Ian Bostridge

Presenter0:00

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 eight.

Presenter0:26

My castaway this week is the tenor Ian Bostridge. Regarded as one of the great leader singers of our time, he has delighted audiences in opera houses and concert halls the world over. But it wasn't a straightforward career choice. He started out as a historian, and for years led two parallel lives, spending term time at Oxford writing about witchcraft and magic, whilst in the holidays throwing himself into operatic productions. Magic appeals to people in a way that is both mysterious and irrational, and so it is, he says, not so different to music.

Presenter1:03

Ian Bostridge, it is a a very curious combination. You're someone whose approach to work, obviously your academic work, had to be very thorough, very studied, and yet your approach to music

Presenter1:16

I suppose has to be emotional, it has to be an emotional response that's not necessarily intellectualized and thought through.

Ian Bostridge1:23

Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, music is a sort of release for me, I think. I mean, I didn't have a musical education. I didn't study an instrument at school. I started music O level but gave up after about two weeks, so I never learnt my key signatures or music theory and that sort of thing. And whatever I have picked up on the sort of theoretical side of music has come in bits and pieces through working.

Presenter1:45

So at the time that you were running these two lives in parallel then, did you feel that when you went to sing, in a way, it was a wonderful escape from what you had to do every day?

Ian Bostridge1:47

Handle the

Ian Bostridge1:54

It was a wonderful escape, but it was slightly. It was very stressful. I mean, it was very stressful performing because I hadn't.

Ian Bostridge2:01

really been trained to do it. I mean, I hadn't been trained it even to cope technically with the demands of of singing that much and singing in such an exposed way. And then going back to Oxford to be an academic again, it that was stressful as well.

Speaker 42:05

Did

Presenter2:14

Was it a sort of schizophrenic existence?

Ian Bostridge2:16

Yes, I think it was. I felt embarrassed by it. I've found out since that people found it quite fascinating that I was doing these two different things, but I found it.

Ian Bostridge2:25

Unsettling.

Presenter2:26

Embarrassed because you thought what your colleagues y your academic colleagues would would judge you, would think you weren't serious? Would think I wasn't serious.

Ian Bostridge2:34

Yeah. Which I don't as I said, I don't actually think is true. I think there were actually much more

Ian Bostridge2:38

generous and much more interested in that. And I think I'm just probably an anxious person and I just wanted something to be anxious about. And then that probably fed beautifully into my anxious performances as a leader singer, because that's all about angst.

Ian Bostridge2:50

Was there a clear point then when music won out? It was pretty clear because I had a three-year research fellowship to write a book. And in the vacation of that second year, I went to summer vacation. I went to Australia to rehearse a production of Midsummer Night's Dream with Baz Luhrmann, the film director, which we then took to the Edinburgh Festival and it got a lot of press. And somebody somewhere picked that up and mentioned it to somebody and it started to become clear where I was going. And we made it I sat down with my academic mentor who was sort of who had supervised my thesis and was the head of my college. And we decided together that I'd cut down on the singing for the next year, I'd finish the book, and then from the autumn of 1995 I'd become a singer full-time and that's what I did. So I was thirty.

Presenter3:42

To a degree it sounds as though your hand was somewhat forced by the publicity surrounding that Bas Luhrmann production. I if it hadn't been, do you think you might have been content to continue on the path of of the two lives?

Ian Bostridge3:47

But

Ian Bostridge3:53

I don't in the end I don't think it would have been possible and I think it would have the crunch point would have come. I'm really grateful to Keith Thomas, who was this person who sorted it out for me, that we could sit down and we could finish it in an orderly way, because it meant I could write the book and feel that I'd achieved something that I wanted to achieve and then I could move on to the next stage of my life.

Presenter4:16

Maybe a little more on the crunch point later. Tell us then about your first piece of music.

Ian Bostridge4:20

Well the man singing this, Dietrich Fischetiskau, is the reason I suppose there are lots of reasons I'm a singer, but he's my great inspiration as a singer. I I first heard him singing on a record at school when I was fourteen in a German lesson. And I became sort of totally obsessed as a teenager with German leader and I listened to Fischetiskau singing all the time because I found it a beautiful voice, I found it very engaging and even when I didn't understand the words I felt he was talking to me.

Speaker 44:53

Dasvanor Vistas Vias Mustas Vaner

Speaker 45:03

Gosmuswein Schlechtor Millers, Field, Asvan, Gasvander, the Asvander, the Svander, the Asvander.

Speaker 45:18

Fum Vassar Ameriusk Er Fom Fasar.

Speaker 15:21

Yeah.

Speaker 45:23

Pompasar Army is good and pompasur.

Speaker 15:26

Yeah.

Speaker 45:28

Dash nich rust by tragracht, these needs of vanelschaft bed, das faster, das faster, das faster, das faster.

Presenter5:40

Dietrich Fiche Descow singing Schubert's Das Vandern. Uh you say he was your inspiration at quite a young age, Dietrich Fiche Descow. Did you ever meet him?

Ian Bostridge5:50

Yes, I don't think you should meet your heroes too much. I mean, I haven't made friends with him. But he was very kind and very inspirational. He sort of I was just recording that piece, Dishona Milaren, and Graham Johnson, the pianist on that project, took me to see Fisherty Scout and he sort of sang in my face, nose to nose. That was his way of sort of inspiring me, really, and teaching me, and it was incredible, and obviously the most enormous thrill.

Presenter6:13

Inspiring you, teaching you, terrifying you, I would imagine.

Ian Bostridge6:16

Uh No. I felt and I didn't feel terr I don't know why I didn't feel terrified, but I d I didn't. And he was he was very charming and he just couldn't believe how skinny I was and that I could make any noise. I mean, I didn't make that much noise, I still don't make that much noise, but he couldn't believe I could make any

Presenter6:17

I thought

Presenter6:31

Noise at all. We're getting ahead of ourselves. I want to find out about you as a little boy.

Ian Bostridge6:35

Boom.

Presenter6:35

Uh you grew up in Streatham, in South London. What was family life like as a little boy?

Ian Bostridge6:38

Yeah, it was

Ian Bostridge6:40

Um, in lots of ways a very secure suburban life. I mean, my parents got divorced. I was sort of ten or eleven when th that started, but I there was an incredible sense of sort of quiet security about living in suburban Streatham and having my friends round the corner and going to I I sang in the local church choir. I d I remember it as being quite idyllic in a way.

Presenter7:01

Now your great-grandfather, who I assume you did you ever meet your great-grandfather?

Ian Bostridge7:05

No, no.

Presenter7:06

He had played for Tottenham Hotspur.

Ian Bostridge7:08

Yes, and and and Mill Wall eventually, which is like the most extraordinary um I mean, to go from playing for M Mill Wall to being a leader singer, there couldn't be much of a great and my father when he came to hear me sing as a grown up, he just there was a level of incomprehension which

Presenter7:14

We won't

Presenter7:23

W was there any sporting prowess with regard to your performance on the field?

Ian Bostridge7:27

Uh no. My brother and I were both completely, completely useless at all forms of sporting activity and I think to m to my father and to my mother as well, who had been captain of the hockey team, it was a little bit mysterious how they had sort of managed to breed these degenerate children.

Ian Bostridge7:43

We really were we were singularly b I mean, I uh maybe I shouldn't speak for my brother'cause maybe he was better than me, but I really was always in, you know, team four and I was always the last to be picked and

Presenter7:53

I I hope you won't take this the wrong way, but you have something of a Peter Crouch build to you. You are that very sort of very, very tall and slim chap.

Ian Bostridge8:00

Yeah, yeah. I I suppose I didn't eat enough. But my father was a b was a big sporting type and I just I was always weedy basically.

Presenter8:08

And your brother Mark was f uh is five years older than you.

Ian Bostridge8:09

Yeah.

Ian Bostridge8:11

Three uh four and a half, yeah.

Presenter8:12

Uh were you were you close to each other? I mean that that is at a young age that is quite a significant age gap.

Ian Bostridge8:18

We were very close to each other and he was really an inspiration to me because he was so interested in history from a very early age. And he used to um he used to give me slide lectures on art history when I was little and set me exams. And he just really encouraged my interest in books and in and in history.

Presenter8:39

And he also passed on the the idea that knowledge uh should be handed down. Were you not lecturing on particle physics to to your uh fellow uh students when you were how old?

Ian Bostridge8:49

Um twelve or thirteen I gave a lecture on cosmology and a lecture on general relativity to my um class because I found that fascinating.

Presenter8:57

A couple of little bookish boffins there you were.

Ian Bostridge9:00

There you were. Yes. And I mean, there was. Uh, yes, with held together with sellotape, very, very thick. I I'd embraced the sort of boffin role, I think.

Presenter9:09

Tell me about your second piece of music, then.

Ian Bostridge9:12

This is the Countess's Aria from The Marriage of Figaro. I choose it partly because well, mainly because The Marriage of Figaro is my favourite opera. But I also choose it because when I was fourteen or fifteen and my voice was on the turn at school, there was a house music competition and the head of house decided it would be great if I could sing two pieces, one in my sort of slightly failing soprano voice and one in my very as yet very, very weak tenor voice. But I did sing it. But Gunda Ljanovich sings it an awful lot better.

Speaker 49:59

We wish you

Speaker 410:08

Uh

Speaker 410:29

Yeah.

Presenter10:45

Gundolojanovitch singing Dovisono, the Countess's Aria from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro memories for you, Ian Bostridge, of singing that very aria. Can you remember where the world of classical music really opened up to you? I mean, was there a moment where you thought, look at this, or listen rather, to this treasure trove?

Ian Bostridge11:03

Really, from uh I had I've I've been so lucky in my life with teachers. I've had at least a dozen amazing, amazing inspirational teachers. And there was a teacher at my prep school called Michael Spencer who was fabulously enthusiastic and ambitious in the best sense for us to do fantastic things. That was where it really opened up. And also he'd played us records in music classes and that got me into listening to stuff.

Presenter11:25

And what about the anxiousness? I mean, you said you said as a as a grown up, you know, you have that anxious quality. As a little boy, did did did performing give you angst? Did it give you worry?

Ian Bostridge11:29

Okay.

Ian Bostridge11:30

Pomcey

Ian Bostridge11:35

I think so. I think I was always a slightly embarrassed performer. I I used to s always blush, I remember, when I sang as a little boy. And I remember the very first time I sang a solo at my church choir. I went wrong and I burst into tears, and the vicar was incredibly nice nice to me, but it's I suppose that's a sort of ur experience. It's funny, I don't feel that any more. I feel ver as when I perform, I feel very

Ian Bostridge11:59

I mean, I use angst in performance because that's what Leader is about. It's romantic poetry. It's about lost love and death and anxious making subjects. But I as a performer I think I'm very unanxious. It makes me fi I being on stage and performing makes me feel

Speaker 112:08

Yeah.

Ian Bostridge12:16

Confident. Which is funny'cause I wasn't a confident performer as a child.

Presenter12:19

And you went first to Dulwich College, then to Westminster. I mean, b both of these things would seem to point to the fact that your your parents had uh had great ambitions, academic ambitions, for their sons.

Ian Bostridge12:22

Young

Ian Bostridge12:29

Yes, neither of them had been to university, but they were very keen to encourage our you know our intellectual interests. I remember when I was at Westminster, I was at school sort of in the shadow of Westminster Abbey, and my father was working across St James's Park in Pall Mall in his office, and we'd meet every Friday and he'd take me to Hatchard's to buy a book every week. So there was always this encouragement not to make lots of money, but to actually to fulfil ourselves intellectually. And that's that's uh and from my mother as as well, who is amazing now is in her eighties and is still going to she's just started philosophy classes and goes to music classes and is always learning.

Presenter13:09

Tell me about your next piece of music then.

Ian Bostridge13:11

Um this is Beethoven's penultimate piano sonata, Opus 110, and it's a recording by Arta Schnabel, which was r Arta Schnabel was the first person really to record all these sonatas in the nineteen twenties, so the sound is slightly dodgy, but he does this amazing thing of sort of gesturing towards an ideal playing of the piece. It's sometimes a little bit out of control. I mean that was what they always said about Schnabel, he wanted to play the impossible somehow.

Presenter14:35

Arto Schnabel playing part of the last movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. thirty one in A-flat. Uh the music Ian Bostridge You Want to Die to

Ian Bostridge14:44

Uh, sort of. I mean music is so much music is about last things in a way. It expresses all sorts of inexpressible things and allows one to confront impossible things, I think. And that is one of for me one of the most

Ian Bostridge15:00

Amazing pieces in that.

Ian Bostridge15:03

Vain, I suppose.

Presenter15:05

I want to take you back to nineteen seventy nine. Uh most people you were around about fifteen then most people then would have been listening to what the police, Iain Jury, the blockheads, blondie.

Ian Bostridge15:14

Hmm.

Ian Bostridge15:15

I was listening to those things as well, I have to say.

Presenter15:18

As well yeah, but what what really captured your heart? What really thrilled you was this box set of Mozart that you got? Did you get it for your b

Ian Bostridge15:25

I got it for my birthday. My father got it and I rem I remember him buying it and then hiding it in his he was in he was in this weird basement in Pall Mall, an old bank, and it had a s it had one of those incredible enormous safes in it. And he hid it in the safe and I kept creeping into the safe and looking at it because it was so exciting. I'm fine I knew eventually I'd get my hands on it and be able to listen to um

Speaker 115:41

Yeah.

Ian Bostridge15:45

All this incredible stuff.

Presenter15:47

Did you try to pretend to your schoolmates that you were listening to the same stuff as them?

Ian Bostridge15:51

Um

Ian Bostridge15:52

No, I mean I I was I mean went to s I was in I was a scholar at Westminster, so actually I was living with I I mean I was one of nine very peculiar little boys who spent most of their time, you know, arguing about whether Wagner was any good and, you know, what mass did a photon have. But we did I shared a study with a a very sort of laconic, cool boy called Ben, who um was this the punk? He was the punk and uh he wasn't really a punk at all. But he listened to it. He listened to the stuff and we used to listen to John Peel on the radio. I mean punk I can really appreciate because it has a sort of

Presenter16:17

Was this the

Ian Bostridge16:30

Vigor and energy, and I still, when I hear it, it appeals to me a lot more than a lot of sort of processed, packaged stuff.

Ian Bostridge16:39

I mean, the ni the nihilism of punk is is inherited from nineteenth century Romanticism and the it was death obsessed punk, really. Punk was part of part of romanticism, definitely.

Presenter16:53

Tell me about your next piece of music, then.

Ian Bostridge16:54

This is Bob Dylan, and it's just the most beautiful song I think about lost love and the most he captures this incredible tone in the way he sings it and in what he's written of sort of being upset but trying to pretend that he's not really upset and he doesn't really give a damn about it.

Speaker 117:15

And it ain't no use in turning on your light, baby.

Speaker 117:20

I'm on the dark side of the road.

Speaker 117:24

But I wish there was something you would do or say.

Speaker 117:28

Try and make me change my mind and state

Speaker 117:33

We never did too much talking anyway.

Speaker 117:37

Don't think twice, it's all right.

Presenter17:44

Bob Dylan and Don't Think Twice It's All Right pretending to wear his heartbreak lightly.

Ian Bostridge17:49

It's just like I mean, I sing a a Schubert cycle called Winteriser and it's just the same thing, but in expressed in a different way. And I mean all so much pop music like that comes out of Schubert really, to be honest. I mean it's it's the inheritor of that tradition.

Presenter18:05

So you went to Oxford then to study history?

Ian Bostridge18:08

Yeah.

Presenter18:08

What did you think you were going to do with your life?

Ian Bostridge18:10

Um, I thought I was going to be an academic. I mean, I'd had this thing with with physics and cosmology when I was a teenager, and then I did my A levels and I

Ian Bostridge18:19

I think I was sort of too lazy to do them, so I after a year I gave up and I I shifted all my eggs into the humanities basket and ended up doing history. I'd been sort of educated so much for that that I suppose I assumed I'd become an academic, yeah.

Presenter18:36

You were singing I was gonna say you were singing for fun. I mean that might be a r ridiculous way to phrase it, but you were choosing to sing whilst also

Ian Bostridge18:44

Yeah, I was I was doing I I wanted I thought going to university was about and I this is something I inherited from school, that it w you know, you did you just did all the things that you loved. So I'd I'd I'd put on maybe three or four song recitals to tiny audiences in my college.

Presenter18:44

Yeah.

Ian Bostridge19:02

But it was just as incredible.

Ian Bostridge19:04

Wonderful life of being able to do the things you love.

Presenter19:07

And entering singing competitions, too.

Ian Bostridge19:10

Later on I just entered a lot of competitions and some of them I did incredibly badly in and some of them I did well in and the ones I did well in were actually very good because they gave me the first one, the National Federation of Music Societies competition gave me work. I went around the country to various music clubs, music societies, choral societies and and sang for sixty quid.

Presenter19:31

Yes, oh at the sixty quid bit. Let's let's talk about the sixty quid bit, because it it's different, isn't it, to to to say to people, um, I'm planning on singing some songs, come along to this little hall or room that holds twenty or thirty people and watch me, but to actually sell tickets or to be paid for getting up in front of people and singing, that surely must be a quite a different experience.

Ian Bostridge19:32

Let's let's talk about the sixty quid bit because it

Ian Bostridge19:46

Yeah.

Ian Bostridge19:52

It's a different experience and it it start I suppose it's the thing that started me thinking about could I be a singer, but I couldn't really work out how it worked because I thought if you're being paid sixty pounds for a concert, how does it add up? Not that I was being paid a lot of money for being an academic, but it didn't really seem to make sense in terms of buying food. But it was incredible, incredible experience and also incredibly inspiring to see how important music was locally to people, the sort of local patriotism that went into this music making.

Presenter20:22

Tell me about your next piece of music, then.

Ian Bostridge20:24

This is um with Britain, and Britain's been an incredibly important composer for me ever since I was a child because he very cleverly wrote a lot of music for children. So you're sort of indoctrinated with it as an English schoolboy from the age of eight. So I had a lot of lot of Britain sort of churning around in my head. And then I got involved in the operas, and the first opera I ever did as a grown-up was Was Midsummer Night's Dream. I did it with British Youth Opera in London, and then I did it with Baz Luhrmann and the Australian Opera in Edinburgh.

Ian Bostridge20:57

And it was that second experience was just completely revelatory because I'd always thought, oh, well, I must, you know, I sing songs, but that's, you know, you can't make a living singing songs, it's just a sort of amateur thing. But suddenly I was in this show and I just loved being it and I f Baz gave me the space to invent things and it was so exciting. And this Midsummer Night Stream is utterly beautiful and the at the end of it, at the very end of the piece is just, you know, it can move me to tears, it's so beautiful.

Speaker 421:48

We can wish the show by mercy.

Presenter22:13

Now until the break of day from the end of Britain's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and it was, of course, that opera, as you were saying right back at the beginning, when we started to talk, it was that opera that sort of forced your hand. That was the minute when you had to decide between

Speaker 422:20

Hey.

Speaker 122:23

Yeah.

Presenter22:25

The life of an academic and the life of a music professional. You were by that time.

Presenter22:30

married to uh the writer Lucaster Miller. Did were there l long nights when you chatted into the wee small hours about this decision?

Speaker 422:33

Yeah.

Ian Bostridge22:39

I probably didn't t I mean it was a great surprise, I think, to both of us and I think lots of decisions about it sort of emerged as we went along, because I don't think we really knew what it would involve. I mean I the very first job I did when I became a professional was to go to Japan for five weeks. And at the end of that we both decided that I'd never do anything like that again, because it was so horribly painful for both of us. In a way it's lucky that happened at the beginning, because it meant I knew what I had to do in terms of sort of limiting my exposure to opera, which I love doing, but it it means that if you really are an opera singer the whole time, you're away a lot. And I'm incredibly lucky.

Ian Bostridge23:18

Incredibly lucky that I do song because it gives me this possibility of not doing opera sometimes.

Presenter23:22

Yeah.

Presenter23:24

Did the reality of being so far away for so long then force you back into that in in that direction?

Ian Bostridge23:30

Not really, I was just very lucky that I straight after that Rake's Progress in Japan, I got I I recorded Dishona Miller in with Graham Johnson, who had incredible faith and trust. I was completely unknown, and he gives me this plum recording in his very distinguished and celebrated and successful Hyperion Schubert Edition. And because that was a success, which was an incredible stroke of luck, I could become that gave me the opportunity, a boy from Streatham, to become a leader singer singing leader in Vienna. That's sort of surreal.

Presenter24:03

Well, you talk about these things, of course, as though they just land in your lap. I mean, the reason that you're chosen is because you bring something distinctive.

Ian Bostridge24:05

And the

Presenter24:10

and significant to the performance. You know, one reviewer said that you manage to find the very essence of a song. Another said that you bring a a remarkably unjaded quality to the work that you perform. Let's talk first of all about the essence.

Ian Bostridge24:26

I think it just if you love the music, then somehow I mean you have to work technically to convey that love through what you do. But I I mean it seemed to work even before I could manage it technically because I the other peculiar thing was I didn't really start to grapple properly with technical issues until 1997, so after I'd recorded Deshanah Miller and I was having to stand up and sing incredibly difficult things, not knowing whether I'd really get through or manage it. It was a sort of triumph of the triumph of the will at the beginning. I was just I loved this thing so much and I so wanted to do it that somehow I made it work. And maybe the struggle actually is also what made people like it. I mean you know that's why I love you know Bob Dylan's got a dreadful voice but I don't care because it expresses emotion to me. That's what singing should be about for me.

Presenter25:13

Tell me about your next piece of music, then.

Ian Bostridge25:15

Track number six is the opening of Schumann's piano quintet, and I love this piece and I was introduced to it by my best friend in music, Julius Drake. I met him in November 1992. We did a concert at Hokem Hall, and in the second half he played this piece. My wife turned pages, first time she'd ever done it, it was quite for her, she was incredibly nerve-wracked by it, but did it brilliantly. And I was just completely seized both by the piece but also by the passion of Julius's playing. And we've gone on to work together now for I suppose 16 years. He's a fantastic, fantastic musician, and he makes my life possible because I love travelling around with him and we have such a great time.

Presenter27:01

The opening of Schumann's Piano Quintet in E flat, played by the Beauzard trio with Samuel Rhodes and Dolph Bettelheim. Ian Bostridge, do you ever, I wonder, play the game of thinking what would have happened if if I hadn't embarked on this career that's been such a success?

Ian Bostridge27:17

I don I don't really, but I mean if I thought about it now I suppose I would have ended up being a not very successful academic because I don't think I had the um if I if I think of the people I admire as academics, I don't think I quite had that in me. In fact I think my brother is a far more scholarly person than I ever was. I was a sort of Your brother's a writer. He's a writer, he's just written a a wonderful, scholarly but at the same time incredibly readable and humane biography of Florence Nightingale. And the same with my my wife, Lucasta, who wrote a a brilliant study of the Bronte's in the 19th and 20th century of the Bronte myth. They've got this capacity to well, to really go into the archive and to assimilate material and be empathetic and then produce something people want to read. I think I've always been much more of a sort of short term a few clever paragraphs and then move on person.

Presenter27:38

Your brothers are writing.

Presenter28:11

Yes, you must be a terrible disappointment to your parents, I'm thinking.

Presenter28:16

What about your success? What do you mind? What do your parents make of your success? Do do your mother and father like the sort of music you perform?

Ian Bostridge28:21

Indeed.

Ian Bostridge28:24

Well my father's dead, but he was very proud of my success and I would he wouldn't he was the sort of father who wouldn't like to say to me that he was proud of my success, but I'd hear from other people that he'd actually been quite boastful, which is nice. But I think he found it very difficult to understand. He came to hear me the only time he really heard me do my thing, he came to hear me sing Vinteriser when I was already a successful singer at my old school. And I remember him turning around to my old friend Sarah, who I've known since she was three, and saying after the fifth song, and you know there are 24 of these songs, are there more? The idea of sitting and listening to 24 songs about lost love and alienation was not his cuff tea. My mother loves music and it's lovely we can talk about it and she's more, much more into the whole thing.

Presenter29:14

Let's take a break then for a piece of music.

Ian Bostridge29:15

Uh

Presenter29:16

Yeah.

Ian Bostridge29:16

Yeah.

Ian Bostridge29:16

This is the quintet from the end of Thomas Addis's opera The Tempest which I was in for the premiere of and then the revival of at the Royal Opera House. I knew Tom before that and he wrote the part of Caliban for me in this piece which was an incredible excitement. But it's exciting as a piece as well because it shows us all that this tradition is not dead. You know, people worry, classical music's dead, operas aren't being written. And this quintet is the most for me, it's just it's sublime and it comes you know you've got so much sort of rough, complicated, difficult music going on in other parts of the opera, but then there are moments in the opera where you have these these incredible moments of simple beauty and they tell so much more because of how they're placed.

Speaker 430:21

I

Speaker 430:26

Perfect.

Speaker 430:34

I

Presenter31:02

The quintet from the end of Thomas Addis's opera The Tempest. What about you and your wife, the writer Locasta Miller? How did you meet?

Ian Bostridge31:10

Well, we were at school together, though we we didn't meet at school. We met sort of shortly after that through mutual friends. And then I was in my last year at Oxford, she was in her first year, and we met and talked a lot, and then I think she'd already asked me to go with to go to Paris with her as a friend. And we went to Paris, and by the time we went to Paris, we weren't just friends. And, um

Ian Bostridge31:32

That was when she was nineteen and I was twenty one.

Presenter31:34

And you have a young family now, and of course travelling is is part of your profession.

Ian Bostridge31:39

Provided

Presenter31:39

Which suffers as a result of the travelling? Does your work suffer because you don't want to do the travelling, or does your family suffer because you have to be away?

Ian Bostridge31:47

I think my family suffers, but l I try to make them suffer less than they would do otherwise, I suppose. It's on my mind all the time. But I try not you know, I've given up doing opera abroad in the sense of doing new opera productions abroad.

Presenter32:01

That must be quite a sacrifice, then.

Ian Bostridge32:03

It is, but it isn't because I couldn't I mean it isn't really sacrifice because I couldn't be able to cope with it. I did a production of Death in Venice with Deborah Warner, who is my great directorial inspiration and who I love working with. We did that in London and we're going to take that abroad and that will mean going even even though we've already rehearsed it, that will mean going to New York for five weeks. But the family, I think, will be able to come out in in the middle. But it's it's it's really tricky. I mean the last time I did an opera abroad was in two thousand and four and I was in Munich for nine weeks and okay, I could come home at the weekend, but it's it's not a life that I could lead really.

Presenter32:37

Do your children listen to what Daddy does?

Ian Bostridge32:40

Not much.

Ian Bostridge32:41

When Oliver was littler he came to the Tempest, for example, and maybe there was a sort of time where he was not little enough and not old enough, and maybe now is the time for him to come come to more stuff.

Presenter32:51

And what about his musical taste? I mean, will he be will he be yearning for the killers on his iPod, or will it be Mozart, just like you?

Ian Bostridge32:58

Um, I sort of hope it'll be the killers, but I don't know.

Presenter33:02

Don't know.

Ian Bostridge33:03

Well, because I think children should I think it's good if children like something different from their parents,'cause they have to I mean, not now, he's eight now, but when children are adolescents, it's surely normal for them to kick against their parents a bit. I won't be saying that when he's a teenager. No, they won't, I'm sure. But um he's got a lovely voice, and which is not something I mean, to my shame in a way, it's not something I've encouraged at all. And he yesterday I went to hear him sing. They went they the school choir went to Southwark Cathedral and sang Even Song. It was really, really lovely.

Presenter33:16

No, they won't, I'm sure.

Presenter33:34

Very moving, I imagine, for you to see.

Ian Bostridge33:35

Well, I sang I d well, I didn't tell him this and I will eventually, but I I realized when I got there that I sang even song there, so it was sort of very was very moving for me.

Presenter33:46

Tell me, then, about your final piece of music.

Ian Bostridge33:49

This is the first movement of a cantata, Fifty-One, by Bach, which I first got to know at school when I was little, but I got to know it, and then w when we got married in St James's Piccadilly in 1992, a wonderful singer called Ruth Holton sang it. We had a lot of beautiful music at our wedding, and it'll remind me of that really, really beautiful day.

Speaker 434:30

Oh no, he wouldn't.

Speaker 434:36

Uh

Speaker 434:53

Fox did.

Speaker 435:03

What are we doing in the

Presenter35:10

Emma Kirkby singing Bach's Praise God in All Lands with the English Baroque Siloists conducted by John Eliot Gardner.

Presenter35:17

So, Ian, I am going to give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare to take to the island, and you may have another book. What would you like?

Ian Bostridge35:24

Um I'd like to have War and Peace because I've it's very long and I've read it many times because I go away a lot and I know I like it, so I know it will give me consolation.

Presenter35:34

Right, it's US and and a luxury.

Ian Bostridge35:37

Well, I thought of having a sort of computer with lots and lots of pictures of my family and friends, because I when I go away again, that's something I just do endlessly. I look at photographs of people I love and it helps me feel better about being away.

Presenter35:47

Okay, you can only use the computer for that though. We'll disable all other facilities.

Ian Bostridge35:50

Okay.

Ian Bostridge35:51

Okay, do I get electricity? Or do I have to go on a sort of bicycle and generate my own electricity?

Presenter35:55

Yes, or maybe the sun, maybe solar powered.

Ian Bostridge35:56

Okay, solar powered, yes, brilliant.

Presenter35:59

Now, if you had to choose just one of these eight records to take with you, which one would it be?

Ian Bostridge36:04

I think it would have to be the Ecosa Hundred and Ten Sonata, as I said I'd die to it, and I'm sure I will die on the island, because I have no practical

Presenter36:11

Capacities at all. Ian Bossridge, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you very much. I've really enjoyed it.

Presenter36:25

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