Classical music desert

SIR – One problem with Ivan Hewett’s recommended escape from Classic FM’S “rag-bag of classical lollipops and film music” (Arts, August 28) is that for most of the year BBC Radio 3 offers no classical music after 10.45pm.

That is when I listen to Classic FM’S Smooth Classics: what this includes is unclear, but it apparently excludes any solo, as opposed to choral, singing. The arias are still to be heard, but in instrumental transcriptions, so we get Michaela’s aria from Carmen on the cello and “Casta diva” from Norma on the piano. But then, Radio 3’s Breakfast programme also hardly ever plays romantic operatic arias; Verdi is its most neglected composer, while we have to endure endless Vivaldi, Telemann and other less distinguished baroque composers.

Smooth Classics does include film music, much of which, like Mr Hewett, I do not rate. But then, Radio 3 also has a weekly programme devoted to film music. This genre must include Korngold, Bernstein, Addinsell and Bernard Hermann, whom I would not wish to be without.

I share Mr Hewett’s dislike of Classic FM presenters’ banalities (“Let’s go to the pub,” as an introduction to Delius’s Walk to the Paradise Garden, leaves something to be desired). But in the evening, Classic FM is better than no deal at all. Andrew Walker

Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire