A new digital station plays only
music written by women. Stephen Moss finds treasures as well as tedium, but wishes Scala’s classical channel could be bolder
![From Mendelssohn to mush: a day tuned to Scala Radio’s Women Composers](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c928c04f277bc0bc269a7a432162a58a2b6eeb19/0_0_5000_3000/master/5000.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&enable=upscale&s=222a865ece186f79d5b1bbff98244d12)
At 10am last Thursday,
Women Composers came on air and Hit the Dancefloor bit the dust. This new arrival among Scala Radio’s 20-strong family of digital niche stations is devoted entirely to classical music composed by women. Things began, however, not with a great fanfare (what a wonderful commission for a female composer that would have been) but with a bit of technical jiggery-pokery that meant knocking out one of Scala’s existing stations – farewell Hit the Dancefloor, a peculiar mixture of waltzes, ballets and galops (even a clog dance in its final hour) – and replacing it with the new Women Composers icon.
The changeover took a few minutes, and the first piece to be played – the opening movement of Fanny Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in E Flat Major – was sadly not available to this listener, whose computer kept displaying an error message. But the second piece – Hildegard von Bingen’s Spiritus Sanctus Vivificans – was extremely uplifting, and the third, even better: a movement of Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor played by Isata Kanneh-Mason and the Royal
Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.