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
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.