John Rutter

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. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and five, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My castaway this week is a composer. This Christmas his music is being heard in concerts and churches all over the world. He's the most celebrated and commercially successful composer of carols alive today. Inspired and encouraged by his school education, he became Director of Music at Clare College, Cambridge, and then with a string of winning commissions already behind him, moved into full-time composition. These days he runs his own record label and directs his own choir, the Cambridge Singers. But most of all, he composes. Traditional, attractive music firmly established at the centre of Christian worship, wherever it's practised. I take sounds in the air and use them, he says. I write music that people will enjoy singing. I'm not ashamed of that. He is John Rutter. John, the Shepherd's Pipe Carol has to be your most popular carol. I think it's your signature tune, really. Wasn't it one of the first you ever wrote?

John Rutter1:24

It was um I think the year was nineteen sixty six, and the occasion was a concert in Clare College, where there was a little gap at the end, and I thought I need just a bit more music to pad out the programme, so I thought I would write a carol.

Presenter1:39

Uh

John Rutter1:39

So you just

Presenter1:39

So you just knocked one off?

John Rutter1:40

I did, yesterday before.

Presenter1:42

Amazing. That's your great trick. You have a gift for melody which a lot of composers would kill for. You just pluck them out of the air, do you?

John Rutter1:49

Well, I'm a magpie. I think composers are divided into two types. There's explorers whose destiny is to discover new sounds. And I think there's those like me who are very happy to use all of the sounds and the ideas that are there and to make a personal synthesis of them. And so I don't think I've trodden any new paths, I'm afraid. But people do tell me my music does sound like me.

Presenter2:16

But it's interesting that we connect you first of all with carols, because you do a lot of other work as well. You write, write other, and you've written a a Requiem Mass, you've written other large works, Mass for Children. But we connect you with Carols, I think, because of their simplicity. And that's really what we're talking about here, isn't it? That Carols are allowed to be perhaps we suspend our stylistic requirements, do we, at Christmas? And carols are allowed to be pure, simple and beautiful.

John Rutter2:43

I think there's a general amnesty on modernism in the month of Christmas, and you're allowed to be simple, and that's something that I've always appreciated, because when I started out as a composer, simplicity was not something that was generally allowed.

Presenter2:58

Well, you you the the fashion was avant-garde, wasn't it? And you were you were really creating something that was melodic, tuneful, simple.

John Rutter3:06

Yes, and I suppose the thing is this, that that I was trained as a classical musician, but as a classical composer there weren't very many outlets for what you could loosely call hummable tunes in the nineteen fifties and sixties when I started. And I think it was just a way of slipping a few tunes in at a time of year when nobody would mind.

Presenter3:26

But how difficult is it, as we say, the requirement is that a carol should be joyful, uplifting, but, more than anything else, simple and, I presume, as in most things, simplicity is one of the most difficult things to achieve.

John Rutter3:40

Yes, I mean very often you begin with a complex idea as a composer and you refine it down until it becomes simpler and simpler. I love melody, and I grew up singing from when I was very small, and so I think I have just a sense a sense of melody, which is probably a pure gift.

Presenter3:58

Well, here's a beautiful carol, your first one for your desert island. Why have you taken this one?

John Rutter4:02

Well, I think I would want to celebrate Christmas, even though I was by myself on my desert island, and I would also want to be reminded of Christmas in Cambridge. And for me nothing sums it up better than the choir of King's College singing in the bleak midwinter by Harold Dark.

Speaker 44:26

Or stay waiting.

Speaker 44:33

God's foretold as long.

Speaker 44:49

Uh

Speaker 44:50

So

Speaker 44:54

See what

Presenter5:20

That's the choir of King's College, Cambridge, directed by Sir David Wilcox, singing In the Bleak Midwinter, arranged by Harold Darke, a Christina Rossetti poem, isn't it? Harold Darke had one day of genius when he wrote that one, you said.

John Rutter5:32

Yes, he really didn't write much else that is still performed, but he had an exceptionally good day when he wrote that.

Presenter5:38

But it's perfect, isn't it? It just conjures up all the elements of a Christian Christmas, you know, the cold and the birth and love and humility. It's perfect peace.

John Rutter5:46

They even sing it in Australia in sweltering temperatures.

Presenter5:50

So here you are, John, the most, as I've said, commercially successful classical composer alive, regularly conducting at Carnegie Hall. Your requiem was played in New York at services, Mourning the Dead of 9-11. You've written compositions for Queen Mother's Hundredth Birthday, Queen's Golden Jubilee. And yet, and yet, in your family history apparently, there is practically no trace of musical talent.

John Rutter6:14

My wife has had a little search but hasn't come up with any composers or musicians that we know of, except back in the Tudor court there was a very obscure composer called Rutter and not one note of his work survives. And so my ancestor might have served King Henry VIII, but really I can't tell you any more than that. And certainly my immediate family was not musical.

Presenter6:39

But your your father did I mean, was there a piano in the house? Did your mother strum it? Or?

John Rutter6:43

There was an old upright piano that was in our flat, left there by the previous occupants because they couldn't get it down the stairs. It was horribly out of tune, but I can't have been more than three or four years old when I first climbed up to it and instantly entered a world of magic that I've been inhabiting ever since, really.

Presenter7:02

Were you taught, or could you just play it?

John Rutter7:04

I could just play it. I used to listen to things on the radio and pick them out on the piano, um singing along in a piping treble voice. And this was quite bewildering to my parents.

Presenter7:14

And what did they do for a living, your mum and dad?

John Rutter7:16

My father was an industrial chemist, and my mum really looked after me, and so she didn't work outside the home at that time.

Presenter7:24

And where was the home with this upright piano in it?

John Rutter7:24

And by a w

John Rutter7:26

It was a flat over a pub which is there to this day in Baker Street called The Globe. And um like many people after the war, um my parents couldn't really find anywhere to live. And my grandma kept this pub rather large, gloomy place. I think they've cheered it up now. And that's where I spent the first ten years of my life.

Presenter7:47

Record number two.

John Rutter7:48

Well, I think that every day would begin on the desert island probably with a beautiful sunrise. But in case it didn't, it would be lovely to have a musical evocation of a sunrise. And for me, the one that always brings tears to my eyes is from Haydn's Creation. It depicts the first morning when God created man. I think it's a lovely, lovely piece, and it's from a work which is very special to me because Haydn's Creation was the first great choral work I sang in at school.

Presenter9:08

The introduction morning to part three of Haydn's Creation played by the English Baroque Soloists conducted by John Elliott Gardner, in which you sang, you say, John Rutter, as a boy treble at school, Highgett School, where you went as a junior and then on into the senior school a school with a strong musical tradition.

Presenter9:26

Every one was encouraged to sing, I gather, even the corncrakes. What kind of stuff did you do?

John Rutter9:31

Absolutely all sorts, but great works were sung by the concert chorus. I remember not just Messiah and all of those, but we did the tippet child of our time in the presence of the composer one year. Very adventurous. He didn't smile much during the performance. I don't think it was our finest hour. Might have been a little beyond us.

Presenter9:50

And there were other I mean there were other musicians, p people who've gone on to be be famous musicians, right?

John Rutter9:54

Many. The thing was that it all stemmed really from an inspirational director of music whose name was Edward Chapman. He had a breadth of musicianship which I think we couldn't but learn from and he instilled in all of us a kind of confidence to have a go at music and to spread our wings and composition was thought of as quite normal that a number of us would actually scribble all sorts of things in our little notebooks.

Presenter10:20

But I mean, let's name some of these people who were there. Y your contemporaries, John Taverneau, the composer.

John Rutter10:24

Well, of course, I mean, he was the lanky lad who used to stand next to me and choir. And it was clear, I think, even then that he was destined for fame and fortune. And then, on my very first day at Highgate, my shepherd, as it were, the person who was assigned to show me around, was a lad called Nicholas Snowman. And I said to him, What do you want to do when you grow up? And he said, I want to run Blinebourne. And he achieved it. He did it. There was Howard Shelley, who, of course, was even then a prodigiously wonderful pianist.

Presenter10:33

Mm.

Presenter10:48

He did it.

Presenter10:56

You mentioned Michael Tippett. Didn't you also perform for Benjamin Britton at one point?

John Rutter11:00

We did because our school choir was a good one, and we were sometimes asked to take part in symphonic performances of works that needed a boys' choir, and I suppose the War Requiem was the most remarkable example of that. It was very new, and when it came to the recording in nineteen sixty three, our school choir.

Presenter11:16

This is the classic recording, isn't it?

John Rutter11:18

I'm in it, and if you listen very hard you can hear a rather squawky alto, and that's me. And of course it was a life changing experience because we all knew that we were touching the hem of musical history garment really. It was extraordinary.

Presenter11:34

You said that he had Mona Lisa eyes.

John Rutter11:37

He seemed to be watching you wherever you were. He never raised his voice. He didn't have to. He had natural authority. And he had us under his spell.

Presenter11:48

Echo number three.

John Rutter11:49

We sang in so many wonderful pieces at school, and the second great work I sang in was the Bach B minor Mas. And of course at Christmas time the words of the Angels to the Shepherds, Gloria and Exchelsis Deo, just sum up what it's all about.

Presenter12:56

Gloria in exchelsisdeo from Bach's Mass in B minor, performed by the chorus and orchestra of the Collegium Vocale, conducted by Philippe Hereweger. And that was the piece, you say, John Rutter, which which made you decide that you were going to take up music for a living, as it were.

John Rutter13:11

I was fourteen and I think that singing that work was what made me think nothing else will do but music. I want to make this my life. I want to be involved in this forever.

Presenter13:22

However, you went up to Cambridge to read modern languages. You obviously lost the confidence or the drive to do it.

John Rutter13:28

Well, that was a wrong turning and I went in for the Cambridge Scholarship Exam in Modern Languages. But on presenting myself for interview, I said to the senior tutor, look, I may as well come clean about this. I don't actually want to do modern languages. Can I please do music instead? And he puffed at his pipe and said, oh, well, we've got quite a few of those around here. I mean, I'm sure you'll fit in.

Presenter13:50

So you swapped on the first day, did you?

John Rutter13:52

Yes. Um th they were wonderfully flexible, and I should bless that dear senior tutor for his kindness and his faith in me.

Presenter14:00

But you were in Clare College. Next door was King's College, which was run by the the the king of the Carroll himself, David Wilcox. How did you come to meet him?

John Rutter14:11

I was a member of his Harmony and Counterpoint class, and he would look through our Harmony exercises, and I think he must have spotted something he liked in one of mine, because he took me aside and said, Well, I believe that you've been writing some Christmas carols and of course my heart sank at that point because I thought, Oh dear, you know, here's the king of the Christmas carol.

Presenter14:29

Yeah, you know.

John Rutter14:32

And he said, would you come and present yourself at my rooms at nine o'clock on Monday morning and bring along some of what you've written? And in fact, he looked through a number of pieces, including, I think, the Shepherd's Pipe Carol, without a word. And at the end of it, he looked up from his desk and said, would you be interested in these being published? And I didn't argue with him. And within, I think, a matter of just a few days, I got an offer of publication.

Presenter14:55

Yeah.

Presenter14:59

Amazing. And he then invited you to collaborate with him on on what's known, I think, as the Orange Book, but it's it's a carols for choirs. I m I mean there must be one in every church vestry in the land, isn't there?

John Rutter15:11

Well that series of books got around far more widely than anybody ever thought it would. And here we are, sort of forty years on and um people are still caroling away from them. It's rather remarkable but

Presenter15:11

Or across the world.

Presenter15:25

How many

John Rutter15:25

Uh

Presenter15:25

The addition

John Rutter15:25

Have there been Oh good l good Lord, countless reprints I think. But he had tremendous faith in me because I was quite young and untried. And he took me on board as his assistant. He was the one who enabled me to make the leap from being aspiring composer to published composer. And I don't think I'd have ever dared to show any of my work to a publisher myself, but he did it for me.

John Rutter15:49

Number four.

John Rutter15:51

Well, this is actually going off in a different direction, really, because at that sort of age, you always have composer heroes, composers whose work you just love. And of course, with the living ones, you think to yourself, well, I wonder if one day I might meet him. And it came about in the early 1970s that I actually did meet Sir William Walton. That was a great moment. So I want Sir William Walton on my desert island, and I want some Shakespeare, and I love film music. And so Henry V brings it all together. I would love to hear the human voice on the desert island, and of course I would want it to be one of our great Shakespearean actors. And this is Laurence Olivier.

Speaker 416:31

In little room confining mighty men.

Speaker 416:35

Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.

Speaker 416:40

Small time

Speaker 416:41

But in that small, most greatly lived this Tower of England.

Speaker 416:48

Fortune made his soul.

Speaker 416:50

And for his sake, in your fair minds, let this acceptance tame.

Presenter17:30

Sir Laurence Olivier delivering the epilogue from Shakespeare's Henry V with William Walton's music for the film, played by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Walton himself. So you stayed on, John, in Cambridge, on and on and on, really, didn't you? You've gone up in about 64 and you were still, I think you were there till the end of the 70s. You became director of music at Clare College, Cambridge. But how, I mean, tell me, a very basic question. How do you make a living as a musician in Cambridge in those years?

John Rutter17:59

Well in bits and pieces I did quite a bit of teaching, sort of one-to-one teaching, which was paid by the hour. And then I was starting to get commissions little by little as a composer. And so that brought in a certain amount of income. And I worked as a copyist. In the days before computers, orchestral parts always had to be hand-copied. And I used to do quite a lot of that, sat up all night sometimes.

Presenter18:24

So it's a sort of portfolio of very small bits, really, because none of these is is excessively lucrative, I take it.

John Rutter18:30

No, that's right. Um it was it was a living made up in bits and pieces, but at the time I was only keeping one person and so

Presenter18:37

And what would you have got as Director of Music at Clare College? What would you have been paid?

John Rutter18:41

Well, it was three hundred and fifty pounds a year, but it did rise to five hundred pounds a year, which was not princely even then. But um the master of the college said to me when he offered me the job, Well, look, you know, you've chosen another profession as composer, so I assume you have an income. And would you be willing to to do this for more or less just a small honorarium?

Presenter19:01

So it's composition that really brings in the money, is it? Ev every time something's played, you get paid.

John Rutter19:07

Yes, um that that's the way that it works. And I've always wanted my compositions to be able to pay their way. And so rather unusually it's my composition which has subsidized other things I've done, like uh teaching and conducting, rather than the other way round, which is how it often is with with composers.

Presenter19:13

Uh

Presenter19:23

And you mentioned conducting you mentioned Benjamin Britton earlier on and how paternalistic in a way he was with the the choirs and orchestras ranged before him. Is that how it feels? I mean, it strikes me that as a conductor you are

Presenter19:39

Leading the way you are asking people to be complicit with you. Do you regard them as your family, as it were?

John Rutter19:46

Oh yes. I love conducting, mainly because it's not composing, I think, and it's also social. Composition is solitary. I don't really enjoy composing. I like having pieces finished. But starting a new piece is really hell on earth. I mean that's the moment where you find every possible delaying tactic that you can. And if you happen to be recording or conducting the premiere, that's glorious, because that moment of the downbeat when you first hear the things that you've only heard in your head translated into real sound, that's a thrill absolutely like no other.

Presenter20:25

These are good.

John Rutter20:25

Mozart, if I have to pick just one piece, I would like it to be the piano quartet in G minor, because it's the work that my son, who's a violinist, is playing just at this very moment with his friends at school. And this particular performance is rather special because Benjamin Britton is playing the piano part. He was a wonderful pianist, and so it's a reminder of him.

Presenter21:43

Part of the final movement of Mozart's piano quartet in G minor, with Benjamin Britton playing the piano and Kenneth Sillito, Cecil Aronowitz and Kenneth Heath making up the quartet. By the early eighties, John, you had your own choir, twenty-eight voice Cambridge singers, and you were performing and recording and composing. It was really your wife, Joanne, I think, who suggested you should set up your own label. You were doing it all anyway. Why didn't you publish it?

John Rutter22:10

Well, I think that's right. It started in a very small way. The thing was that I had my choir, the Cambridge Singers, which I'd set up. And it seemed natural once I'd formed the Cambridge Singers to have a home for them on record. Because I made a decision, which I think was probably the right one, not to do live concerts with this choir, because I knew once I got drawn into the world of live concerts and touring and promotion and all that kind of thing, I probably would have an excuse never to compose. And I'd have felt bad about myself if I never wrote anything. And so I thought I can limit it to recordings. I like music making just when there's a red light and concentration and no audience. That's meaningful to me as well.

Presenter22:37

Yeah.

Presenter22:52

It's purer, I suppose, is what you're saying. You can you can craft it better, you can absolutely give attention to every single detail of it and get it right.

John Rutter22:59

In a way that you can't in a live concert. That that's true. And I think I developed a taste for that from the years when I was directing Clare Chapel Choir in our lovely little eighteenth century chapel, which would often be empty for a weekday evening song. It would be just us and the dean and the lesson reader and the chaplain.

Presenter23:01

Shoot.

Presenter23:17

You're singing to yourself.

John Rutter23:18

Singing to ourselves and singing all my favourite pieces. I always programmed my very favourite bird motets and so forth for weekday evening songs when there wouldn't be a congregation to disturb us. Perhaps that was selfish, but I loved it. And so in the 80s, I decided that I would set up my label and that we would essentially just record music which I thought needed recording or hadn't been. An awful lot of choral literature was not then as well known as it is now. And I had a very expert young choir.

Presenter23:50

But the market welcomed it. That was the great thing, wasn't it? There was a there was a gap in the market, and you found it.

John Rutter23:55

By accident.

John Rutter23:57

But I did.

Presenter23:58

Number six.

John Rutter24:00

I've always adored the musical theatre. I think my parents took me to Oklahoma when I was a kid, and I was hooked. This is by Lerner and Lowe, and it's from their first successful show, Brigadoon. It sums up that wonderful, glad-to-be-alive sort of optimism of the American dream and the American musical theatre. And of course, it's terribly poignant in a way because so many of Lerner and Lowe's people back in Europe who had not managed to escape Hitler were not alive. And when this show was produced in 1947, there was, I think, a real resonance to that because life was a gift to be celebrated, and there were many who had lost their lives.

Speaker 424:41

What a day this has been, what a ram mood I'm in, White.

Speaker 424:51

Almost like being in love.

Speaker 324:54

Uh

Speaker 424:56

There's a smile on my face For the whole human race Why it's almost like being in love

Presenter25:11

Jack Cassidy and almost like being in love from Lerner and Lowe's Brigadoon. You you stopped writing commissions on your fortieth birthday, or round your fortieth birthday, didn't you? Because you felt, I think, endlessly pressured by deadlines which you've been mentioning. You you in fact became quite ill, I think.

John Rutter25:26

Well, I got an illness that I wouldn't recommend to anyone called myalgic encephalomyelitis, ME for short, otherwise known as yuppie flu, and um it was really seven years, I suppose, in the nineteen eighties where I was well below my best. And so I thought that it wasn't a good idea to continue with commissioned work, because in the end you have to deliver a piece by the set agreed time. It's no good finishing a piece the day after the concert.

Presenter25:50

Isn't it?

Presenter25:53

Ugh.

John Rutter25:53

Um

Presenter25:54

But I presume being a composer can be quite a a a selfish business anyway. I mean you had by then your your wife and two boys, and presumably you had to cut yourself off from them to get done what you were going to do anyway.

John Rutter26:05

I regret that now. Um

John Rutter26:08

I think given my time again, I perhaps wouldn't be as single-minded and I wouldn't work as hard as I did in those years because I know that I neglected my children and I wasn't always easy to live with, really because of the stresses and strains of the business and not being well. The trouble with composition is it's a compulsion. It doesn't necessarily make you happy, but you feel you've got to do it. And so it is very much a regret that I didn't spend more time with my wife and kids when they were growing up.

Speaker 426:33

Hmm.

Presenter26:43

And tragically, one of your sons was killed a few years ago, so I suppose you've felt that even more strongly that, you know, you look back on time not spent with him.

John Rutter26:53

Yes.

Presenter26:53

Yes, the merch.

John Rutter26:53

My oldest son, Christopher, was 19 when he was run over in his first year as a student at my old college, Clare College in Cambridge. And if I had known that we were only going to have 19 years together, of course I would have spent them differently, but you can't know that in advance.

Presenter27:15

Push it.

John Rutter27:15

We can't.

Presenter27:15

Um

Presenter27:17

You've you wrote after he died, you wrote um um quite a major work in Du Masse for Children. Is that in his memory?

John Rutter27:24

It wasn't meant to be, but quite a number of people have said that they do see signs of Christopher in that piece. He read computer science at Cambridge. He had the ability that I wished I had and didn't, which was mathematics. And at the same time, he was a singer. He had a lovely baritone voice. And so in a sense, maybe there's something of him in that piece. It was the first larger scale thing I wrote after his death.

Presenter27:55

Next record.

John Rutter27:57

This is pure self-indulgence. Rachmaninoff is a composer who was not awfully fashionable when I started out, and I think his tremendous merits are now appreciated much better. There's a wonderful feeling in the work I've chosen, which is the Second Symphony, that this was music that just poured out of him. It's music that had to be written. But when the clarinet solo comes in in the slow movement, it's like the composer is speaking personally to each and every one of us.

Presenter29:20

The opening of the third movement of Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. Two in E minor performed by the Koncertgebar Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazi.

Presenter29:28

John, by the very nature of your work, you're steeped in Christianity. Are you a religious man?

John Rutter29:35

Well

John Rutter29:36

Yes and no. I'm an agnostic, I suppose, if you want to stick a label on me. But as I get older, the more I realise that the person I am is shaped by the traditions and the ideas of Christianity. And of course, I just love the music and the liturgy. It's been part of my life. And to this day, the framework of the offices of the church is still something I couldn't be without. I'm just not very good at signing up on dotted lines, really.

Presenter30:03

Two.

Presenter30:08

But it would be very difficult, would it not, to to um write a setting for a sacred text if you believed it to be a load of hokeum? I mean, it would be an act of supreme hypocrisy. You have to have some.

John Rutter30:20

It would, of course, and I would never set a text I disagree with and I look for vision and poetry and beauty in all the texts that I set. In a sense, I enter into states of faith which are perhaps not my own when I set a religious text to music or when I conduct it. I believe absolutely every syllable of it then.

Presenter30:43

And on Christmas Day, do you go to church? Do you need to hear music in the setting for which it's written? Does th do you is that the way you find it uplifting? Or was playing it at home full blast good enough for you?

John Rutter30:55

I think that public worship is rather well, public occasions of any kind are different from listening on your own, and I do need that at certain key points in my life. So I have been known to sneak into the back of a cathedral when no one's looking.

John Rutter31:10

Last record.

John Rutter31:12

Well, on my desert island, I would want to end each day peacefully. I don't usually have much trouble getting to sleep, but just in case I did, it would be lovely to listen to and perhaps sing along with the Office of Compline, which is the last of the daily monastic offices, sung to Gregorian chant, which I've always loved. And this particular recording would be a memento for me of the Cambridge singers, because I know I would miss them terribly on the Desert Island.

Speaker 431:40

Glory be to the Father and to the Son.

Speaker 431:48

Praise to the Holy Ghost.

Speaker 431:53

As it was in the beginning, Slide never shined.

Speaker 432:04

One without man.

Speaker 432:12

Please help us the Lord by me, and God using That awake we may watch with cries, And asleep we may wear sleep.

John Rutter32:25

But away we may watch with cry.

Presenter32:40

Keep me as the apple of an eye from the office of Compline, performed by the Cambridge Singers, conducted by my castaway, John Rutter. John, if you could only take one of those eight records, which one would you take?

John Rutter32:51

Oh gosh.

John Rutter32:53

I think it would have to be Bach.

Presenter32:58

The B minor mass.

John Rutter32:59

We might unmask.

Presenter33:00

Okay.

John Rutter33:01

The sound of Bach, I think, would always raise my spirits, no matter how depressed I might be.

Presenter33:07

What about your book? You get the Bible and Shakespeare, as you know.

John Rutter33:10

This book doesn't actually exist. It would have to be made up specially for me on the desert island. But it would be Teach Yourself Mathematics, because I've always felt I should learn mathematics, and it was what my older son, Christopher, was good at. And perhaps if I really did learn mathematics, he might be proud of me. But this is the little twist that I would like it to have illustrations of gorgeous, voluptuous women, as portrayed by Rubens and Velasquis and Titian and the great artists of the past, because if my motivation weakened a little bit, then maybe I'd just be given a little spur. And of course they'd be a lovely reminder of what I was missing.

Presenter33:49

It sounds as if that's your luxury as well, actually, but I dare say you've got one of those there too, have you?

John Rutter33:50

Yeah.

John Rutter33:54

Well, um I'm not sure whether um for a musician a musical instrument counts as a luxury because I suppose I'd I'd like to have a viola and it's the instrument my wife and my son play and it's my guilty secret that I don't play a stringed instrument. I would love to be able to. With all the time in the world I think I'd like to learn on my desert island.

Presenter34:15

John Rutter, thank you very much for all your Christmas carols and for letting us hear your Desert Island discs, and happy Christmas. And to you.

Speaker 334:30

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

Speaker 435:21

Uh