The Early Music Show
Radio 3

The Early Music Show's fantastic two-parter on the birth of opera (10-11 April, 1pm) opened with the presenter Catherine Bott explaining that the form began as an intermission entertainment between the acts of Renaissance plays - and then Florentine producers started chucking proper money at it.

“By 1589," clarified Catherine, "the usual spectacle was comparable with, ooh, the big productions staged nowadays by 'pop' groups." I'd never heard Catherine so confident. She was on fire, coming at us with a heap of authoritative innuendo and eye-rolling.

Catherine can make the most articulate thought-bubble of a composer's shortcomings with a pause. With the mere bat's squeak of an inflection, she can imply she'd rather do algebra in sackcloth. So if she says, "Good tunes are all very well - but when it comes to good opera, you need compelling words, too," one senses she is speaking directly to, say, Bellini, as he cracked out the more ridiculous passages of La sonnambula, an opera that, like so many, combines the truly great with the wonky, only to such a bewildering degree that it's like listening to the Cheeky Girls and finding out Derek Walcott wrote the words. Also, Catherine's accent when she does Italian is brilliant, and her occasional translations into English make brazen virtue of her second career as a singer, and those years spent poring over librettos and chucking garlic bread across the table. "Fernando . . . Francesco . . . If you are dead, my life, how can I be breathing?"

Certainly, Catherine is most cherishable when she's on the attack. "I must stress it's my personal view that L'Orfeo is the first great opera. And having performed and recorded it, and having sung in the two Orpheus-themed operas that preceded it, I stand by that view. The . . . other operas of the same name and same libretto of two years later are both very . . . interesting, but neither of them has the sheer emotional power of Monteverdi's work! He went on to give the world the first 'verismo' opera - and again that's just my definition, but . . . I'm getting ahead of myself."

Oh, go right ahead, Catherine, and while you do, I'll just quickly go on to the website to look again at that lovely photo of you, leaning against a staircase, swathed in what looks like a black, silken yurt, a garment very possibly actively designed for protection against those hours spent sitting in draughty halls rehearsing.

Altogether, I'd say that if you want to hear women with 'tude, look no further than 3. Even the newsreaders give it some. "The Turin Shroud," said the withering Lopa Kothari the other day during a bulletin, "believed by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus, goes on display today in Italy. Some two million people are expected to view the artefact." Maybe it's just me, but I'd say her opinion of those poor, soft creatures was fairly evident.
“Now, where were we?" asked Catherine, at the start of part two. "By now, you're thinking, Monteverdi went to Venice, didn't he? But he initially went to work in the world of sacred music! Which is imbued with its own drama, but it's not opera - no matter what some directors like to say!"
Next week, a cagefight with Simon Russell Beale.