Is your tuning the problem here?
Perhaps you need to have the volume higher.
Are you sure that you're tuned to Radio 3 and not to Radio 4?

Sorry.
Got my serious hat on now.

I had been led to believe that it was going to be rather conservative and not my cup of tea, but I actually quite enjoyed it (it's an awful lot less conservative than, for example, Judith Weir's essay in the same medium). It's not avant-garde certainly, but it's a harder-edged Classicism than that which I had been expecting.

I will Listen Again.

Fascinating reaction re Judith Weir, hh. (I actually have real problems with almost all her chamber/small-ensemble-scale instrumental music, since the notes are so tightly woven I can't hear the presumably intended quirky/wittiness, and then it all becomes very earnest and, yes, maybe conservative too, in a funny kind of way. Strange, when the 'reinvention of simplicity' in her orchestral music and operas I often find so eloquent.)

Hugh Wood was on the verge of retiring when I arrived at Cambridge 10 years ago, and gave the 19th-century analysis lectures in my second term. He was only really interested in the German masters - no Berlioz, etc. - and his idea of analysis was to go through each of the Beethoven symphonies movement by movement, breaking down the sonata forms and listing the motives, all of which put him in for a certain amount of ridicule and a pretty intolerant response from a group of first-years who'd already had it made abundantly clear to them in a term of profoundly imaginative C18th lectures that dogged filling out of charts and tables really wouldn't do.

But HW's Germanocentric traditionalism was certainly of the sort that progressed quite happily from Beethoven to Brahms and hence to Schoenberg, and his own music seems to add a strong dash of lyricism from Mozart and sometimes even Messiaen into the mix (plus some jazz in the piano concerto, I believe). I don't know it all that well, but I think it would always hold the interest, and sometimes a bit more than that. I remember hearing a rather good set of variations of some kind for clarinet and piano.

I knew the piano concerto was coming up but had completely missed the fact it was this week. Will have to try and Listen Again, or see if I can dig out the old Collins Classics CD. Hugh was always completely devoted to Joanna MacGregor, by the way, who'd been his student at Cambridge. They're an odd but rather sweet pair. Hugh's bark was always quite fierce, but much, much worse than his bite. He's a softie really, but feels left behind or left out and was not at all good with students en masse by the time I got to know him. But if you approached him after a lecture and asked about his music he'd be thrilled, and stand and talk for hours.

Sorry John ... bad habit of mine!

In my defence, I hardly know the Piano Concerto so wasn't really in a position to enlighten you on that specific piece. I hoped (in good old-fashioned R3 style) that by painting a sympathetic picture of the composer I might at least make you feel you had some point of orientation while Listening Again.

I've a feeling they may be in the finale, though don't know where I've got that idea from.

Well, the Piano Concerto was written specially for Joanna MacG, and is certainly supposed to be more effervescent in tone than a lot of his other work, especially in the last 20 years, which has often been quite elegiac. But I think what you were picking up on in other messages above was more the fact that he has a reputation among 'new music' people for being a bit old-fashioned. True, but more in the 'Schoenberg is old-fashioned' way than in the 'tonality is old-fashioned' kind of way, if you see what I mean. Old-fashioned, too, in the sense of mainly having written in the 'standard genres': concertos, string quartets (5 of them I believe), a symphony ...