Music Richard Osborne

‘I’m not in a good place right now’

we, the taxpayer, settled the bill, should their renovations not rightly have been the subject of Grand Designs or Escape to the Château? Thirty minutes of makeover TV is enough to justify the licence fee: not only can we poke around in other people’s houses, but we get to laugh at their horrendous taste.

Which is where the producers of Virtually Home (BBC1) have catastrophically missed the point. Rather than stapling leopard-print fabric to their next-door neighbour’s bedroom walls, as they do in Changing Rooms, the participants in this snoozefest ‘avoid unsightly and costly mistakes’ by seeing their new homes designed for them on 3-D screens. In other words, reality TV becomes virtual reality TV.

This week’s home owners are Janet and Darren, who live in Stafford with their nine dogs. The current arrangement of their kitchen diner means that they bump into each other while chopping the veg, and Janet worries that she might accidentally stab Darren in the chest. With a budget of £5,000, they are offered something in either Scandi or Shaker style, images of which swirl around them in the Design Hub.

‘Wow,’ says Janet.

The colours change from grey to blue to white with the flick of a wand, like that scene in Disney’s Cinderella where the fairies squabble over the colour of Cinderella’s wedding dress.

As entertainment, it’s like watching paint dry. Virtually. Macabre been extracted.

His music was generally viewed as passé and second-rate, even among certain respected Francophile critics – though not, interestingly, among musicians who knew at first hand what riches lay buried within the Saint-Saëns treasure hoard. I remember Mstislav Rostropovich, fabled interpreter of the wonderful A minor Cello Concerto, telling me how much Shostakovich admired Saint-Saëns’s two cello concertos, and how they influenced the pair he himself later wrote.

Song, as opposed to opera, was not a medium to which Saint-Saëns gave a great deal of attention. Not that this deterred the endlessly enterprising Oxford Lieder Festival from devoting an entire day to him, in this his centenary year, during its own 21st autumn season.

‘Natural histories’ was one of the pegs, inspired by the fascination French composers have long had with birds, beasts and insects of every kind. A peacock, a cricket, a swan, a kingfisher and a guineafowl feature in Ravel’s gloriously off-the-wall Histoires naturelles with which the young French baritone Victor Sicard ended his morning recital.

His Saint-Saëns group had concluded with the original version for voice and piano of the famous Danse Macabre. Like a number of Saint-Saëns’s most enduring pieces, it was written in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War and the horrors of the Paris Commune that

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE CELEBRATING SAINT-SAËNS OXFORD LIEDER FESTIVAL

You need to be a person of some consequence to be given a state funeral on Christmas Eve, but that is what was granted the 86-year-old Camille Saint-Saëns, elder statesman of French music a century ago, after his death in December 1921.

He had already received a full military funeral in the French provincial city of Algiers where he’d been wintering; protocol demanded as much for a holder of the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour. A state funeral, however, was something else.

Despite his instruction that the obsequies should be brief, they were staged on the grandest scale. The façade of the Madeleine, where he had once been titular organist – the greatest in Europe, said Franz Liszt – was draped in black with silver edgings. The church was packed, the streets impassable. A lifetime’s worth of orders and decorations required the addition of several carriages to an already lengthy cortège.

After which the bottom fell out of the Saint-Saëns market. As late as 1970, his works occupied less than a page in the Gramophone LP catalogue, and his entry would have been shorter still had The Carnival of the Animals and Danse