Sir Ernest Hall

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 eight and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:32

My Castaway this week is a business man. Born into a poor family in Bolton, he discovered a passionate love of music at the age of nine, and trained as a pianist and composer. But it was industry, not the arts, in which he made his career, and by his late thirties he'd become a millionaire.

Presenter0:48

Throughout his life he's tried to bring the imagination of the artist to the world of commerce and the pragmatism of the business man to the world of the arts. Nowhere is this better represented than in the practical utopia, his phrase, that he's created in Halifax. Dean Clough, a highly successful mix of business, the arts and education, is a monument to his vision. We need to dream extravagantly, he says, and we need to believe in our dreams. He is Sir Ernest Hall. And if we believe in our dreams that's the philosophy, isn't it? We can attempt anything.

Sir Ernest Hall1:24

I think dreaming I I'm sure we all dream and we all have our dreams. The problem is most of us abandon our dreams. And I know from experience that dreams and dreaming and believing in dreams is absolutely fundamental to our lives.

Presenter1:41

And how long ago did you first dream of of creating this this practical utopia I've just described, this Dean Clough, which is, we should say, a vast complex, isn't it, where polytheem bag manufacturers and building societies work alongside sculptors and painters?

Sir Ernest Hall1:54

It is. It is a practical utopia. It is a place with culture, education, commerce, enterprise.

Sir Ernest Hall2:04

For me it's a dream world come true. It's a world I first glimpsed when my children started at Dartington because that really had all of those elements involved in it, education, culture, commerce and school.

Presenter2:16

The school in Devon was a very good idea.

Sir Ernest Hall2:17

The school in Devon.

Presenter2:18

Self-expression. It was also called a utopia, wasn't it?

Sir Ernest Hall2:21

Well, I th it may well have been. I certainly thought of it as a kind of utopia. It seemed like that to me, but the difference was that this was a utopia in a kind of wonderful idyllic rural environment. And here we were in Halifax, a place which people thought was ugly and something that they wanted to get away from. And so for me, it was the challenge of creating this kind of sense of utopia in what is not the most promising looking environment. A great deserted complex of mills which had housed one of the greatest businesses in the 19th century, crossed its carpets, sixteen major buildings stretching nearly a mile from one end to the other, abandoned when they closed in 1982 and demonstrating, I think, for everybody at that time that everything was terrible and going to get worse. And my experience in my life had demonstrated that the reverse was true, that actually the future is not something we inherit, but something we can create.

Presenter3:20

But to create it out of this vast derelict building, you know, where I mean, presumably there were there was just water everywhere, broken glass. I mean, it w must have been miserable.

Sir Ernest Hall3:21

Tucker.

Sir Ernest Hall3:28

That's been mis daunting sense of emptiness.

Presenter3:30

Y you can't do that, you can't transform that into some kind of humming enterprise without spending millions and millions and millions of pounds.

Sir Ernest Hall3:38

Of your own. But it's a progressive. We started off using spaces almost as they were, bringing things in slowly. Of course, gradually as you become more professional and you get professional people coming into it, you spend more and more money. But it has been an organic thing.

Presenter3:57

But is it commercially viable now?

Sir Ernest Hall3:59

It's incredibly commercially successful. But it's commercially successful in the sense that we have two quite separate things. We have, on the one hand, we are commercial developers of space and we excite and try to find very high quality professional tenants to come in because we run a professional environment. But they also come in because they're excited by the kind of world of the arts, the theatre, the artists, and all of these.

Presenter4:23

Are they or is that just something that goes on around the world somehow by the way?

Sir Ernest Hall4:25

Oh no, they hope by using it. They support it, they sponsor it, they're involved in it. Everybody, everybody sees and gets involved in the kind of activities which are taking place. You can't help it. We've got a working community of over twenty professional artists, we've got the theatre companies there. And so you have this marvellous sense that we're not a kind of segment of society with people who are simply making money in business, but people who are artists, people are artisans, people who are executives, all the whole mix, educators, and it is quite extraordinary to be a part of it.

Presenter5:01

So it's a dream come true, and there have been others too, as we shall hear. But first of all, tell me about your first record.

Sir Ernest Hall5:07

Well

Presenter5:07

Well

Sir Ernest Hall5:08

The dream of Utopia really had its origins in the dream which emanated from music and my love of music and my discovery of music and uh when I was fourteen I happened to buy one record in particular which was uh Rach Melinoff's first piano concerto, The Last Movement. It was the only record in the shop and I'd love to hear that record again.

Speaker 45:31

Uh

Presenter6:28

Recorded in nineteen thirty four, that was Sergei Ragmaninoff himself playing part of the final movement of his piano concerto number one in F sharp minor, with the Philadelphia orchestra conducted by Leopold Stockovsky.

Presenter6:40

How did you know? How did you know about music? You lived in this this poor end of Bolton, your father had been unemployed, they were scraping a living as as bakers. You know, how did you know about that?

Sir Ernest Hall6:50

Well, I was very lucky. I one day when I was about eight years old in the primary school, which was Saint George's in Bolton, someone came in not one of the regular teachers, but somebody came in with a wind up grammar phone.

Sir Ernest Hall7:02

And he started to talk to us about music. And he told us the programme of a piece of music we were going to listen to, and he described this.

Sir Ernest Hall7:11

Castle and dancers coming out of the shadows, and gradually the dance increased in intensity, and then at the end the dancers disappear into the shadows again. I think I was just mesmerized by the idea that music could have this kind of story. And I listened to the music, and from that moment, everything in my life changed. I'd never heard it. It was Sibelius Volstriest, and it's still the most beautiful piece of music to me. And of course, it was a door. I mean, what it was was not the piece of music, it was simply I realized there's another world.

Presenter7:30

I'd never heard it.

Presenter7:43

You you persuaded your parents to get a piano?

Sir Ernest Hall7:45

Well, I we we spent a very uh long Sunday w with relatives who had a honky-tonk piano and they had a small words tutor and at the end of this boring Sunday something had drawn me to the piano and to the small words tutor and I'd realized that these dots on the music could translate into sound on the piano and I painstakingly translated them all and I managed to decipher the Bluebells of Scotland. At the end of the day I gave a very halting a performance of it and they were so impressed that they went uh and bought a piano for me because I think with all working class families then it was something a piano was something that people thought was really something to have.

Presenter8:22

But you are apparently quite a sickly little boy.

Sir Ernest Hall8:24

And you

Presenter8:25

And you've said since I might well have opted for failure. What does that mean?

Sir Ernest Hall8:30

Well, I think that first of all, when I think of my childhood, I'm reminded of somebody I knew once said, you know, nature's got it wrong, we should be born old and get younger. And when I go back in time to the beginning of my life, it really feels like a miserable old age to me because I was surrounded by people who were struggling, unemployment, my father was one of the unemployed, no health service, so when I had hooping cough, I nearly died. And you had this terrifying sense of vulnerability physically. And I was sickly, I was bilious, I was never well at Christmas, I was always sick because I was overexcited. So I never enjoyed Christmas, and I can't remember anything which really lightens the gloom. But the astonishing thing is that I now realise what an advantage it was, because my life seems to have been a progression indeed from this miserable old age to youth. And so it has in the end proved to be an enormous advantage. At the time it didn't seem so, but that's what it seems like to me now.

Presenter9:27

Tell me about your second record.

Sir Ernest Hall9:28

Well, it seems that every dream I have creates another dream, and the dream of being a pianist composer created the dream of going to what I thought was the most wonderful place, Roman College of Music. The most marvellous part of life there was the discovery of chamber music and the joy of making music with other people. And I started particularly because Bolton had a wonderful violinist in the shape of Martin Milner, who led the Halle for 25 years. And he was a fellow student and a great friend, and has remained so. And we started making music together. And we played, I remember in the 40s, the Schubert B-Flatt trio. The great role model for that trio were the three great soloists, Alfred Corteau, Jacques Thibault, and Pablo Casals.

Presenter11:16

Alfred Corteau, Jacques Thibault and Pablo Casals playing part of the second movement of Schubert's Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat major. So, Sir Ernest Hall, you got to the Royal Manchester College of Music in 1947, but your parents weren't really on side with this music business, were they? I mean, you've again said since they were resentful of everything I was trying to do.

Sir Ernest Hall11:37

It's very hard when you when you come from a poor working class family, my parents had started work at the age of eleven as half-timers and they were so proud to be earning money for the family and I think that they understandably had a sense that every child has got a duty as soon as possible to contribute to the coffers of the family because that had been their experience.

Presenter11:58

To get out to work and work is a thing that you did. It was not something you got any pleasure in.

Sir Ernest Hall11:59

Um to

Sir Ernest Hall12:00

It's a good idea.

Sir Ernest Hall12:02

I mean they saw every year added to the education at school as a nail in the coffin as it were. I mean they didn't like the idea that this moment of starting to work was something you delayed. And so it was a great sacrifice I think and culturally it was very difficult to adjust to the idea that I was not going to be earning money and I was going to be still a student at the age of 18, 19, 20, 21. As you say, I'm

Presenter12:28

As you say, I mean, not surprising really,'cause they'd come through the Great War and the Depression and so on. But do you think that that's why you feel now so strongly, which obviously you do, that work and culture and the art should all mix? I mean, that's why, isn't it?

Sir Ernest Hall12:31

Yeah.

Sir Ernest Hall12:32

And that's all.

Sir Ernest Hall12:42

Well I do, but I do because I think we're in a post-industrial society. We're in transition from a culture of dependency, paternalistic employment, to a world in which clearly people have got to be given the confidence to live their own lives and to develop the power that they have, because without it they're lost. If we have a culture of dependency and people are brainwashed into believing their role is to be a menial subservient role and there isn't a subservient role, then you're really destroying people. And the only way I love what Jung said, he said the only in his experience, the greatest problems are fundamentally insoluble. Only by when people d develop higher and wider interests can they elevate themselves above the problem. And I think with 800 million worldwide who are now without conventional work, it's clear we have to change our idea of what work is. We have to change our idea of what people can do.

Presenter13:34

So there you were at the at the Royal Manchester College of Music, nineteen forty seven, determined to make your your life as a as a concert pianist and a composer.

Sir Ernest Hall13:41

In a cell,

Presenter13:42

But there was just one problem. There was another student at that same college, and his name was John Ogden.

Sir Ernest Hall13:48

Well, he didn't start, of course, when I started. I'd had three wonderful years in which I'd made incredible progress as a pianist. But one of the other things that I've discovered, and I think it applies to every child, that it's very easy to be diminished by other people's achievements. I've often said when I speak to my children, we look at ourselves through an electronic microscope and we look at everybody else through rose-coloured spectacles. And it's not a good comparison. And whatever other people do, you have to hold on to the idea that it's a demonstration of the possible. Mozart, Beethoven, Michelangelo, they were human, I mean, no more or less than we are. And yet we somehow have this idea that the achievements of others can simply indicate to us that we're never going to do it. And John Ogden arrived, and he was just prodigiously gifted. I saw a programme where he played the Chopin B. Manisonata, the Lisbon Manisonata, Hammer Clavier, all in one programme. He did things no one had ever done before, and his ability to do everything was just extraordinary.

Presenter14:47

And you were intimidated.

Sir Ernest Hall14:49

Well, I I I recognized that he had something that I didn't have, and um I think all children decide it's easier to decide you can't do things than to persevere and try to do them.

Presenter14:58

You'd better tell me about your third record.

Sir Ernest Hall15:00

Well, this is John Ogden giving the first recording of the great Bizzoni piano concerto. Bizzoni himself described it as the skyscraper of a concerto. It lasts for an hour. It's got a male voice choir in the final movement singing a hymn to Allah, but this particular movement that I've chosen really shows the scintillating playing of John Ogden.

Presenter16:20

John Ogden and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra playing part of the second movement of Ferruccio Bussoni's piano concerto conducted by Daniel Reveno.

Presenter16:28

So it was because of Ogden and and this fear of your own lack of talent that you turned to business instead of music as a career. I mean it's as simple as that, is it? After all those dreams

Sir Ernest Hall16:37

Well there was a transition. I had to do, at the end of my studies, I had to do two years national service and I went into the army and I learnt to type. I became a touch typist and I learnt to be an office worker. And I found to my astonishment that I actually rather enjoyed it. And I decided to get a job. And it happened to be a job in a textile mill in Yorkshire, which was extraordinary. I'd grown up in the shadow working in the office. And I'd grown up in the shadow of a cotton mill. My mother's twelve brothers and sisters had all worked in the mill. My father had worked in the mill. Everybody worked in the mill. And I thought I was escaping from this world of the mill and becoming a musician. And instead, I found myself going back into a mill. And the astonishing thing was, when I went back into the mill,

Presenter17:01

Doing what?

Sir Ernest Hall17:24

I just loved it. I s loved the smell. I loved the people. I loved the culture. I love the whole sense of the creativity of it. I love the idea that every week

Sir Ernest Hall17:33

Something was being produced, and so I fell in love with Enterprise.

Presenter17:37

It's difficult to understand, though, that, after all those musical aspirations, that that I mean, surely life in a Yorkshire textile mill was pretty humdrum.

Sir Ernest Hall17:45

It didn't seem so to me. It seemed quite the reverse. It seemed astonishingly exciting.

Presenter17:49

The manufacturer was in the blood, after all, said this.

Sir Ernest Hall17:52

I think it's creativity. I mean, I've often said, I think, you know, in a business or writing music or writing prototype, it's a creative process.

Presenter18:00

But it's the measuring of success, isn't it? I mean, I suppose if you're manufacturing textiles, then you can see a bale of cloth at the end of the day.

Sir Ernest Hall18:07

You can. You're absolutely right. I mean, one of the most terrifying things as a pianist is at the end of a month's hard work you look at yourself and say, Am I any better? You think, No, I'm worse than I was when I started. So it can be an extraordinary thing.

Presenter18:18

So you found satisfaction in the formers?

Sir Ernest Hall18:20

I found satisfaction in the whole feeling that there was something that came out of it and you could measure it. And I also I suppose I did love the I love the whole sense of it. As a child I'd been rather terrified of this mill yard. I once got stuck behind the gates and every other child could climb over the mill gates, but they had to go and get the watchman to come and open up the gates and he did. But it is going to let me out because I was just so physically afraid of climbing the gates. And I was so I I saw this world of the mill as a kind of quite terrifying place. And yet when I went into it it was suddenly it was I was emancipated and I suddenly felt excited by it.

Presenter18:59

It's an if

Presenter19:00

And it worked for you because within five or six years, I think you became managing director of the manager. I became manager.

Sir Ernest Hall19:04

I became well I yes, I mean one of the things I I discovered of course is the key to everything is enthusiasm. I mean if you love doing things then you inevitably become good at doing them and I I brought the kind of enthusiasm and passion I'd had for music into textile manufacture and of course I went then from being managing director to doing a management buyout and it was just I was ast more astonished than anybody else at the kind of progress that I made.

Presenter19:30

Record number four.

Sir Ernest Hall19:31

I talked about going through the door with the Siberius, and the doors went on and led to other rooms, and it led me into the first Viennese school and the music of Anton Babern and Schoenberg, and in particular Albenberg, Wocek and Lulu. And I I I don't think I could exist without the haunting romantic music, the ultimate romantic music of Albenberg, and I'd love to hear the opening of the Berg Lulu suite.

Presenter20:54

The opening of Alban Berg's Lulu Suite, played by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Antal Dorati. So at the age of thirty one, Sir Ernest Hall, you headed a management buy-out of the company and then there followed various lucky breaks, calculated gambles, reversed takeovers, all those things. And by the age of thirty six you were running really quite a large public company, weren't you?

Speaker 421:12

I was, I was.

Presenter21:14

And you were a millionaire.

Speaker 421:15

Yeah.

Presenter21:15

No, it was I mean that was when what the sixties, when being a millionaire meant something, didn't it? If you had a million pounds you've got a lot of dosh.

Sir Ernest Hall21:19

Oh yes, it was meant something, didn't it? If you had a million pounds, you couldn't lose it.

Sir Ernest Hall21:23

It was, yes, it was an extraordinary experience, simply because it was something I never.

Presenter21:23

It was

Sir Ernest Hall21:28

anticipated. Around this time, the mid sixties, I was looking for a way forward because I knew I loved manufacturing, but it wasn't a world in which I could find a kind of I couldn't find the thread of what I wanted to do. I was looking. And it all happened for me, really, towards the end of the sixties and the early seventies, when for the first time

Sir Ernest Hall21:51

Youth as a consequence of the Beatles really became a dominant influence in clothing and there was a new, incredible renaissance of men's fashion. And it was a moment that I was ready for, and I I I think we we ju I just jumped into this new world.

Presenter22:07

So were you just making the cloth or were you just clothes?

Sir Ernest Hall22:09

We were just making the cloth. But the cloth was the most important part of it. It was a very, it was an incredibly important thing. It was a pure-worsted kind of men's suiting. And the suit business was an astonishing business. I mean, three-piece suits was then selling for less than £30 in the early 1970s. I think the king at that time was a man called Jeff Quintner, who had 16 shops in London and was retailing over 3,000 suits a week in the early 70s. It was a most astonishing time.

Presenter22:38

What did what did your mum and dad think of all of this by this time? And were they were they impressed now by you, this sickly lad of theirs?

Sir Ernest Hall22:46

It's very difficult uh to it's very difficult to say I probably my my relations with them were always I I maintained relations, but my life went into such a kind of uh sphere that it was probably impossible to communicate what I was thinking and what I was doing, and it was so far outside their own experience that I I think it was incomprehensible.

Sir Ernest Hall23:11

My mother's incredibly puritanical and she attaches absolutely no importance to any kind of success because her concern is that if you make people feel who've done well how wonderful they are, what do you do to other people who haven't done so well? And even with the lack of education, she has this incredible sensitivity and wisdom to realize that it's a very dangerous thing to extol the virtues of people and not think about other people.

Presenter23:38

You don't believe in that, though surely I'm sure you praise your children whenever they achieve it.

Sir Ernest Hall23:38

But it's a

Sir Ernest Hall23:41

I do, but of course I'm I've I've become nearer as middle class than my parents ever were, so I probably am a victim of that. Of course, parental pride is something you can't I can't resist.

Presenter23:52

More music

Sir Ernest Hall23:53

My four children, Virginia, Vivian, Jeremy and Tom, all went to Dartington and whilst I was whilst they were there, I forced Virginia and Vivian to learn the the violin. I thought they would take it and with my first wife, June, being a pianist, we assumed they would all be instant, instrumentalists and be as devoted to music from the age of eight as we'd been.

Sir Ernest Hall24:15

Well, of course we discovered it doesn't work like that. And although they started the violin, it never became the kind of preoccupation that it had been for us. And I tried to force my son Jeremy to learn the violin and piano and refused. And when he went to Dartington, he rang me.

Sir Ernest Hall24:29

one day, and said, Will you buy me a guitar?

Sir Ernest Hall24:33

And I had this image of a guitar thrown in the corner after a week, and I said no.

Sir Ernest Hall24:37

Immediately, a knee-jerk reaction, and he said, That's the trouble with you, you're a musical snob. If I'd asked you to buy me a violin, you'd have said yes. I thought I was my destiny as a parent was to lead, but I now realize it's to follow that one of the great excitements for me has been sharing their discoveries. And my life would never have been the same if I hadn't listened to the kind of music which they love.

Speaker 425:03

Hmm.

Presenter25:25

Bobby Wellens playing I'm a Fool to Want You. Your musical ambition, um Ernest, might have been put on hold while you made your money and you made even more in the seventies in property development.

Speaker 425:35

Uh

Sir Ernest Hall25:35

I do.

Presenter25:36

But did you go on practising the piano? Did you go on keeping your fingers?

Sir Ernest Hall25:38

There were two composers I played always during this period. One was Bach and the other was Chopin. I couldn't live without that sense that somehow I was curling myself in reserve. I never imagined I was going to become a professional pianist, as it were, but I knew that my life as a pianist, destined to be a pianist, I'd never abandoned the sense that I was a pianist, and I was, first and foremost, somebody who was passionate about music. I mean, Nietzsche said the love of music is in itself enough to make life worthwhile. It's difficult to put that into the context of being successful, but I know for me it has a kind of

Sir Ernest Hall26:18

Truth that it music means so much to me that I can't imagine anything in my life happening unless I'd had that passion for music.

Presenter26:26

But it's also as you I think mentioned earlier, it's to do with your enthusiasm. I mean neither presumably did you imagine that you'd become a horseman and at some point, not too long ago, you you turned to three day eventing.

Sir Ernest Hall26:33

Now let's

Sir Ernest Hall26:35

You know, not

Sir Ernest Hall26:38

I did. Well, no, I never got to three days. I did two day eventually, which was daunting enough. I met Sarah in 1974, and we married in 1975, so 23 years ago. Through that change in my life, I discovered incredible things about myself. I'd always been physically a diffident, uncoordinated, unbalanced child. As I said, I couldn't climb a gate, I couldn't do anything as a child.

Sir Ernest Hall27:09

As a consequence of Sarah's influence in the when I was forty-five, six, seven, I started to ride and I found that my far from being uncoordinated, I was coordinated, I was balanced, far from being too diffident and afraid, I could ride cross country. And so I began to become ambitious. And I did have one or two minor problems, like a common utility fracture of the left leg and a brain hemorrhage as a consequence of coming off. I mean it was a perilous period, but it was a wonderful period because I just discovered something about myself that I didn't know.

Presenter27:49

Next piece of music.

Sir Ernest Hall27:50

Well

Presenter27:51

Uh

Sir Ernest Hall27:51

Uh

Presenter27:51

Yeah.

Sir Ernest Hall27:51

My life is unthinkable as an individual. So a life on a desert island is going to be terrifying for me because I lead such a together life and Sarah and I do everything. We love working in the garden together, we love doing the horses, I love watching and making comments and we do everything. And so I have to take some love music with me. And I think the greatest love music ever written and the greatest love story is Wagner's love story of Siegfried and Brunhilde, the ultimate love story of the hero and the goddess from Goethe Dammerung.

Speaker 428:28

This time

Speaker 428:35

Polate aggress.

Speaker 428:42

Faithful

Speaker 428:46

Beef

Speaker 428:49

He's cool.

Speaker 428:53

He's a fine man.

Speaker 428:56

Where these full-on

Speaker 428:59

Fighter Pai T.

Speaker 429:07

Hour Sheer Lord.

Presenter29:22

Dietrich Fischer Dieskau as Gunther in Act Two of Wagner's Goethe Demmerung with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Sir George Schulte. So back to your first dream. When did you decide that it might be possible after all to become a professional pianist?

Sir Ernest Hall29:37

It was really around 1990. I was then 60.

Sir Ernest Hall29:43

And

Sir Ernest Hall29:44

One thing led to another. My success in Dean Klupp uh led to more interest in my piano playing. Extraordinarily. I think uh I've discovered

Sir Ernest Hall29:54

That

Sir Ernest Hall29:56

The kind of obstacles I believed existed in my twenties, actually, with application and hard work, you could find that your octave playing could improve, that your trill playing could improve, that all the things that you come to believe when you're at that vulnerable age, you've reached you're in this box and you can't get out of it, you've reached the limit of your potential, that this is all a myth and that actually your potential is beyond over the horizon. And when I had left and abandoned my idea of being a musician, I'd heard that John Ogden had played the three Bartock piano concertos at the Edinburgh Festival. And that at the time was proof positive that I'd really made the right decision to abandon the idea of being a pianist, because the Bartocks are probably.

Sir Ernest Hall30:41

Particularly the second Bartok concerto, probably the most dauntingly difficult concertos written. And I conceived the idea with the Symphony of Leeds and David Greed conducting that we would record the three Bartock piano concertos. And I coupled with them the Lutuslski concerto I'd met and I greatly admired wonderful concerto. So I recorded these things at the age of 65 and I put them out in the C D's came out of Bartock at 65. And it was for me, it was again a kind of like the horse riding.

Sir Ernest Hall31:15

I believe, like everybody else and most people believe, that if you haven't done it when you're thirty or forty, you'll never do it. And for me, it was an astonishing discovery that at the age of sixty five I could pick up a dream that I'd had when I was twenty five.

Presenter31:27

The rubber

Sir Ernest Hall31:27

And realize it.

Presenter31:28

And now you've moved on to shopping.

Sir Ernest Hall31:30

Shopping has been so important to me for the whole of my life that I thought it would be something I'd like to do.

Sir Ernest Hall31:36

Would be to record the complete works of Chopin.

Presenter31:38

The complete

Sir Ernest Hall31:38

The complete works of Chopin. It will run to about thirteen C D's and I've so far done two of them, but I now got a programme which will mean that I shall have them done certainly in the next two years. So this is a major project for me and a very exciting project.

Presenter31:39

Come on.

Presenter32:58

My castaway, Sir Ernest Hall, playing Chopin's third schizo in C sharp minor. How many hours a day do you practise, Luda, set time or?

Sir Ernest Hall33:05

Well, I I d I something around three, four, sometimes five, sometimes six. I mean, it depends, but I I think it's a good idea.

Presenter33:12

In your dressing gown before breakfast?

Sir Ernest Hall33:14

Before yes, I can't pass the piano without playing. I in fact, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I mean, I actually thrill at the prospect of getting to that piano. It's remained. Probably if I hadn't been so keen on playing the piano, I might have achieved a great deal more, because it is a kind of seductive way of spending all your time playing. But Casals, we heard earlier, you know, he said when he was in his nineties, he still practiced the cello as if he was going to live to be three hundred. And I fear he's been the role model for me in so many ways, Casals. And I rather fear I'm going to be in the same mold.

Presenter33:48

Yeah.

Presenter33:49

Only one question left really. I mean, so little in life has defeated you. How are you gonna hack it on this desert island? I mean, stripped of everything. Everything.

Sir Ernest Hall33:58

I'm rather good at growing things. So I think I shall enjoy the sort of cultivation of uh food if I can find a few seeds and a few plants to uh to transplant and and look after. But I don't think I'm going to be very much good at uh make rubbing two sticks together to make a fire or

Presenter34:15

But the old positive thinking, the enthusiasm

Sir Ernest Hall34:16

Putting a positive

Sir Ernest Hall34:17

I'm going to try. I'm I'm convinced that I would be able to I will be able to make a good job of it in the end. It may take me a long time. Sometime this is a great thing. I mean, we're all s slower or faster in developing, so I'm I may be a slow developer, but I'm convinced I'm going to get there in the end.

Speaker 334:33

Master Echo

Sir Ernest Hall34:34

Well, the last record is I suppose one of the most exciting things for me about having.

Sir Ernest Hall34:39

Five children, and my fifth child, Leopold, who's now thirteen, all of them, I'm glad to say, absolutely adore music. And I think of all the pop groups that I've heard over the years, and I've heard all of them I think and I've loved a lot of them, there's one group which has weathered the test of time for the past twenty years. And so I think I've got to have this one group, Steely Dan, and I want to h listen to Black Cow, which will remind me of all these other wonderful groups who are perhaps more transient but still enjoyable temporarily.

Speaker 435:11

I'm not sure.

Speaker 435:21

Break away.

Speaker 435:23

When it seems so clear that it's over now.

Speaker 435:28

Drink your big black cow

Speaker 435:31

And get outta here.

Presenter35:37

Steely Dan and Black Cow. Well, that was different from the rest. What about if you could only take one of them?

Sir Ernest Hall35:43

I think I have to take the Corto Tibon pabloca sals.

Presenter35:48

Mr Schubert.

Sir Ernest Hall35:49

The Schubert.

Presenter35:51

What about your book?

Sir Ernest Hall35:53

I'd love to have the complete works of William Blake. It does come in one book, and Blake's meant so much to me during my life. When I was a student in Manchester, I used to go and look at the

Sir Ernest Hall36:02

Ancient of Days in the Whitworth Gallery, which is just walking distance from the Royal Medicine College, so he's been a very important part of my life.

Presenter36:09

And what about your luxury?

Sir Ernest Hall36:11

I I wo I think I have to take a piano.

Presenter36:14

Sir Ernest Hall, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 336:25

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