Roger Wright can’t say that he wasn’t warned. “Always remember,” his predecessor, Nicholas Kenyon, told him, as he handed over the keys to the last bastion of high-culture broadcasting, “that the great thing about being Controller of Radio 3 is that you can’t win.”

Nine years on, Wright knows that’s true. Radio 3’s ratings usually hover around two million. But last quarter they plunged to 1.79 million, just when every other BBC network increased its audience. As Wright points out, the year-on-year decline is “only” 5 per cent. And Classic FM, his commercial competitor, also took a knock. But the figures have triggered apocalyptic speculation about Radio 3 in the press – even from critics whose editors would be joyous if their circulations reached a quarter of Radio 3’s reach. What’s worse, some of Wright’s own listeners have publicly vented their irritation about the station’s style and content.

Wright is famously affable and buoyant. But surely this criticism has upset him. “I would rather that people didn’t want to throw wet dishcloths at me, as they might put it on the message-boards,” he says. “And yes, it does sometimes seem as if people tune in just to find things they can be enraged about. John Drummond [one of Wright’s predecessors] used to say that Radio 3’s core audience consists of 27 lobby groups, each of whom hated the tastes of the other 26. But you actually want listeners who feel such a sense of ownership. One person wrote to me: ‘I hear there are changes on Radio 3. I don’t know what they are, but I want you to reverse them immediately.’ ”

But don’t the audience figures say something? If Wright were running a commercial station, his head would be on the block. “Of course they are important,” he replies. “We want to share our passions as widely as possible. But in the public sector they are only one measure. Do we know what we could do to raise the figures? Of course.”

Really? What would that be? And why doesn’t he do it? “Because we wouldn’t be Radio 3 any longer. We could go down a simpler musical route. We could operate a computer playlist. We could play CDs instead of broadcasting major events such as The Minotaur at Covent Garden. We could ensure we played nothing people didn’t like. But that’s against the whole ethos of public service broadcasting.

“Besides which, nearly two million listeners is a lot of people, when you consider the range of what we do. We cover 2,000 years of music. We have a huge commitment to new work. Yes, next to Radio 2’s audience, ours seems small. But if you compare it to concert attendances, or circulation figures for newspapers, it’s a huge number.”

Wright is well aware, however, that Radio 3 has an image problem – which is that for most people it has no image at all. “Yes, probably the bulk of the population doesn’t know what Radio 3 is,” he admits. “And if they do know something about it, their perception is probably 20 or 30 years out of date. I hope the station today has a tone that matches the way people listen now.”

But it’s exactly this more relaxed presentation – “endless chitchat”, as its detractors describe it – that triggers criticism. “For every person who finds one presenter too matey,” Wright counters, “there’s another who thinks that he or she lacks personality. I believe that our presenters – whether Iain Burnside or Claire Martin or Rob Cowan – are linked by a quiet authority and a desire to share their passions.”

What of the oft-heard complaint that there’s too much jazz and world music now on a station to which people turn essentially for classical music? Wright claims that this is an illusion. “Perhaps we talk more about our jazz and world music content,” he says, “but it constitutes just 5 per cent of our output.”

Maybe. But when Radio 3’s breakfast show suddenly inserts a jazz track in a classical sequence, people get irked. “Well,” Wright replies, “our breakfast-show audience has actually gone up. And its output remains pretty classical. Yes, you might get the odd track dropped in. Rob Cowan once famously played Stan Kenton’s version of The Valkyries, with bongos. But invariably that’s the track people e-mail about, asking where to get hold of it.”

Isn’t Radio 3’s “Renaissance Man” remit an anomaly in a world where radio stations increasingly offer “niche” outputs? “We do broadcasting rather than narrowcasting,” Wright replies. “We have to take people farther than their niche interests. We have to draw them in, by big-impact projects such as the hugely successful Chopin Experience last weekend, and then show that we do many other interesting things.

“And we have to cater for the diverse interests of existing listeners. Just look at the letters The Times has just run about Radio 3. One praised Choral Evensong; one wanted more jazz; the other wanted to ban operatic voices! How do you respond to those passionate views if you only do one narrow thing?”

But how will Wright find time to respond to any issue, now that he combines running Radio 3 with running the Proms, the world’s biggest music festival? Won’t he find himself taking his eye off the ball? “Not at all. The potential for running the two in tandem is so exciting, especially when I fast-forward to 2009 and the anniversaries of Purcell, Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn. I shall bring the same energy to Radio 3 as I’ve always done.”

We shall see.

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