David Pountney

Speaker 40:00

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 40:09

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

Presenter0:31

My Costaway this week is an opera producer. Music has been with him all his life. He went to the St John's College Choir School in Cambridge at the age of seven, eventually to the University itself, where he produced several operas and ended up at Scottish Opera in the late seventies as Director of Productions. But it was at English National Opera that he made his name. Working with Mark Elder, the music director, and Peter Jonas as general director, he set the opera world alight with a string of brilliant and controversial productions of the works of Janicek, Shostakovich and Vorzhak.

Presenter1:04

Opera, he admits, is an elitist art form, but that doesn't mean it should be suffocatingly genteel, he says. I believe in making it theatre, and I can't bear to have a stage used as a mantel shelf. He is David

Presenter1:19

Why not, David? Why can't you just produce Don Giovanni or Tosca exactly as the composer intended and exactly as the audience seems to want it?

David Pountney1:28

Well, because music is the most intensely imaginative language which we possess as human beings. And for that very reason it uh strives, I think, constantly to liberate us and to be liberated from meaning. And this is the permanent tension between

David Pountney1:50

Music and what people say, the text that people speak in an opera, and also what happens on stage.

Presenter1:57

But why should they

Presenter1:59

Discover anything more about Carmen if you set it in an automobile graveyard than if you leave it where Bizet put it outside a cigarette factory in Seville?

David Pountney2:08

Oh, because it was devastatingly shocking.

David Pountney2:12

For the audience of Bizet's time to find an opera which was traditionally about kings and queens and and you know such safe subjects uh to find an opera set in the slums of Seville and with with this dangerously, overtly sexual woman uh parading around the stage was viscerally dangerous.

Presenter2:34

So you have to try and transplant it into something that is dangerous for us.

David Pountney2:37

The visual world changes so radically that Bizet's music still sounds as vibrant as it did then, but Seville has become a picture postcard. So i so you render something which was meant to be a shock into merely the picturesque.

Presenter2:54

But the truth is, isn't it, that that an opera house could turn over quite successfully doing

Presenter2:59

a standard repertoire of the best loved loved operas, you know, from from Figaro to Fidelio, from from Carmen to to Boheme. That's what the mass audience wants, isn't it? And that's how you could make money in an opera house. But the truth is you would be bored to do that.

David Pountney3:14

I don't think you could necessarily ever make money in an opera house, and I think that to treat, as I say, this extraordinary imaginative language as a vehicle for a museum is a great betrayal of what all composers wanted. They all wanted somehow to penetrate the heart of people's minds and their emotional responses. And that to me is the the great function of an opera house. An opera house is primarily for me an urban thing. An opera is an urban art form. It sits in the middle of the city and it addresses the public of a city. It draws them together into the darkness and it inspires them simultaneously to share all kinds of feelings that they would be much too embarrassed to share with these strangers next to whom they are sitting if they if the lights were suddenly switched on.

Presenter4:08

But you know what the charge is, because it's not one that's unfamiliar to you, which is that that that you're guilty of

Presenter4:14

Artistic arrogance, you know, putting on in front of what the composer intended what you want to do.

David Pountney4:20

Well, yes. And I think a degree of arrogance is essential to all interpreters. There's no point in dealing with the material if you're afraid to put your hands into the tub and get them dirty. And I think that it's a gesture of respect towards the great artists, towards Bizet, Verdi, and so forth, that they're not made of porcelain. These are great masters. They're very robust people. They're made of steel. So you don't.

Presenter4:47

So you don't smash them when you pull them off the mantel shelf.

David Pountney4:49

Exactly. You can hurl their works around and they'll bounce back and hit you on the nose.

Presenter4:53

Tell me about your first record.

David Pountney4:55

Well, actually, this is a wonderfully irreverent piece. One tends to think of modern music, twentieth century music, as sort of angst-ridden and morbid and very difficult. And this is a wonderful piece by Shostakovich, who was a master of being ironic and funny and quixotic and very surprising. This is

David Pountney5:18

Ophelia's Ditty and I doubt whether anybody hearing this would ever imagine it had anything whatever to do with Ophelia, but it makes me laugh to think that this was his take on Ophelia's madness.

Speaker 45:30

So, part of him at norm of me got wof.

Speaker 15:47

All is dead.

Speaker 45:51

Puskur tikil dem.

Speaker 15:52

Go on!

Speaker 15:54

Unity is not all.

Speaker 45:57

Yeah.

Speaker 45:58

Pusca Pusca Posca

Speaker 16:02

Points in the option.

Speaker 16:05

Followed Wascar.

Presenter6:28

Louise Winter singing Ophelia's Ditty from Shostakovich's Incidental Music for Hamlet with the City of Birmingham Orchestra conducted by Mark Elder. No opera on this list at all, David. Why not?

David Pountney6:40

Well, as I've already said, I think it's an urban art form. It's something I don't think I really want on a desert island. Uh I will have opera with me on the desert island'cause it's it's in my head and it's in my memory and it's in my blood and

Presenter6:54

All the parts, presumably, because as you direct you you've got to be able to sing them all, I suppose, if one of the uh one of the performers is absent.

David Pountney7:02

Well, nobody would want to hear me sing them all, but I I can hum along pretty uh pretty effectively, and, you know, it's all it's in my blood, so it it'll be there. I don't need records of it.

Presenter7:12

And you can sing'cause you were a chorister. I mean, might you have been a singer?

David Pountney7:17

I don't think so. No, I was not even a very

David Pountney7:20

Good chorister in the strictly vocal sense, I don't think. I had one of those rather hooty English voices.

Presenter7:27

But you you were a music scholar, I think, as well, at school, at your public school. Yes. Might you have been a conductor?

David Pountney7:30

Yes.

David Pountney7:33

Well, I think the truth is that um I met and mingled with a lot of very musical people, um, you know, through playing in the National Youth Orchestra and this kind of thing. And I think I twigged that quite a lot of them were more musical than I was.

Presenter7:50

I ask you that because I mean it isn't just to sort of have a go at you as it were, but surely, you know, the producer.

Presenter7:58

In opera it

Presenter8:00

is I don't know quite how to put this, but isn't he of of rather more secondary importance than the musical director or or the the company manager with a large C and M, you know, the general director?

David Pountney8:12

Well, ideally, the relationship between a conductor and a producer should it should be one of equals, in which nonetheless you defer ultimately t to the conductor because he is running the performance. But of course, the fact is that there's an awful lot that goes on in an opera which is in outside the conductor's control, or has become so, because of the complexity of the molten stage. I mean, in the nineteenth century, there weren't really such things. We are, in fact, one of Hans Keller's so-called invented professions, probably along with many other twentieth century professions. By which I think he meant spurious professions, actually. Well, I suppose it

Presenter8:53

Well, I suppose i in opera you can almost understand that because unlike in straight theatre there is the music and that is ultimately what's communicating itself, isn't it? So that you know, in other words, if opera singers can't act, it doesn't actually matter too much.

David Pountney9:06

Well, I think it matters a lot because I think that the stage

Presenter9:08

The stage.

David Pountney9:09

Nonetheless, you know, the stage is in some sort of way a sacred space. It is, you know, right from Greek times, it's a mythic space. It's a space where people are placed in order to speak directly to the hearts and minds of a large public. And of course there are lots of different ways of doing that. And a skilled actor in an opera is not the same thing as a skilled actor in a play. And you shouldn't necessarily look for the same skills. But people who are ineffective, shall we say, on stage in an opera are betraying a large part of what that experience should be.

Presenter9:52

Michael number two.

David Pountney9:54

My second record is one of those sort of Proustian bits of music that it evokes smells actually almost as much as anything else. And this goes back to my chorister days. And about once a term we used to have to sing at the end of the college feast. We'd all put our gowns and our mortarboards on and we would be led upstairs to the balcony of this very wonderful dining room in St John's College, where there would be these huge long tables and candles guttering and this extraordinary smell of cigar smoke and cheese and so on. And we would almost invariably sing this very beautiful piece by Thomas Tellers, which, even when I just think of it, brings back that aroma of good living, I suppose.

Speaker 411:25

Which I wait for joy.

Presenter11:46

The choir of Saint John's College, Cambridge, singing Onata Lux de Lumine by Thomas Tallis, conducted by George Guest. What was the first opera you ever heard, David, and and how old were you?

David Pountney11:58

Well, my my parents in the war started going to um an organization called Music Camp, which was really an attempt by musicians to find somewhere to have some sort of holiday, which was pretty difficult during the war. And they started meeting at a barn in Berkshire and pitching their tents and playing music. And in the coronation year, they decided to do Fidelio.

David Pountney12:28

And I can remember very vividly sitting in the cross beam of this barn, and hearing um uh Floristar and the prisoner's Aria. I remember this man. It's it's odd that I remember that and not the big choruses and things.

Presenter12:45

And you'd have been what about five years?

David Pountney12:46

And I was five, yes.

Presenter12:48

What about music at home? Was there much of that? Or radio or television or?

David Pountney12:50

Radio television

David Pountney12:52

My father was a a singer in New College choir, was a lay clerk, and also a conductor of the local choral society.

David Pountney13:00

And my mother was a singer and a family.

Presenter13:02

And you played the trumpet.

David Pountney13:04

Yes, which was an idea I I got from the radio, um hearing a Beethoven symphony, I think, and and just hearing these trumpets playing, and and you know, deciding that I wanted to learn to play the trumpet, which I did at my prep school.

Presenter13:18

And went into the National Youth Orchestra and presumably met lots of like-minded young people then.

David Pountney13:24

Yes, in fact Mark Elder and I actually met in a in a wonderful little organisation called the Abingdon Holiday Orchestra in the

Presenter13:30

What did he play?

David Pountney13:30

And he played the bassoon.

Speaker 413:31

Yeah.

David Pountney13:32

And we met, in fact, I think playing Shostakovich's first symphony, which ironically begins with a bassoon and a trumpet.

Presenter13:40

Tell me about record number three.

David Pountney13:41

Well, when I'd finished school, and I was I had the year off, the year out, as it's now called, and um I was s suggested to me that I would like to go and help this priest who was running a mission and a school in Zululand.

David Pountney14:00

And I did all sorts of wonderful things with them. I trained a choir and I taught them Shakespeare and and you know, they taught me, of course, far more about all kinds of much more important things, and opened my eyes in all sorts of ways.

Speaker 414:27

I'm not sure.

Speaker 414:30

As it had been so many low, who now would take away?

Speaker 414:35

Jimana Miyashma.

Speaker 414:41

I am a very good person.

Presenter14:46

Ladysmith black mambazzo singing Izi them bezo zen cozy, is that right?

David Pountney14:51

I suppose it is, yes.

Presenter14:53

You um went up to Cambridge and produced while you were there, I think, some nine operas. You can't have had much time to spend on academic work.

David Pountney15:03

No, I suppose not. But uh I think Cambridge was probably more indulgent those days than it is now. Um

Presenter15:09

What was the best of what you produced?

David Pountney15:09

What was the best?

David Pountney15:11

Oh, undoubtedly a piece called The Seven Deadly Sins, which which Mark Elder and I did actually I think we did it the year after we left, in fact. And that was quite an important sort of little visiting card, really, that production, because it was sort of seen by a number of people and that that sort of got me where it got me my next job.

Presenter15:29

So some one from Scottish Opera had seen the vial, had they?

David Pountney15:32

Yes, yes.

Presenter15:34

That this was the period, I think, when you decided, or was it, that that opera shouldn't be genteel and cosy, that you should actually break a few rules. I mean, it it was the period, was it?

David Pountney15:45

Yes, and and in fact uh

David Pountney15:47

I mean, I arrived in Glasgow as, you know, I suppose a more or less foolish public school boy, not knowing very much, and with this sort of rather slightly protected life, you know, public school, Cambridge, you know, it's all very nice. And you drive in down the parliamentary road in Glasgow and you are in a very different world, or you were then, of course, that's all been demolished now. And it it seemed m monstrous really to think of some sort of porcelain mantel shelf object in Glasgow, you know, that was just so totally inappropriate. There had to be something more vigorous and more full-blooded about opera than that in that city. And you know, that's what I I sought to discover, or that's what I think Glasgow sought to teach me, I think.

Presenter16:32

Next piece of music.

David Pountney16:34

Well, I had done um a production of Janacek's opera Kacha Kabanova in in Wexford and I had been banging on about Janacek actually for

David Pountney16:47

A very long time, ever since Mark Elder and I first heard that piece on his in his sitting room in Crouch End. And eventually Scottish Opera said we'd like to do a Janacek piece and and and the Welsh at the same time were were interested in doing that and and eventually they agreed to do a Janacek cycle, which was a kind of act of suicidal.

David Pountney17:11

Enterprise, because he'd been, of course, already introduced in London by Sir Charles Macaras, and that's Adders Wells, but he really was not known outside London, and it was a very brave thing to do. And this is the opening of his quartet, Intimate Letters, which was about his muse, really. He had this in his sixties. He really composed all his great pieces in the last twenty years of his life, which is also a rather inspiring thought. And this was connected with a very strange and interesting relationship he had with this woman called Camilla.

David Pountney17:57

Um nobody is very sure what this relationship amounted to, but it's probably pretty unlikely to have been a sexual one, although uh there is a passion that breathes through practically every bar that Janacek wrote.

Speaker 418:12

Uh

Presenter18:59

The Smetener Quartet playing part of Janicek's string quartet number two, Intimate Letters. So, David Pantner, you became Director of Productions at Scottish Opera and then in nineteen eighty two Director of Productions at ENO, English National Opera. It brought you together again with Mark Elder and fulfilled a kind of ambition, really, for the two of you, didn't it? To running your own opera company, as it were.

David Pountney19:20

Yes, we'd fantasised about this event for um a long time.

Presenter19:25

But what were your priorities? What did you set out to do?

David Pountney19:30

I think that we were very aware that we were the continuers of a very substantial tradition. People always kind of make too much of these changes. I mean, we knew that we picked up already on something that had been very securely laid before us.

Presenter19:46

But you did revolutionise it. You did suddenly give it, as I said in the introduction, you and Mark Elder and Peter Jonas. Suddenly you were much younger than your predecessors, and you were you know, youngish men with a vision.

David Pountney20:02

Well

Presenter20:02

Not afraid of controversy.

David Pountney20:03

Yes, and I I think I think you see this goes back to th this idea that that that uh the function of a theatre is somehow to be

David Pountney20:15

The most sensitive membrane, if you like, for the life of the city.

David Pountney20:21

And I think actually there was a lot going on. There was a lot of aggression, there was a lot of provocation going on in the eighties. You know, there was Mrs. Thatcher who was a hate figure and a love figure and was obviously a very provocative leader. And that gave rise to a very febrile emotional atmosphere for many people.

Presenter20:44

Do you think that's what opera should do, that it should move with the fashion, as it were?

David Pountney20:48

Well, yes, you see, because I think well, I think particularly that what you see, the production, is dictated by fashion. And what people like i in terms of an illustration, shall we say, just like what they like i on the advertisement hoardings, changes very rapidly. So the way people respond to stage images actually changes over the over the decades.

Presenter21:12

So you tried to bring in some of those techniques, didn't you, from cinema learned in the cinema and in television, you're flashbacks and fantasy and cartoon. These were all things that you tried to incorporate in your productions.

David Pountney21:23

Yes, because they are incorporated willy-nilly in the eyes and minds of the audience. The audience is feeding on that all the time. So.

David Pountney21:33

They shouldn't come to the opera and feel as though the visual world has suddenly stepped back into another era before all that happened.

Presenter21:40

Nevertheless, you lost money.

David Pountney21:42

Well, opera does lose money, yes.

Presenter21:44

Whatever you do.

David Pountney21:45

Actually, I mean, we went up and did pretty well during the sort of mid eighties and we went down and did not so well during the the late eighties.

Presenter21:54

I think by by the time you left it was in debt to the tune of more than one and a quarter million. And it's it's a lot of money. I go back to my first point. If you hadn't tried

Presenter22:03

you know, to move with the mood of the times, if you had just put on, you know, the the Toskers and Bohems and Carmen's, you might not have been in such deep debt. I mean, it's it's a sad judgment, but it's true, isn't it?

David Pountney22:14

It's also a very unproven one. You know, you might easily have been written off as being, well, not worth subsidising as a second house in London, for example. I mean, I think that that you know, there are two houses in London, thank goodness. Let's hope it remains so. And the ecology and the balance between those two houses is very important. One of them has a job to do, to be the sort of flagship international house. That's the Royal Opera's job. And inevitably, they deal with visiting stars and all those kind of people, and that presupposes a degree of conservatism about what they do, because they have that's their function. And INO is a younger house. It is there to give chances to younger singers and to younger directors and to perform in English. And therefore, I think by definition is there to take a more pro provocative line.

Presenter23:16

Record number five.

David Pountney23:18

Uh well, I think I'm going to miss landscape on this desert island. In fact

David Pountney23:25

Uh the island bit is all right, but I'm not really so very keen on the desert bit. Um landscape is something that's very important to me, and I suppose by that I mean

David Pountney23:37

uh English landscape. And if I'm on some patch of sand, however much the sun is shining, I think I want to be reminded, and I think this is a very exquisite reminder.

Speaker 423:51

In summer time on Breeder, The bells they sound so clear, Round both the shores they ring there In steeples far and near, A happy noise to hear

Speaker 124:08

Yeah.

Speaker 424:24

Here on a Sunday morning my love and I would lie

Speaker 124:28

I love

Speaker 124:30

I would love.

Speaker 424:32

And see the colonet counties.

Speaker 124:33

Be the card.

Speaker 424:38

And hear the locks soar high About us in the sky.

Presenter24:50

Ian Partridge singing part of Breeden Hill from Vaughan Williams on Wenlock Edge with the Music Group of London. Um let's just talk a little bit more about the about the audience you produce for, the ones we accuse, generally speaking, of being so relentless in their enthusiasm for a very narrow repertoire, being hostile towards anything new. Why are they like that? I mean, we are generalising. A theatre audience isn't like that.

David Pountney25:13

Well

David Pountney25:14

I I'm not sure. Uh on the whole, actually, I think that opera has been more progressive in terms of staging and and

David Pountney25:27

uh production ideas than the theatre has really over the last twenty years. So to some extent the opera audience has been faced with greater challenges. What opera doesn't have, which I envy desperately about the theatre, is it doesn't have this continual flow of successful new writing. So in a way, I suppose the reason opera has more zany productions is because it doesn't have the renewal of more repertoire.

Presenter25:55

But opera doesn't pack em in in the same way, does it?

David Pountney25:59

There is a different reason there and it's to do with music. It's the music that has moved away from the audience. And that is something I mean that that is a problem of the twentieth century, that the the detachment of composers and painters, for example, from their natural public has become quite acute. There are avenues.

Presenter26:26

But do you think there's some onus on us, the audience, as some enthusiasts of modern music say and have said here on this programme, we should work harder at it, we should try harder, because otherwise we're being sterile in our approach?

David Pountney26:42

No, I think that's rubbish. I think actually it's our job to entertain the public. And uh this is a very kind of airy, fairy, ivory tower view that somehow it's the audience's fault. I mean we began with a piece of Shostakovich which I think would have set anybody's feet tapping. Now he was to my mind the person who would have who could have established a twentieth century

David Pountney27:06

popular operatic language. And and he was silenced by Stalin. I mean, he was potentially the Verdi of this century, uh the man who could write something both profound and popular at the same time. That's a quite a difficult trick to pull.

Presenter27:21

Who who is the Verdi? I mean, might you even know him as we speak of the twenty first century?

David Pountney27:28

I I couldn't name him. I wish I could.

Presenter27:31

Tell me about record number six.

David Pountney27:33

Ah, well going back to the last record, which was music about the English countryside, there is a music in the English countryside, or of the English countryside, which to me is something so intrinsically part of its structure, of its hedgerows and its fields, and how it came to be what it is, and it's a sound that is a very dear part of my life actually, I mean my childhood and so on. And uh it's um now rather controversial and some people want to silence this music and I would say to anybody, beware about silencing music.

Speaker 428:18

Yeah.

Speaker 428:30

You're the Sailor, you're the Falman, you're air, you're a

Speaker 428:34

You don't hold the ball, hold it in blood, hold it, hold it, woo-woo!

Presenter28:42

The Cry of the Hounds and the Huntsman, recorded by Ludwig Koch and sold on an EP complete with a book called Hunting by Ear for thirty five shillings in nineteen sixty.

Presenter28:51

The other uh string to your professional beau, of course, David Pountney, is that you translate operas, the libretto. When did you start doing that?

David Pountney28:58

Oh, I started um back in Scottish Opera. Really I started'cause I got fed up with spending an awful lot of time correcting other people's translations or improving on them as I thought.

Presenter29:08

But does that mean you know Czech and Russian as well as French and Italian and German and whatever? No.

David Pountney29:13

No, no. Uh as far as the um you know the obscure languages are concerned, I mean by now I I have a passable vocabulary in Czech, but I don't pretend to know it as a language. But uh the the problem for for an opera translation is not finding out what it means. It's hearing an English sentence which can be sung, which fits the music, which has the rise and fall and the vowels in the right place.

Presenter29:34

Fince that's

Presenter29:38

But you do believe that English speaking audiences should be sung to in English?

David Pountney29:42

I certainly do. I mean, to me, the idea of anybody

David Pountney29:48

Uh walking out in front of a paying public in a theater.

David Pountney29:52

And deliberately addressing them in a language they don't understand is.

David Pountney29:57

either impertinent or just terribly stupid. Uh I mean, it is such a nonsense.

Presenter30:03

But it can also be the case that that the singer is going out there and addressing them in another language that they themselves, the singer, don't understand either.

David Pountney30:12

Well, indeed. Uh I mean you know, obviously Italian and German are things that every professional singer learns from their early student days. But uh I mean, when you read things that, you know, that a certain performance will be sung in Czech.

David Pountney30:29

and you know you look down the list of names and you know the conductor is English and half the singers are American and the other two are German and one's you know there may be one Czech in there. And the idea that they and the chorus are singing Czech is total nonsense.

Presenter30:46

No idea what they're singing about.

David Pountney30:46

No idea.

David Pountney30:47

Well, they of course they will have studied it and they will have rehearsed it. But uh you know, I say pui to study. That's not you you you can't get inside a language by learning it by rote. And, you know, I apply the Oklahoma test. Which is.

David Pountney31:01

Give me a Russian baritone, the most intelligent, sophisticated Russian baritone you can find. Give him a coach, let him study for as long as you like.

David Pountney31:10

Will he ever sing Oh, What a Beautiful Morning in any other way other than tells you that he's a Russian barrator, not a man from Oklahoma?

Presenter31:19

Next piece of music, number seven.

David Pountney31:21

Well, this is purely and simply an exquisite piece of music that I love very much, and I love the timbre of a French singer singing French to contradict my previous remarks.

Speaker 431:37

Uh

Speaker 431:59

God is a pain.

Speaker 432:04

It was something also deep in the ball and a year.

Speaker 432:25

We didn't want to talk what he do, sir. We didn't want to talk what you wanted to do.

Presenter32:35

Regine Crespin singing part of the Villanelle from Belliot's Les Nuis d'Eté with the Orquestre de la Suisse Romande conducted by Ernest Anserme.

Presenter32:44

Off, then, to a desert island. Is it a happy prospect for you? Do you think you'll enjoy it?

David Pountney32:48

Well, I'm I'm quite used to uh looking after myself. I mean the life of a freelance director is um you know has its solitary moments in all these flats and hotel rooms that one ends up in. So I'll I'll cope. Um and I as I've said before, I I love the countryside. I'll I actually you know, to be out of towns will be something wonderful. I hope it's not too deserty.

Presenter33:15

So you can snare the odd rabbit or snake or whatever it might be.

David Pountney33:18

Might be. Yes, yes, so I'll be quite practical and uh you know I'm rather a passionate gardener so I'm looking forward to finding out what I can

David Pountney33:27

Harvest

Presenter33:29

Last record.

David Pountney33:30

Ah, well the last record is is actually in a way an example of what might have been my ideal eight records, really, would have been things that I'd never ever heard. I have to say I don't really listen to records for pleasure. I love going to concerts and I usually manage to go to a butts for four a year or something like that. And that to me is a sort of a very special and intense experience of music. Anyway, this last record I've never heard because it was chosen by my children, Emilia and James. And so it's not only something I've never heard, but it's also like a little sort of musical snapshot of them.

Speaker 134:16

Uh

Speaker 134:18

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

Presenter34:45

And so it goes on, because it's called Circles by Adam F. What did you think of your children's musical taste for you?

David Pountney34:52

I actually I I liked it very much. I could have uh I can see that it's uh I can see it blending in with the cicadas on this uh

Presenter34:58

BOOM

David Pountney34:58

It's Desert Island.

Presenter34:59

If you could only take one of these eight, which one would it be?

David Pountney35:02

Well, you've probably guessed it would be the Janicek. You know, he's been such an important person in my professional life and in my personal life. I met my wife through Janicek, and uh so, you know, he's been right there, and I'll be happy to sit on the beach and listen to him.

Presenter35:19

What about a book?

David Pountney35:21

Well, this is an anthology uh by Geoffrey Grigson called The English Year, which is a collection of little bits of prose and poetry in the form of a daily diary, really. So it would keep me making my marks on the on the tree, you know, and giving me a little taste of what that day would be like maybe on Breedon Hill.

Presenter35:45

And a luxury.

David Pountney35:47

Hi yes, now this is a bit of a strain, I'm afraid, for your organization. Um it it's it's quite large and um it requires a certain amount of equipment and quite a lot of maintenance, all of which I shall require to be done as part of the contract. Um it's a cropia lawn.

Presenter36:04

Well, you can do the maintenance on that. Oh no, we'll give you the gear.

David Pountney36:06

Oh no.

Presenter36:08

David Pantley, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Speaker 436:12

Pleasure.

Speaker 436:21

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