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What were you doing on Sept. 2? I was tuning into Julie Nesrallah's brand new classical-music show Tempo on CBC Radio 2, hearing her introduce a Luciano Pavarotti performance of Nessun dorma as if it were a special treat, and wondering briefly whether this was my cue to go back to bed and pull the covers tight around my ears.

I've been dropping in and out of Radio 2's three new weekday offerings ever since. (The other two are Radio 2 Morning with Tom Allen and Radio 2 Drive with Rich Terfry.) Some of what I've heard deserves hand-clapping, but I think two of the shows need some serious rethinking.

Radio 2 Morning offers pop, soul, jazz, world music and much else. With The Signal, the evening new-music program launched last year, the morning show is the most complete expression of Radio 2's bold departure from the narrow formatting that governs most music radio. The novelty of the mix is buffered somewhat by the presence of Allen, who has spent 10 years gathering a faithful morning audience as the host of Music & Company (radio newcomer Molly Johnson, the Toronto singer, takes the show on the weekend).

As predicted, hearing the show is a bit like going on a shuffle tour of a gigantic iPod. I've heard some great things, including a few that made me reach for a pen to jot down a name or a song title. But there's something incoherent about this particular exercise in eclectic listening. Even a very diverse iPod will testify to some individual taste. The playlists on Radio 2 Morning often sound as if they've been put together simply to include all the kinds of listeners that the CBC wants to attract.

My other problem with this show's music is that there's a lot of contrast but not much flow. I'm up for hearing boogie-woogie and Malian kora music in the same hour, but maybe not in blunt succession. A bit more thought about how to get from A to B would be good.

Allen usually sounds fairly comfortable with his new playlist, and has sometimes surprised me with his comments about the details of an R&B arrangement. He still has room for the thoughtful digressions that made him a star of Radio 2's long experiment in personality radio; a thought bubble last Wednesday about the hidden relationship between newfangled building techniques and the current financial crisis was a classic of its type. But I can't be the only one who finds it weird that the guy we've known for a decade as an enthusiast of classical music is now forbidden to play any. Like, not even a little bit every hour or so.

Nesrallah's five-hour daily offering of what she calls "gorgeous music" pretty much defines what I call classical music defanged. In this aesthetic universe, a symphony by William Boyce is on the same level as a partita by J. S. Bach, in spite of the extreme difference in artistic quality; and modernism is mostly off-limits. I was startled the other day to hear even Henry Cowell, the most experimental of all American composers, being drafted into this mission of gorgeousness, via one of the benign-sounding pieces he wrote under the title Hymn and Fuguing Tune.

It was also a shock to discover that Radio 2's flagship classical show has almost no time for Canadian classical music — sometimes one or two short pieces per show, sometimes nothing at all. In this context, the CBC's unhosted new Web channel for Canadian composition (one of four launched this fall) looks more like an exile than an opportunity.

I like Nesrallah's energy, and the frequent hints that behind that plummy voice (she's an operatic mezzo-soprano) is an earthy woman who can be goofy when the time is right. What I don't get is how she connects to her playlist, as a musician. Her comments are almost always some kind of anecdotal tidbit about the composer, or about how listening to Bach is one of the ways "I take care of myself." I would think that one of the reasons for hiring a skilled musician to take care of a show like this would be to get some intelligent inside dope on the music, from a performer's point of view.

Terfry's drive-home show is the only one of these three in which I hear a clear programming concept (the song in all its forms), a varied playlist that flows well, and a host who seems thoroughly suited to his place in the broadcast universe. Terfry (who records as Buck 65) had some rough patches early on, but he has ironed out his delivery in a way that hasn't dispelled his backwoods charm. This son of Mount Uniacke, N.S., sounds right at home with the rootsiest stuff on his agenda, and makes a good foil for hipster bands such as Destroyer and Vampire Weekend. He was all over the Polaris Prize short list before the winner was announced on Monday, which made that day's show timely without disturbing its focus. There's a lot of good Canadian music on this program that was in radio wilderness before Sept. 2, and Terfry presents it in an engaging, unaffected way.

One out of three isn't a great success rate (the next BBM ratings, a more statistical index of success, are still weeks away), but all radio is a work in progress. I hope Radio 2 keeps thinking about what it's putting on the air, and doesn't lapse into the steady-as-she-goes mentality that stifled this service during the past decade.