I'm astounded.

Next week Performance on 3 celebrates Sir Colin Davis's 80th birthday. We all know what that means nowadays: they trot out the same old commercial recordings that everybody has already, so that the only difference between what's on the radio and what you can do for yourself at home is the guff in between.

Well, I don't know what's happened, but that's not what they're doing this time. Live performances from the archives. Yes, really: and a really interesting choice (apart from the Friday which is a repeat of this year's EUYO Prom.) There's Stravinsky, Debussy and Ravel and two Tippett world premieres (Triple Concerto and Rose Lake), a Dresden Symphonie Fantastique, and an LSO Francs-Juges fragments from 1965 and most astonishingly - and Richard will know exactly why this is so important to me - Roberto Gerhard's Fourth Symphony, quite possibly in the very late sixties broadcast from which I came to know and love it myself.

It's not just intelligent but exciting programming: I can't remember the time when I last opened Radio Times and my jaw just dropped.

Now it's not just the weather that makes it feel as if Christmas has come early this year. Were I a cat, I'd be purring.

Well, if you had an infinite number of monkeys equipped with an infinite number of typewriters...

 

Perhaps the Cat's been at play planning his Proms Debut Triumph... and the mice have been allowed to play meantime?

And for programme one, promise amply delivered: the Stravinsky and Gerhard (both in stereo) sounding very good indeed for December 1968: a tad short of air around the instruments in the Petrushka, but wonderfully balanced and excellent examples of the younger Davis's taut sprung rhythm; the Gerhard (indeed the very performance that I taped all those years ago) similarly imbued with a crispness of attack and a sense of metre: very creditable for the first UK performance of a pretty complex work. Having only ever heard that performance in mono up to now I was not unsurprisingly aware of more detail than before. A great treat.

The Berlioz Francs-Juges fragments are in mono (from 1965) but still sound wonderful. In some ways it's very comforting to that R3 can still do this: in other ways it makes it even more deeply frustrating that it happens so rarely. introductions (Tom Service) spot on, too.