Nicholas Snowman

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My Castaway this week is a man of the arts. A determined apostle of all things new, he founded the University Opera Society when he was at Cambridge, and the London Sinfonietta when he left.

Presenter0:40

In Paris, where he went next, he became a close friend of the conductor and composer Pierre Boulez, and was appointed artistic director of the Pompidou Centre.

Presenter0:49

His latest post has brought him back to these shores, where his advocacy of the avant-garde has recently run him into controversy. His concert programmes this season have been described as seriously unattractive by some. He has, however, succeeded where others have failed, and has established a resident orchestra in Britain's largest arts centre. He is the general director of the South Bank, Nicholas Snowman. Patently, Nicholas, music is your life. Has it always been the case since you were very small?

Nicholas Snowman1:18

I've always been very, very fascinated by music. My parents don't play instruments, but I was always encouraged to go to concerts and exhibitions, and music was very much part of our life.

Presenter1:28

So you were really very young when you went to your first opera, way?

Nicholas Snowman1:31

I was twelve, I think. It was in a little cinema in a tiny town in Italy.

Nicholas Snowman1:35

Where as with my mother and my grandmother, who I think were were there for for

Nicholas Snowman1:40

mud baths or some some such treatment, and a place called Arbano, and I saw a performance of La Boheme.

Nicholas Snowman1:47

And I found it uh very upsetting actually, Labo M, as I think it always is when one sees the end of Mimi and the

Nicholas Snowman1:53

The tears at the end.

Presenter1:54

Hmm.

Nicholas Snowman1:54

And I remember that very vividly.

Presenter1:56

But you were brought up in London you went to school in London it meant you had access to to great musical events, I presume.

Nicholas Snowman2:02

Yes, I'm very, very fortunate in that uh not only coming from a I suppose what you call a culture at home, but also being near the South Bank, the opera houses, and being a day boy at school, meant that I could um dream, during boring lessons at school, of the concert that was to come that evening.

Presenter2:20

So you sat in the Royal Festival Hall as a boy.

Nicholas Snowman2:22

Yes, yes.

Presenter2:23

little dreaming that you would ever be in charge of it.

Nicholas Snowman2:26

I never thought that I'd be um working there, indeed.

Presenter2:29

But did you intend that you might do something in the world of music?

Nicholas Snowman2:34

Well, I would have liked to have been at University Don, and I had this illusion, I think, for about ten minutes after I got to Cambridge, and I found that really I wasn't up to that, which is I think a a permanent regret, because I I love the idea of a university.

Presenter2:48

Did you play any instruments as a boy?

Nicholas Snowman2:50

I played the violin and the oboe both extremely badly in school orchestras and little ensembles and um yes, I I played them, and I sang in various choirs.

Presenter2:59

And now you have a son of your own, don't you?

Nicholas Snowman3:01

Hector, yes, is four and a half, and he had his first uh cello lesson yesterday.

Presenter3:05

Good heavens C can he prop it up?

Nicholas Snowman3:07

He can prop it up, although he's disappointed he wasn't asked to use the bow on this first occasion.

Presenter3:13

And his name is Hector, or Hector,'cause your wife is French, isn't it?

Nicholas Snowman3:16

Yes, I call him Hector, and my wife calls him Hector.

Presenter3:19

But there's a reason for that name, isn't there?

Nicholas Snowman3:21

There is indeed. Yes. Um I've always had a great love for Balio's, and I remember my father playing me a record of the Royal Hunt and Storm conducted by Hamilton Harty an old, old record, the day we all went off to see the Trojans, the first professional performance of the Trojans in Britain, can you imagine, at Covent Garden.

Presenter3:38

And that's a record that you must take with you to your island.

Nicholas Snowman3:40

I absolutely must have that, especially as the recording is with Josephine Veazey, who is a marvellous person as well as being a marvellous singer, and John Vickers, that great tenor, that individual tenor, in in an age when so so many are one is like another, and conducted by Colin Davis, who's done so much for Belios.

Speaker 34:05

Let it starter.

Speaker 34:12

Uh

Speaker 34:38

I see. And sight you

Presenter4:53

John Vickers and Josephine Veazi singing the love duet from Act Four of the Trojans by Berlioz, with the orchestra of the Royal Opera House conducted by Sir Colin Davis.

Presenter5:02

So you went up to Cambridge, as you were saying, Nicholas, to read what?

Nicholas Snowman5:06

Uh to read English literature.

Presenter5:07

Not music.

Nicholas Snowman5:07

No, no, no.

Presenter5:08

Why not?

Nicholas Snowman5:09

First of all, I wouldn't have been qualified to read music, not having studied it in in a serious manner up to that time. I've always considered myself to be a music lover, not a professional of the music business in in the sense of analysis and playing instruments at a professional level. And I've always been very interested in literature, and that seemed the the obvious thing to do.

Presenter5:29

But why was it left to you to establish the Cambridge University Opera Society? I mean, this was what in the early sixties one one would have imagined there would have been one already.

Nicholas Snowman5:37

There had been a a very distinguished Cambridge Opera Society earlier on, but there wasn't one at the time I went, and um I thought it'd be good to get one started again.

Presenter5:45

And is it still flourishing? Still going, yes, obviously.

Nicholas Snowman5:46

It's still going, yes, I basically have to say.

Presenter5:49

You also edited the student newspaper, didn't you?

Nicholas Snowman5:51

Yes, well, uh with John Simpson, with whom I shared rooms.

Presenter5:55

Who's now the BBC's diplomatic editor?

Nicholas Snowman5:57

Indeed. And and really my best friend from those those days. We see a lot of each other. He was appointed the editor of Granter, and was kind enough to ask me to help, and so I assisted him and edited one or two issues as well.

Presenter6:09

So it was a very happy time, your time it came. It was wonderful.

Nicholas Snowman6:11

It was wonderful. It really was wonderful. After I got over the shock of realizing that I wasn't going to get a triple first and, um, I don't know, write the next great book on on Shakespeare or something.

Presenter6:20

But so happy was it you wanted to stay, as you were saying.

Nicholas Snowman6:23

I would have loved to have stayed, yes. Although as the Opera Society started and I got more and more excited and excitable about putting things on and making things happen, I think possibly I discovered that I was built for doing other things.

Presenter6:35

Shall we have your next record?

Nicholas Snowman6:37

I would like to listen to um a record I used to enjoy at Cambridge. John and I used to laugh a lot over this in fact the Peter Sellers record of The Critics.

Speaker 16:47

One can now detect in Bonstadt's present work a certain uh how should I say a certain architectural, yes, architectural, as well as lyrical quality of suspensive secrecy with regard to the brushwork. Sense of uh fossilized motion all seems almost literally

Speaker 17:04

To sping at one from some of the paintings. That's all I have to say.

Presenter7:10

Peter Sellers and Irene Handel and the critics. I can't really believe you want to take that to a desert island.

Nicholas Snowman7:15

No, I really do, because it'll remind me of my permanent schizophrenia of being English and French, of being um irritated very often by the difficulty of getting across.

Nicholas Snowman7:27

Well, the simple idea that music goes on, that that the arts are not things of the past, and that life is not just one big museum, and longing for some of that French curiosity which I came across in Paris. On the other hand, the minute I get to Paris and I don't even go to a dinner party or a discussion in Paris, which could fill

Nicholas Snowman7:45

Volumes of Seud's Corner. And I think the Peter Sellers thing is a healthy reminder, as well as being a very funny reminder, of.

Presenter7:50

Hmm.

Nicholas Snowman7:52

The danger of being a bit too pretentious.

Presenter7:55

But you take it in preference to what Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, all of whom are are missing from your aid, I think.

Nicholas Snowman8:00

Look, I'm very much aware, and I I was horrified to find the three B's Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms are missing as well indeed as early music, Purcell, Handel, Talis. It's it's it's simply terrible, isn't it?

Presenter8:12

So all you're saying is it's an impossible task to choose eight records?

Nicholas Snowman8:15

I think it is, and uh but it's a very pleasurable one.

Presenter8:19

But there's also some contemporary music there. When did your fondness for contemporary music begin?

Nicholas Snowman8:24

I remember very well at Cambridge feeling an enormous sadness at the idea that music somehow doesn't exist any more. This can't be possible.

Nicholas Snowman8:32

And

Nicholas Snowman8:33

It can't be possible because there's painting, there's literature, there's everything else, there's cinema, everything else goes on. Surely music can't just be a wonderful museum with no extra gallery, no extra room, no continuity. And at Cambridge I was very conscious of the the need that traditions change and I was immensely impressed by the new music which was coming out of the continent as well as in Britain. Stockhous and Boulas.

Speaker 38:56

Yeah.

Presenter8:56

Co in particular.

Speaker 38:57

Uh

Nicholas Snowman9:00

No, no. But also the works of composers then very young, like Maxwell Davis, Bertwistle, and Alexander Goh.

Nicholas Snowman9:08

And just, as I say, this feeling that life goes on and that the refusal to face an intolerable idea that music is archaeology, that it's finished with Richard Strauss, wonderful though that is.

Presenter9:21

So that was how the founding of the London Sinfonietta came about. Was it a a an orchestra specially set up to play this contemporary music?

Nicholas Snowman9:28

Yes, yes. David Atherton.

Nicholas Snowman9:31

had been the conductor of two or three of the operas we put on at Cambridge, and round David Atherton was built up a little group of players, many of whom had been in the National Youth Orchestra and had gone to Cambridge. And David and I both felt at the end, well, what do we do next? Because it's a great pity to d disband this this loyal troop. And so we started the orchestra, the London Symphonietta, realizing there was a need in London, if not in the country, to have a specialised group to play contemporary works.

Presenter9:58

Shall we have your third record there, then?

Nicholas Snowman10:01

What I think would be very nice would be to have a record of the very first commission the Sinfonietta ever passed, which was to Harry Birtwhistle for a piece called Verses for Ensembles, which has since been played by all sorts of orchestras all round the world with all sorts of conductors. It's a very exciting piece because I think you've got the really raw energy of Bertwhistle. And I find Birtwhistle a very, very great composer, because he has known how to be himself, very British, very northern British, and at the same time he's a man open to all the fashionable or less fashionable currents and knows where he's at and always has done.

Presenter11:31

Part of Sir Harrison Birtwhistle's Verses for Ensembles, played by the London Sinfonietta, conducted by David Atherton. It it does rather take you by surprise, Nicholas. I mean, it it's quite repetitive.

Nicholas Snowman11:43

It takes I think music and art should take us by surprise, and uh that's what's so exciting about it, I think. Yes, it does take us by surprise. So does Mozart, so do many things.

Presenter11:53

All right, we'll talk more about contemporary music later. But let let's go with you now to Paris, which is what you did in nineteen seventy two. You were invited to become the artistic director at the Pompidou Centre, which which hadn't been built even at the time, I think.

Nicholas Snowman12:05

No, it was that's right. It was Pierre Boulez who um I'd got to know because he took the Sinfonieta he asked for the London Sinfonietta for their first big European tour. And uh I suddenly had a call saying I had to have lunch with Pierre Boulez and he said, Look, President Pompitou has asked me to

Nicholas Snowman12:21

Set up a musical institute as part of this new crazy idea, the Pompidou Centre, which was to bring the different art forms together, contemporary art with the Museum of Modern Art being moved especially into a new building, a new open library, which was revolutionary in France at the time, a design centre and other facilities, and music. So I was asked by Boulez to go over to France and be the artistic director of the musical part. Boulez at the time was music director of the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestra here, and therefore I was his representative really at all these meetings with government officials and architects and engineers, etc., to try and see what kind of institute the future users of that institute would actually want. So it was plunging into a different universe of architects, of engineers. It was quite extraordinary. Money at that time was particularly plentiful in France, as it still is for culture. And Pompidou had this extraordinary vision that the arts shouldn't be in separate boxes, but should be brought together. And that he had the genius to have a building not way out somewhere, but right in the centre of town, which of course horrified lots of people. It was a wasteland at the time, near the Marais. He built this very modern building in the middle of Paris, literally.

Nicholas Snowman13:37

Everybody was terribly against it. Political parties, everybody. It was pushed through by Pumpy Doo really. And and of course when when everybody realized that there were about twenty five thousand people trooping through there every day double, I think, the number of people who go to the Eiffel Tower

Nicholas Snowman13:53

Everybody changed their mind, particularly the left wing press, and found it was the People's Palace and approval was immediately arrived at. And uh there we are.

Presenter14:02

And there was no resentment at all at your being an Englishman.

Nicholas Snowman14:05

None whatsoever. But there was no resentment at all, I think, either, at the fact that a Swede, Pontus Hulten, was brought in to run the Museum of the National Museum of Modern Art.

Presenter14:13

But can you imagine the British extending that that same generosity of spirit to a Frenchman?

Nicholas Snowman14:20

I would like to say yes. I would like to think yes. And indeed that there appears to be no resentment at

Nicholas Snowman14:26

Very distinguished foreign conductors taking on orchestras in Liverpool, London and elsewhere. So I don't believe we're any more chauvinistic than anybody else. Where I think the French are very, very clever, though, is that they bring in and have always brought in foreigners from Louis Catour's or even earlier onwards, whether we're talking about Leonardo da Vinci or Lieberman at the Opera House or whatever, they have always brought in foreigners when they need them.

Nicholas Snowman14:50

For the greater glory of France.

Presenter14:52

Shall we have your next piece of music?

Nicholas Snowman14:54

The next piece of music is the aria.

Nicholas Snowman14:57

Soi immobile from William Tell. I found it very moving. It's the moment where William Tell is about to shoot the apple off his son's head and I went to the opera at the Royal Opera House with Margot recently. We went there and we we slightly uh supercilious grin as the the rather silly French text began and the opera started and it all seemed a bit

Nicholas Snowman15:21

kind of folklore in a in a in a rather silly way. And the smiles were soon off our faces as we realised this is really one of the very great works. And I think that the idea of Rossigne as just being um a kind of light amuser is to be rethought when you when you hear this extraordinary piece and I I defy anybody to sit through it without tears coming to their eyes.

Nicholas Snowman15:51

Uh

Speaker 315:55

I think

Presenter15:56

Uh

Presenter16:06

Maurice Renault singing the Aria Suzimobile from Rossini's William Tell. Terry old recording, that, because

Nicholas Snowman16:12

Very old recording, must have been recorded in the 20s I think, probably. But I think it's a very, very beautiful version. The line is so clear and the emotion is there without being vulgar in any way. And I think that makes it all the more moving and all the more wonderful. And Aria, I think, all about normality, the normality of patriotic feelings of a country which was being oppressed, the natural feelings of a father to his family. And I think it's a extraordinary thing.

Presenter16:41

And the last opera Rossini ever wrote.

Nicholas Snowman16:43

It was his thirty eighth opera. He was thirty seven years old. It was a commission, of course, from the Paris Opera. And I think he spent the rest of his life in Paris, basically. He invented the Tornado Rossini, which I also like very much. And uh wrote a few pieces at the end of his life, but never any more operas. And I think he knew exactly what he was doing. And he knew he that was it.

Presenter17:02

Well, now, you spent, what, thirteen years in Paris and then you got the call from the South Bank in nineteen eighty six. Uh, presumably, you know, they wanted you because of your experience of running the musical side of this Centre for the Arts. Did you jump at the chance to come to the South Bank?

Nicholas Snowman17:06

Yeah.

Nicholas Snowman17:17

Well, when I realised the job which was being advertised actually involved a new approach on the South Bank, that rather than running the concert halls as what I call garages, places where orchestras park, do their thing and then move off which is a perfectly reasonable way of doing things, but not a very exciting way, I think. When I realised what was wanted was an active artistic policy of the kind I'd learnt

Nicholas Snowman17:39

To see working at the at the Pompidou Center. I was very excited.

Presenter17:43

But, Nicholas, do you feel that you have in any way in your in your four years there have got anywhere along the line towards recreating that that palace of the people that you experienced at the Pompeidoux? Do you feel that the South Bank is anything like that at all, has any of that atmosphere?

Nicholas Snowman17:57

Look, with the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Purcell Room, I remember when I arrived I I couldn't help noticing the audience figures were simply appalling.

Nicholas Snowman18:04

And now we've changed the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Nicholas Snowman18:07

Imperfect though it is.

Nicholas Snowman18:09

The acoustic's excellent, but the actual feel of the place is a bit cold, frankly. We know that. We have changed the place. We brought in a stage, we brought forward the artists, so you don't have the feeling you're watching people perform through the wrong end of a telescope, which is how I lived that place from, after all, 68 onwards, with the London Symphoniator and other orchestras. We've made the place able to bring in stage work, dance, music theatre, performance art, as well as looking very carefully at the quality of the music making in that hall. The result is, of course, we've just had our best year ever. The Queen Elizabeth Hall has never had such a good year in terms of public, because we've applied the formula of quality and variety to it. And the Purcell Room has had its fourth best year since it was built. So those are achievements which I think reflect the Parisian experience. Bring in all sorts of different things for different audiences and don't just satisfy one audience.

Presenter19:03

Let's pause there for record number five.

Nicholas Snowman19:05

Yes, I would like very much to take with me.

Nicholas Snowman19:07

on this desert island um a memento of

Nicholas Snowman19:11

the very long partnership I've been able to enjoy with Pierre Boulaz.

Nicholas Snowman19:15

And I thought I would bring his second sonata, played by Maurizio Pollini. It was a piece written by an angry young man of twenty three.

Nicholas Snowman19:23

Who was out to change the world?

Nicholas Snowman19:26

And at the same time

Nicholas Snowman19:27

Writing a piano sonata

Nicholas Snowman19:29

with such lyrical moments in it as well as such energy and aggressivity, I think links the piece very closely to the great piano music of the past. It's absolutely new, and at the same time it absolutely follows in the tradition of piano writing.

Presenter20:29

part of the third movement of Pierre Boulet's second sonata for piano played by Maurizio Pollini.

Presenter20:36

So, Nicholas Snowman, let's address this question of your latest season being and I think it was the music critic Gillian Whitticomb who called it seriously unattractive. It certainly hasn't been drawing the crowds, has it?

Nicholas Snowman20:47

The very first concert, the Stockhausen Hymnen, was a disappointing attendance. The Boulevard's concert after that did rather better than we had thought,'cause this was during the end of the Proms period after all. And then we had Simon Rattle with the Birmingham Orchestra and got terrific houses. So we're ahead on

Nicholas Snowman21:02

Numbers of public coming in. And I think had the arts correspondents rather than the reviewers and the more serious music critics encouraged people to come and decide for themselves that this music was out of date to quote or uninteresting or horrible or unemotional or whatever, that I think would have been a more responsible attitude to have taken. But I think simply just to have a go at the fact that contemporary music is a mina minority interest and therefore a waste of time is not only Philistine but irresponsible.

Presenter21:34

But the main argument is, isn't it about about money, really, that the Arts Council gives you, what, a million pounds a year? Haven't you haven't you a duty, a responsibility, therefore, when spending that public money, to put on music that a lot of potential concert goers want to go to?

Nicholas Snowman21:49

Look, absolutely. I believe that the South Bank, the concert halls and the galleries and the literature events have to have a very careful mix of the familiar, the favourites, the popular, the classical, the non-classical. And I was referring to the Queen Elizabeth Hall earlier, quality and variety having succeeded in increasing the public beyond any public that's been there before. In the festival hall, which is, I think, what we're talking about, we have to do the same thing.

Presenter22:16

Yes, but in taking as as your main theme for your newest newest series of concepts, these these brave new worlds, these modern composers from what, nineteen

Nicholas Snowman22:25

Fifties, sixties, seventies.

Presenter22:26

Yes. I mean, uh you can of course be accused of of being

Presenter22:31

attempting to be a kind of musical dictator, or to run a musical dictatorship, can't you? Telling people they must come, as you were saying earlier, and enter this new room of music. Perhaps they genuinely simply don't like it and don't want to.

Nicholas Snowman22:43

Well after the first two concerts we actually invited the public to come and talk to us in the foyer at the Festival Hall and express their views and many members of the public have been coming up to my colleagues and myself and saying we want this music, we need to hear more of it. If the proportions were wrong not only would there be financial disaster but there would be artistic disaster.

Presenter23:04

So you would still put on Stockhausen with five hundred bums on seats in a hall that can hold three thousand and say that this was the right thing to do with public money?

Nicholas Snowman23:13

I would hope that next time when Stockhausen comes back, there'll be more people coming to the concert. It would help, obviously, if...

Nicholas Snowman23:21

The arts correspondents made the point that Stockhausen is worth coming to hear, whether one likes the actual end result or not. And if I may point out, we have recently announced our figures for the year, which show a surplus of getting on for half a million pounds this year, which means that we have reduced our deficit by about thirty per cent already, and will have completely eliminated our deficit by first of april ninety two. So I believe we're running our organisation with all the adventures which the Arts Council rightly

Nicholas Snowman23:52

believes we should um carry out.

Nicholas Snowman23:55

With all that adventurous policy, we are nevertheless running the place in a serious manner financially as well as artistically.

Presenter24:02

Record number six.

Nicholas Snowman24:04

I'd very much like on the Desert Island a memento of one of the great success stories of the South Bank in recent months. That was the Indonesian Festival. It was very much the initiative of our education department, who have this gamelan in the festival hall, which everybody's entitled to play, and which has become a bit of Indonesia within the concrete jungle of the South Bank. It's also the memento of a country where culture is a way of life rather than for the happy few.

Nicholas Snowman24:34

And it's a marvellous music which Debussy and other musicians onwards have found a great inspiration.

Presenter25:27

Gamelan music from Indonesia. What does a gamelan look like, little?

Nicholas Snowman25:31

It's a very, very beautiful series of of metal and wooden instruments spread across a room, demanding a lot of players, and uh it's really, as I say, part of part of life in Indonesia.

Presenter25:43

Well, now you've succeeded, as I said at the beginning, where others have failed. You've um appointed a resident orchestra at the South Bank. It's the London Philharmonic now. Can you explain to me what the advantages are of having a resident orchestra?

Nicholas Snowman25:57

Yes. Uh the advantages are that uh in London the orchestras use, particularly the Festival Hall, as a garage. They come in and they come out, they park their orchestra and then they have to move out to let another one come in. So rehearsals are scarce in the hall itself, which is very bad musically obviously, and quite unlike any other town.

Nicholas Snowman26:15

And concerts are rarely repeated, which means the musicians have the frustration, artistically, of working very hard for one performance of a concert, occasionally two. But in other countries, and great orchestras have the chance of repeating programmes and therefore really getting into them. And that is the way an orchestra becomes a great orchestra. We have all the potential to have great orchestras here. We have the musicians. I think it was up to the South Bank to attempt to give those wonderful musicians the hardware they needed, really.

Presenter26:45

And the new music director of the LPO has recently been announced, France Velsermerst. So together with this orchestra being now in residence, what does that give us? Does that mean that London will at last have what people call a super orchestra to rival the Berlin Philharmonic or the Vienna State?

Nicholas Snowman27:02

This is exactly what we believe. That by giving a music director the powers that the London Philharmonic have very courageously consented to give him, which is really.

Nicholas Snowman27:12

In the end the power to high on fire.

Nicholas Snowman27:15

Real authority.

Nicholas Snowman27:16

in an old fashioned sense, and that was how great orchestras were built, with great maestri who could really get what they needed done and didn't just pop in and out from time to time. By having made that courageous decision, the London Philharmonic

Nicholas Snowman27:30

are in a position, in my opinion, to become one of the world's very great orchestras, because as I say, it isn't the quality of the musicians, the it's the structure around.

Presenter27:39

Record number seven.

Nicholas Snowman27:41

I couldn't live on the Desert Island or anywhere else without Wagner. I need my Wagner, my shot of Wagner, every autumn. I think since my father first took me to hear Rudolf Kempe conducting The Ring at Coven Garden with Birgit Nielsen. And it's also related to some of the happiest days of my life in France, when Patrice Cherrault and Pierre Boulez, together with Wolfgang Wagner, plotted the great ring performances which dominated by Reut for five years. And it's a memory on my Desert Island of what opera ought to be about, where you have real theatre and real music making and real intelligence.

Presenter28:21

All right.

Speaker 328:24

I

Speaker 328:48

Oh yeah.

Presenter29:18

Janine Altmeier and Peter Hoffman singing the love duet from the end of Act One of Wagner's Die Walkure with the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez. Do you go to other people's concerts as well, Nicholas?

Nicholas Snowman29:30

Oh, I go to everybody's concerts. Um

Presenter29:32

How many are we?

Nicholas Snowman29:33

Three or four too many in a way.

Nicholas Snowman29:36

But I think it's vital to know what's going on. It's also a lot of fun.

Presenter29:39

So being cast away on a desert island is going to be total and utter purgatory, hm?

Nicholas Snowman29:44

I think that the very first reaction will be one of

Nicholas Snowman29:47

Pleasure at being able to think a bit. But having um thought profoundly or not profoundly, yes, I think it would become very difficult. I I'm not a practical person, and um I would miss my family, my friends, and miss my concerts, miss the art galleries yes, miss a great number of things.

Presenter30:06

You've just been um extended, as they say, at the South Bank, for another five years, which means you're there till ninety five. What about beyond that? Have you any ambition beyond the South Bank? Is there a uh one job in the arts that you would really love to get your hands on?

Nicholas Snowman30:22

I do have a great love of opera, I always have had, and I think at one point I would love to go back to my first love. I used to work at Glenbourne when I left Cambridge and uh it would be lovely to get back into the opera world at some point. But uh I don't feel any sense of pressure or any great ambition I'm waiting to fulfil. I'm enjoying what I'm doing at the moment, even the controversy, and I'm determined and there's a lot still to do.

Presenter30:48

Your last record.

Nicholas Snowman30:50

My last record, Mozart. I couldn't live without Mozart. I didn't see how anybody can live without Mozart. Mozart is, I think, the center of everybody's musical experience, really. And conventionally, I divide music up into pre-Mozart and post-Mozart. This may seem ridiculous, but that's the way I think of it. And Mozart's chamber music.

Nicholas Snowman31:10

The string quintet in G minor.

Nicholas Snowman31:14

The adagia of that.

Nicholas Snowman31:16

I think presents us wi as with so much Mozart with a mystery. There's one cannot work out what it is. There's no analysis. There's no book, however many pages there may be, which can bring one to understanding the extraordinary emotion of listening to such music, which seems so simple and yet so complex and so touching and profound.

Presenter32:36

Part of Mozart's string quintet number four in G minor, played by the Albenberg Quartet, with Markus Wolff playing the viola.

Presenter32:44

So there we are, one of those records. Having had so much difficulty choosing the eight, Nicholas, now one of them you can choose.

Nicholas Snowman32:51

Mozart.

Nicholas Snowman32:52

Of course.

Presenter32:54

And a book. You have the Bible, you have Shakespeare.

Nicholas Snowman32:57

I would like to take with me the Smiley Trilogy. Can I am I allowed three books?

Presenter33:01

No.

Presenter33:03

It's only a loud one, I'm afraid. No more collected work.

Nicholas Snowman33:03

It's on your

Nicholas Snowman33:06

Oh, I see. Then I think it has to be Smiley's people.

Nicholas Snowman33:09

I've re-read that book several times, of course, and on the desert island, um not being very practical I wouldn't be able to get away.

Nicholas Snowman33:15

I could re-read it again and again and again, and still not quite understand what's going on.

Nicholas Snowman33:20

So it would keep me going.

Presenter33:21

And your luxury, what's that?

Nicholas Snowman33:24

I would like to bring with me my Mini Gadger coffee machine, Expresso Coffee Machine, with a supply of um coffee so that I can um keep awake. I need my coffee.

Presenter33:36

Right, a coffee machine and smiley's people. Nicholas Snowman, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 333:50

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.