At-risk classical radio has value, despite flaws
The news that Boston may soon be losing its only full-time commercial classical-music radio station has not put the musical community up in arms as you might expect.
WCRB-FM hasn't been sold yet, and the prospective buyer, Greater Media, Inc., of Braintree, hasn't announced its intentions for the station. It can't actually be sold until April 1, when the FCC process of renewing its license is complete. But after April 1, it seems likely that people who tune in will be listening to WCRB Country Music, 102.5 on your dial.
The prospect has not created the huge clamor you might imagine for a station that reaches a weekly audience of 400,000 listeners. Many music lovers -- this writer included -- don't listen to WCRB at all because its broadcast formula of Classical Music Lite, incessantly interrupted by commercials, doesn't appeal.
It is easy to poke fun at WCRB. Large works are rarely played on the air, except in broadcasts from the Boston Symphony Orchestra; sometimes such works are represented by only a single movement of the whole piece. The music is most often delivered in 10- to 15-minute segments, usually one short work or a series of short works. The emphasis is either on the extremely familiar (''Pie Jesu" from the Faure Requiem, but played on the saxophone) or works in familiar styles by obscure figures from Avison through Wranitzky.
Background information is in short supply, and when it is offered, it comes as happy talk; Schubert is introduced the way an anchorperson welcomes the weatherman or the sportscaster. Each segment of music is framed by several badly acted commercials in a row, and those commercials are often underpinned by jarring pop music, or rock, or worse, as on one recent occasion: a Mozart piano sonata that most listeners would probably rather hear than the commercial that was heedlessly talking over it.
The commercials interfere with the primary mission of the playlist, which seems to be to provide a pleasant, nonthreatening sonic environment for people who want to have relaxing classical music playing in the background while they are doing something else; announcers frequently urge listeners to tune in to WCRB when they are working in the office.
You don't have to go far to find musical people who are bored by WCRB. Periodically the station has also been engulfed by controversy, as it was in 1999, when it dropped the weekly broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera in order to increase revenue.
Defenders of the station argue that it provides an attractive entryway to the world of classical music, like the Boston Pops. But it's unclear whether nonstop baroque concerti grossi would awaken an appetite for Mahler or Schoenberg; it could just create a craving for more of the same.
Even so, WCRB remains valuable to Boston's committed and curious concertgoing public because of its weekly broadcasts of the BSO's Saturday night concerts and its function as an audio bulletin board for the city's performing arts organizations. It has also provided a valuable service in promoting and subsidizing free summer concerts at the Hatch Shell on the Esplanade and during the summer and fall in Copley Square by numerous local groups. Losing WCRB as a resource will be a serious blow to music lovers, whether they listen regularly to the station or not.
No one can say that the station's formula hasn't been successful. There are all those listeners, for one thing, and revenues estimated at $9 million annually. (The station potentially commands a purchase price estimated at somewhere between $90 million and $100 million.)
And the station has important defenders in the musical community, such as Mark Volpe, managing director of the BSO, and conductor Jonathan McPhee of the Boston Ballet, Symphony by the Sea, and the Longwood Symphony.
The loss to the BSO and its public would be incalculable. Saturday night is the orchestra's most prestigious subscription series, and more often than not, Saturday night brings the best performance of a program. If the sale goes through, the BSO will have to shop its Saturday night concerts around. (WBGH-FM broadcasts the Friday matinees, but not the Friday night concerts. If WGBH were the only source for BSO broadcasts, the radio public would never hear six of this season's programs, including such hot tickets as James Levine conducting Beethoven's ''Missa Solemnis" and Schoenberg's ''Gurrelieder," and Bernard Haitink leading Mahler's Sixth Symphony.)
The BSO is a minority shareholder in WCRB and stands to make money from the sale, but Volpe is worried about it. ''Of course we will benefit financially," he says, ''but we are also concerned about the greater good of the whole Boston arts community. The station has been a critical conduit for communication. The station has a broad audience, and we have a broad audience, and it has been a terrific partner for us. They represent a desirable and important format -- after all, it is fourth or fifth in the Boston market -- and this is something we want to see preserved."
Two of McPhee's orchestras are community-based and have appeared in WCRB's Hatch Shell series. McPhee says WCRB does pick up ''a substantial tab" to produce these concerts, as well as the programs of vintage cartoons in Symphony Hall that introduce children to the classical music standards used on the soundtracks. A survey of the Symphony by the Sea audience also reported that WCRB was that public's main source of arts news and schedules.
McPhee observes, ''The more local something is, the more people care about it. Anyone can turn to the other sources for the music WCRB plays, but it's the other part that really matters. Radio is all about communicating with your audience, and radio at its best is the voice of the community it serves. WCRB has been the community voice for the arts."
David Elliott, chairman of the trustees of WHRB-FM, the Harvard radio station that broadcasts far more adventurous classical-music programming says, ''WCRB is the only place where classical music is a presence on the radio dial for 24 hours a day, and that makes an assertion to the community that classical music is important. The potential sale is a significant blow to the stature of classical music in the community; it is a good thing that people can hear the kind of music they enjoy any time they want to."
