the silence before Woman's Hour," she said the other day. "I lost a minute there. But I'm back now." And then, later, "beer bellies, spare tyres and muffin tops. We're opening the jar on middle-aged spread in a mo."
She even carries off the ridiculous intros to Material World ("Next, we explore the nature of reality itself . . . but first a word from Eddie Mair") and makes bearable the most terrifying words in the English language ("This is BBC Radio 4. And now, the Afternoon Play"). All of which compensates for your reviewer's increasing irritation at the way in which Kirsty Young (whose own voice, btw, I've always felt is somehow very white and green, like a tennis court, or a spring onion sandwich) persists in referring to her castaways' musical choices on Desert Island Discs as "tracks" - as in "Tell me about this next track" or "An unusual choice of track, that", which in turn infects the interviewee who finds himself helplessly saying, “I love that track" and "This next track really encapsulates my will to win" - as though we're all record company executives, too paranoid to stoop to calling something a "song", because the word implies a horrifying naivety.
You wouldn't catch Frédéric Chopin referring to his "Raindrop Prelude" as a track. In fact, you wouldn't find him calling it anything at all - he just gave his compositions numbers and left others to fuss around with nicknames. ("Not for him descriptive titles or scene-painting . . .") A terrific series of The Essay marked the bicentenary of the composer's birth (1 to 5 March, 11pm, Radio 3). It told us that he was fastidiously elegant, obsessed with scent and the wearing of white gloves (the image of Amy in Little Women springs to mind).
Late photographs of Chopin show a man with an ambitiously low side parting and a drooping, feeling nose - a face constructed to be painted in miniature and pinned to a bosom. He was snotty about the many fan letters he was sent by Robert Schumann ("I could die laughing at this German's imagination") and coughed so much that his lover George Sand called him her "beloved little corpse".
We were told that the Études 10 and 25 were his most challenging compositions, "an immense journey" that focused on certain technical difficulties as though deliberately to expose the deficiencies in a player's talent. And yet so comprehensive was Chopin's genius that he even considered the various peculiar qualities of each digit (the little finger has a weight of x, the thumb and index finger are so situated to pluck out little chords, etc).
He brought this knowledge of the physical to bear, just as Billy Wilder, say, always bore in mind the certainty that, shot from one angle, Gloria Swanson looks like a child gathering flowers in Tuscany, and yet, from another, like someone exploiting the blank finality of a blackjack deal. It's there in the flesh, in the bone. Why fight it?
