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This explains the power of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, where the musical intensity increases as the story unfolds. On Radio 3 on Palm Sunday the performance came live from Krakow, adding a particular potency to the experience of listening, knowing what sufferings that city has experienced in the not-so-distant past. The ritual of telling the gospel in words and music is an opportunity not to forget, but with the hope of resolution.
Radio 2 also told the story straight in At the Foot of the Cross ‘hosted’ by Ken Bruce on Good Friday. Music from the Messiah was interwoven with the readings. But on Radio 4 the Good Friday Liturgy gave us instead a personal meditation on grief and bereavement. In itself this can be moving, but the power of the ritual is lost, for, as Lord Sacks reminded us, that impact lies in the simple telling, the almost-exact repetition.
On Radio 4 Extra through Holy Week and Easter there’s been a timely replay of Don Taylor’s 12-part series about the English Civil War, first made in 1988. It’s hard for us now to imagine the bloody religious strife of three centuries ago; ‘that so much holiness should produce so much blood’. But God’s Revolution takes us straight back into the chaos and cruelty of those decades, as Cromwell’s Protestant army routed the cavalier Catholics still loyal to Charles I.
This is classy writing: ‘Your preoccupations with peace are like a tiger’s yawn or a crocodile’s grin — not to be trusted’ caught my ear. The production, too, was wonderfully crisp, with a brilliant cast that includes Bernard Hepton (as Cromwell), Deborah Makepeace, June Barrie and Nigel Anthony, their voices crystal-clear and distinct, their characters clearly defined. Taylor unravels the incredibly complex oppositions, the twisting fortunes of democracy and individual freedom, drawing us in by making sense of the public events through the eyes of two families.
He said he wanted to be ‘meticulously accurate’, to make sense of the detail by revealing what went on day by day, ‘how the balance of power changes between people’. He was given 12 hours of airtime to do it. What luxury. The longest most radio serials extend to now is only half that time. But with 12 hours there’s enough airtime to take the story beyond the mere outline, to dwell on the detail.
Spare a thought for the bees as you make your simnel cake this Easter. All those ground almonds come at a cost, as we discovered in On the Trail of the American Honeybee (Radio 4, Tuesday). It’s a startling, discomfiting story, vividly told; yet another of those wake-up calls to what we’re doing to our environment. Dr Adam Hart took us to southern California to meet the migratory beekeepers who transport bee colonies for thousands of miles each year, following the pollinating season from the almond blossom of southern California to wild blueberries in northern Maine and then back south to Florida via Cape Cod for the cranberries. It’s been going on ever since the railroad made it possible for hives to be moved around easily. But in the 1990s, when almonds suddenly became a hugely profitable cash crop, transporting the colonies became big business with a million and a half hives arriving in California’s central valley for just three or four weeks while the sweet-scented white almond blossom is in bloom.
The almonds flourish but the bees have become susceptible to strange new viruses and the as-yet-unexplained Colony Collapse Disorder — when the bees abandon the hive for no apparent reason. A terrifying existential tale, for if the bees disappear the almonds will wither.
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