April 1 Stainer

Radio 3 used to be worth listening to when it was the Third Programme, and later the Music Programme, but with Classic Eff 'Em snapping at its heels it had to go downmarket, which is why its schedules are now mainly full of trailers for forthcoming goodies uttered breathlessly by females with exaggerated vocal inflections, in the style of those deliciously OTT Eurotrash voice-overs from Maria McErlane, Davina McCall and Kate Robbins,  or tweets from the sort of twits who tweet and telephone conversations with astoundingly uninteresting people with adenoids living in Essex who are only too happy to relate their experiences in their infant school choir in 1927.

I've very nearly given up on Radio 3, though last week was very educational. It confirmed what I had always suspected - Schubert wrote far more music than it's decent to, and it shows.  A handful of songs which aren't all that bad, but more than 500 which mostly are; chamber music that's more chamber-pot than chamber music, a few masses that sound like Dvorak on syrup and the symphonies, not very well scored. He couldn't even be bothered to finish the last one. The only half-decent stuff he wrote was fugues, in which he is very nearly as accomplished as Max Reger, whose spiritual father also was JSB.

But yesterday, Palm Sunday, R3 put the clock back and pulled material from the European Broadcasting Union, and wow! They are doing wonderful things across the Channel, as well as in Japan, but you wouldn't know it if you listened to R3 regularly.

But the masterstroke, after a day of utterly breathtaking baroque and Bach, was the April Fool spoof - a performance of Stainer's Crucifixion in the Victorian style that had to be heard to be believed. The tenor had picked up the tremolo-on-one-note that Michael Ball relinquished for Sweeney Todd, and the baritone did a La Scala. I think they'd chucked rugs over the organ pipes, because they just sort of rumbled away below the threshold of hearing, and the chorus!  They must have spent weeks boning up on Victorian elocutionary practices, because I've never heard the word 'royal' sung with such a rich variety of mutating 'phthongs. Absolutely brilliant. We had to turn it off after twenty minutes, tears of mirth streaming down our faces, but it's there on iPlayer for a few days if you missed it.

You have to hand it to the Beeb - when they do do 1 April, they pull out all the stops.