Alison Balsom

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

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My castaway this week is the musician Alison Bolson.

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Widely considered the finest classical trumpet player of her generation, she has performed in all the great concert halls of the world.

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winning a huge amount of fans and a string of awards for her ability to exquisitely convey the many voices of her chosen instrument. As a child, she had dreams of being a part-time trumpet player, astronaut and jockey. She's only in her mid-thirties, so there's time yet for the other two. But whilst she is solely devoting her energies to her instrument, her belief in the power of music seems endless. In between gigs, rehearsals, recordings, and motherhood, she's found time to travel to Uganda and Liberia as patron of Brass for Africa with the heartfelt conviction that she can help transform the lives of street children by teaching them to play too.

Presenter1:23

She says, I just believe completely in the trumpet and what it can do. Doing any other job would be totally pointless for me and so welcome, Alison Bolson. I'm talking to you just a few days after your performance at last night of the proms in Hyde Park in front of an audience of 40 odd, fifty odd thousand, I think. Was that more like doing a sort of rock concert than doing a classical concert?

Alison Balsom1:45

It was. It's a very different experience. It's wonderful to feel that energy, that kind of electricity you get from a large crowd. But I have to say, the all-time highlight of my career and almost my life would be playing at The Last Night of the Proms in the Albert Hall in 2009, where it's a concert I'd seen on the TV when I was just a little kid and I'd been allowed to stay up late to watch it and I thought that would be a dream. And so to do that concert in 2009 and you can hear a pin drop in the hall, the acoustics there are wonderful. It was the biggest thrill really of my musical life and everything since then almost has felt like an encore.

Presenter2:22

Do you suffer anxiety or dreams or anything before a big performance?

Alison Balsom2:26

I do actually. I've got a recurring dream. It doesn't happen often, but my recurring dream is that I'm standing on a paving slab fifty centimetres square. Suddenly everything around that paving slab drops a mile. Nothing changes about what you're doing, but everything around you is completely different. And you know, if you take a step wrong, literally you'll be off the edge of this mile-high column. It's a very funny, but must be a very obvious sort of performer's dream.

Presenter2:50

And the morning after a huge performance, do you meticulously analyse what has happened on stage, or are you back on the school run and thinking about the lunch box?

Alison Balsom2:59

Oh, no. Um, I mean, I think many musicians would tell you that you're constantly reliving how it went, what you could have done better, what more you could do next time.

Presenter3:10

So let's go to the first of your eight this morning then. Tell me a little bit about this. Why have you chosen it?

Alison Balsom3:15

Dizzy Gillespie is one of the all-time great trumpeters and when I just started the trumpet at my local primary school in Royston my mum and I took a trip to the library just to see what they had about the trumpet and they happened to have a cassette of Dizzy Gillespie and obviously, unquestionably, I fell in love with this recording and I was so lucky at such a young age to just happen upon certain recordings and concerts which were you know the very very greatest that of those genres. You know Dizzy Gillespie even now is just one of my all-time favourite musicians. So to discover that when I was seven is just such a happy accident.

Presenter4:51

That was Dizzy Gillespie and Con Alman. You said to me just there, Alison Bolsom, as that was finishing, that you know, you can appreciate that sort of playing in the same way that somebody like me can appreciate it, because you can't do that. If if you wanted to, you couldn't do that with a trumpet.

Alison Balsom5:05

No, I couldn't do it like that. I mean, playing jazz trumpet and classical trumpet is so different. It's almost like two different instruments. In my opinion, it's because as a classical musician, I think very horizontally, very melodically. And as a jazz musician, perhaps you think more harmonically or vertically. So it makes it almost like a totally different world of music to me.

Presenter5:11

Look at that.

Presenter5:26

You have said that the trumpet is a classless instrument. That's an interesting phrase. What do you mean?

Alison Balsom5:31

It's quite universal. It works in many, many genres of music and it's a relatively cheap instrument. You can pick one up in a charity shop, I think, these days for maybe fifty quid. I started when I was seven, and in my class at school, lots of us played brass instruments, girls and boys, and very quickly we were playing really lovely little tunes together. And it was, you know, a wonderful way for us to play music together. And it represents, you know, the most the splendour of um celebration, ceremonial music from, you know, ancient times right through to Dizzy and beyond, you know, um, the brass band culture that we have that's so strong in this country.

Presenter6:11

When did you literally pick up a trumpet for the first time? Do you remember?

Alison Balsom6:15

I picked up a trumpet um at my uncle and aunt's house. My uncle had lots of different musical instruments and I just immediately took to the trumpet and I loved the look of it and I loved the sound of it. It was kind of love at first sight.

Presenter6:28

And the trumpet's similarity, if it's played at all well, to the human voice is quite an interesting thing. It almost does have the quality of a human voice, would you say?

Alison Balsom6:37

I really believe that it does, yeah. It has so many vocal qualities, especially the early trumpets, the I play the natural trumpet or the baroque trumpet a lot. It's so much like the human voice in the inflections and the colours and the articulation that it's when I play it sometimes I feel that I've just jumped three hundred years back.

Presenter6:54

Let's have your second piece. What are we going to hear now?

Alison Balsom6:57

This is Good Old Fashioned Love a Boy by Queen. And my granny and granddad lived in Nebworth. And when we were all me and my brother and my cousins, we were all tiny children, we did actually hear Queen live across the fields in Nebworth. And it's something that my mum and dad and me and my brother, you know, we've always had it on in the car when we were little. You know, Queen and Freddie Mercury, just an unbelievable musician. And I would say that it comes up a fair bit in the car now. And me and my son, we sing along as well.

Speaker 47:26

I can tindle lights and sing you songs full of sad things. We can do the tanger just for t-

Speaker 47:36

I can serenade and gently

Speaker 47:40

On your heart strings, be a Valentino just wing.

Speaker 47:48

Yeah.

Speaker 47:51

Oh love a boy watching him tonight

Presenter7:57

That was Queen and Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy. As I understand it, Alison Balsam, neither of your parents play musical instruments. It and you you said you found a trumpet, it was at your uncle's house. So so what did you do with your parents when you were growing up, if they weren't necessarily musical themselves?

Alison Balsom8:11

Well, my parents, although they didn't play themselves, they didn't have the opportunity to play, they were incredibly supportive. My granddad actually could play my mother's father could actually play by ear very well and didn't ever have any formal training. I remember my dad, you know, working, I'd play in Cambridge Youth Orchestra and I'd play very, very little as third trumpet in the orchestra. My parents would come together and, you know, my dad would be probably a little bit bored and he'd work out how many miles he'd driven per note that I played in the orchestra because, yeah, he would drive me off and drive me to London and drive me to Cambridge. And yeah, my parents were incredibly supportive. My mum, I remember so vividly of her sitting through my brother and me doing our Grade Five theory tests. And she could come across as being a musician because she really, really did practically take her Grade Five theory despite not being a musician, you know, just sort of helping us through it.

Presenter8:21

Yeah.

Speaker 48:21

Um

Presenter8:58

And they took you to a concert at the Barbican, which proved f pivotal, I think. Tell me about that.

Alison Balsom9:03

I was 10 and I remember, I think my parents kind of almost saved up for that concert because it was an expensive night out. The tickets were expensive. You know, we went to London, we ate out and you know, it was a big deal. But I remember it like it was yesterday, that it was the English Chamber Orchestra and it was Hulkenhardenberger, the Swedish trumpet virtuoso, playing the Hummel concerto. And when I realised that the trumpet was capable of playing as a solo instrument in front of an orchestra and playing such incredible lines and melodies, you know, the Hummel's almost like Mozart, I thought, yeah, that's what I want to do. I can't imagine doing anything else.

Presenter9:36

And for parents listening thinking, oh God, you know, I've got to absolutely force Ella to pick up her guitar and do a practice or whatever, do you think parents themselves should just leave it alone? If a child does not have an inbuilt, obvious enthusiasm for practising and getting on with an instrument, then do you think it's the child's right to give it up?

Alison Balsom9:55

Inspiration is the key. I feel incredibly lucky, as I was saying, you know, with the Dizzy Gillespie track and hearing Hawkin at the Barbican and having a local band that I love to play in, and my best friend was in the band. I had all these things that were just things I felt I discovered for myself, and yet my family gave me the opportunity to find those things. I think it's pointless to force a child to practice because you'll just make them hate it. But I do think that you need to find a way to inspire them and make them think, wow, this is something for me in some way, almost set it up so they feel that they have found it for themselves. And I think the next track is a perfect example of that. I remember listening with my Walkman to this track and not knowing what it was. I didn't know that it was classical music. I didn't even know what Baroque music was. It didn't have the trumpet in it, which didn't matter. But I remember almost feeling.

Presenter10:16

Do you

Alison Balsom10:42

Like it took my breath away. The power, the energy, the raw brilliance of it, and just thinking, what is this? I need to have more of this. I'm addicted.

Presenter11:49

That was part of the first movement from Bach's Brandenburg concerto No. five in D major with the English concert directed from the harpsichord by Trevor Pinnock, somebody who you have since worked with. You said as little girl, you you listened and it was something of a watermark of brilliance.

Alison Balsom12:02

Hearing this recording of Trevor made me realise it was like the Baroque equivalent of, you know, smashing up your electric guitar at the end of the concert.

Presenter12:09

At what stage then did you envisage yourself as a soloist rather than an orchestral player?

Alison Balsom12:14

I always wanted to be a soloist on the trumpet. The trumpet to me, as a ten-year-old at the Barbican hearing Hochen, the trumpet to me was the vehicle to say something, to express myself. And although to be in an orchestra, you have to be equally as brilliant, I wanted to be playing all the time. And my teenage years, I did have some incredible experiences playing in symphony orchestras and playing in the National Youth Orchestra. But what that was for me more than anything was an education about the power of classical music in all its skises.

Presenter12:45

But purely in practical terms I mean, of course there are very few classical concertos that are written for trumpets. How did you envisage your classical solo career going?

Alison Balsom12:55

If I'd known how difficult it was gonna be, maybe I would have had second thoughts.

Presenter12:58

So that was just naivety, was it?

Alison Balsom13:00

Yeah, it was. I was very green. Um this has been the greatest challenge of my career, but also the most enjoyable path to follow because it feels like one that no one's ever trodden before.

Presenter13:11

Your passion and your dedication just to hear you speak, and also clearly from the career that you've carved out for yourself, k i cannot be in doubt. I very rarely get any sense of what you were doing otherwise. I mean, when you were in Paris as a beautiful young woman, w were you kicking your heels up? Were you having a good time?

Alison Balsom13:28

It was pretty exhausting. It was a va very intense um period. Um and I feel that although I was twenty when I went to the Paris Conservatoire, I don't feel like I could really play the trumpet till I went to the Paris Conservatoire. And that was the period where I've practiced the most intensively in my life. And I would

Alison Balsom13:43

Almost practiced till my lip was bleeding every day because I had so much repertoire to get through. So it was very, very music-based.

Presenter13:50

So how many hours a day then?

Alison Balsom13:51

The class that we did, which was in French, was a six hour class with a five minute toilet break in the middle in French. That was on a Wednesday, one till seven. Thursday was just I was wiped out. And I was already trying to fit in concerts here and there, so I was on the Eurostar and I'm going to a lot of concerts in Paris. So in terms of doing other things,

Alison Balsom14:10

I wasn't doing much else around that time apart from playing music.

Presenter14:13

Where will you

Presenter14:14

The Ken's meet was money tied.

Alison Balsom14:16

I I was living in a um a little flat in the tenth Tharndy Small, which was it was quite gritty, but I loved it.

Presenter14:16

Yeah.

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And your father, a builder, your mother at that time was a social worker. Was it difficult to fund that existence?

Alison Balsom14:29

Yeah, my parents made quite a number of sacrifices to make me feel that anything was possible. My brother was also a musician and they had to make difficult choices. You know, should we pay for Alison to go to the Junior Guildhall? Because if we do, we can't buy Richard a new tuber. You know, so they were doing this kind of thing all the time and I had no idea until very recently when I was speaking to a at a fundraising dinner for the National Youth Culture and I realized how much my parents had had to think about just to make it possible for us. And I think that's something that's I will always be so thankful to them for. But at the same time, I had a very loving, very normal childhood. I wasn't hothoused in any way. I was the thing we would do the most. We'd go to the seaside, mess about with boats.

Presenter15:11

And did they come to visit you in Paris?

Alison Balsom15:13

Oh yeah, they drove me to Paris with all my staff and round the the one way system, round you know, the driving in Paris was was I remember that very clearly. My parents have done that um for me many, many times. In fact, just last week my dad was helping me doing DIY, which is like really my biggest hobby at the moment.

Presenter15:31

Time for some more music. It's your fourth. Tell me about this fourth disc and and particularly why you've chosen it.

Alison Balsom15:36

Well, this piece reminds me of my National Youth Orchestra days. It also sort of conjures up that time in my life when I was in the NYO and just learning so much repertoire, so much about classical music and about the great symphonies. And this is just a devastating performance of Schulte's Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The whole symphony starts with a solo trumpet, very lonely, that launches into this enormous symphony. But this is from the fifth movement when it's incredibly triumphant.

Presenter16:59

The end of the fifth movement from Mahler's Fifth Symphony, played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir George Shulty. Did you enjoy that heroic brass there?

Alison Balsom17:06

I enjoyed all of it. I enjoyed every player in that orchestra.

Presenter17:10

You are, Alison Balsam, very good looking, and the phrase that has followed you around is the crumpet with a trumpet.

Presenter17:16

The only reason I feel comfortable saying that is because I'm told that you're the person who invented it. Am I right?

Alison Balsom17:21

Well, as we know, um things shouldn't be said in irony to the um the press. Yeah. Did you say it in a press interview?

Presenter17:28

Yeah.

Alison Balsom17:30

I said it in a press interview.

Presenter17:32

Can you see it?

Alison Balsom17:33

Yeah, it was funny many decades ago, but it's obviously a lazy tagline and it's it's incredibly insulting because what I do is about

Presenter17:41

Because

Alison Balsom17:43

It's a it's a very oral art form more than any other kind of music. It's very much, you know, I spent years just playing as a BBC New Generation artist, you know, which just on the radio with the great BBC orchestras and y you know, working so hard to forge a career that was prestigious in some way and this cropping up every time I did any kind of PR was incredibly damaging and incredibly difficult to deal with without sounding really pompous about it.

Presenter18:08

So you used it as a phrase to try to be jolly and move on from the way people were characterizing you as being this sort of terribly glamorous individual.

Alison Balsom18:16

I I only no, I only used it once when I was um I mean, before I even kno knew that crumpet was something that's kind of got overtones of something sexual at you know, in any way. I only used it when it was like, Oh, it's just funny word and you know, I was like a child, so it was just telling a story about that really. So, um, it's it's kind of unfortunate. But at the same time, you know

Speaker 418:29

Oh.

Presenter18:29

Yeah.

Alison Balsom18:36

It it doesn't affect my career. It affects probably my image in the press, but really my entire career is about playing concertos with symphony orchestras, so it's

Presenter18:46

Well, anybody who knows anything about your career knows that it is built on this incredibly solid foundation of years and years and years of dedication and hard work. And it almost seems that in the climate that we operate in, which is of course a very visual climate,

Alison Balsom18:46

But well any

Presenter18:59

It almost works against you that you are so blinking glamorous and that you look so good.

Alison Balsom19:04

Well, thanks for saying that. It's very kind. But um actually I've taken recently to wearing my hair in a ponytail and wearing a black suit on stage. I still seem to be getting booked, so it's all right. And also I'm you know, I'm thirty six now, so it's not so much of an issue as when you're you know, you're in your early twenties and you're trying to be taken seriously.

Presenter19:22

Let's have some more music. We're on your fifth now. Tell us about this, Joyce.

Alison Balsom19:27

This is a contrast to the other choices on my Desert Island disc list. It just had to be in there because when I was a teenager, the bodyguard came out and that was when I discovered Whitney Houston. I mean, her voice is something else. And the way that she makes the line, she's an incredible musician. And also, one of the other reasons it had to go in today is because one of my greatest friends and champions, because she was my manager for eight years, Maggie O'Herlihy, she, I would say I couldn't have had anything like the career I've had without her. She's a fierce negotiator, a wonderful person and a very loyal, very clever person. And she loves Whitney Houston. And the number of talks we've had and arguments we've had long into the night about what's the best Whitney Houston track or what's the best Michael Jackson track. So this actually just reminds me of some of the great late nights we've had in LA.

Speaker 320:18

I don't really need to look very much further I don't wanna have to go where you don't follow

Speaker 320:28

I won't hold it back again, this passion inside Can't run from myself, there's no way to hide

Speaker 320:39

But don't make me come out

Presenter20:44

From the bodyguard, that was I Have Nothing sung, of course, by Whitney Houston. So Alison Balsam, let's explore for a moment the relationship between an international soloist and the orchestras variously that they work with around the world. Of course, they will undoubtedly respect your professionalism, but I can't help thinking that it must be quite a nuanced relationship. When you first go in for rehearsals, uh do you get a sense that they are, you know, weighing up your heft, seeing what you're capable of?

Alison Balsom21:10

Yes, definitely. But to be fair, I think that that's what happens to all soloists. It happens to me, but it happens to all of us.

Presenter21:17

So how do you manage that?

Alison Balsom21:18

Well, just with grace and good manners, and also the brass world, it's a lovely kind of club, if you like. People are very friendly and commonly turn up to an orchestra. The brass players may give a little clap, you know, a little welcome, but you can see on all of their faces that they're thinking, right, yeah, why do you think you're so good? Let's you prove it to us, and we're not going to come over and say hi yet. And hopefully, if I do my job well, at the end of the week, everyone wants to have a selfie. I want to say, I would have really appreciated if you could have done that just before the first rehearsal, it would have made me feel so much better.

Presenter21:53

And being an international artist, of course, means you must be very familiar with airport departure lounges all around the world. It's not glamorous anymore, international travel. Do you have rituals to make those anonymous hotel rooms and rehearsal rooms feel just a little bit more personal?

Alison Balsom22:07

Well, I actually have to say I do really enjoy it now because before I had Charlie I was on the road all the time. You know, I was busily building my career and doing everything and just travelling around the world. And Charlie came at the perfect time in terms of my career in that I could then stop for a little bit and just pick and choose what I did and now what I do. And I've been around for Charlie and that's been my priority. It's just, you know, unless there's a very good reason to leave home and leave him, I won't do it. And now I'm doing a little bit more, but everything I'm taking on is just delicious, you know, whether it's artistically like the orchestra is wonderful or the tour somewhere fabulous. So I really do look forward to the travel I now do and I'm just very efficient with my diary. One example that comes to mind is recently I took my son to school on a Tuesday morning and I went to Heathrow and I got on a plane and I slept for 13 hours, got off, went to the orchestra in South Korea, did the concert, did the reception and the signing and went back to the airport and slept for 12 hours on the plane home and picked my son up from school on Thursday afternoon. So I was really, you know, I felt like I was there for my son, I'd done my work and I'd had enough sleep. It was perfect.

Presenter23:08

It's an h

Presenter23:16

That's you're your sixth. Tell me about this.

Alison Balsom23:18

This is the great Maxim Van Goroff playing the first movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto. He is, in my opinion, one of the greatest musicians of all time. And I know him personally, but the way he plays is just extraordinary to me. And I don't think about him as a person very much in my everyday life, but I was talking about it with a friend the other day, which is what made me think, of course, he's the single most important influence on me as a musician, really, because every time I'm standing on stage and I think, can I do this? Am I going to lose my bottle? Can I really do this? I'm terrified of this next thing I'm about to do. You know, if it's, you know, just in the tootie before, you know, the orchestra's playing and then you have to come in with your big entry. At that point, I have to dig very deep to find the courage to do it. And I pretty much always think of him at that very moment. And then he's gone. You know, I concentrate on the music. But I always pretend I'm him with his power, his control, his vulnerability, the beauty of his sound. But just looking at him playing is just, you can see that it's just a perfect, perfect storm of skills.

Presenter25:21

That was part of the first movement of Beethoven's Violin Concerto, performed by Maxim Wengeroff, with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Mr Slav Rostroprovich. So, Alison Balsam, away from the international concert platform, you are evangelical, I think it would be fair to say, about the power of music to

Presenter25:38

to transform people's lives and and these are people who are in

Presenter25:42

Countries of extreme deprivation, poverty, war-torn. It sounds.

Presenter25:47

Admirable. It also sounds incredibly idealistic. Can can you really give me concrete examples of where you've seen that work?

Alison Balsom25:54

Yeah, absolutely. I feel a duty to talk about it in the UK because I benefited from free lessons, having the opportunity to, you know, borrow the school instruments and play in my local community music programmes. Now, these things are shrinking and shrinking, and if I was at school today, I simply wouldn't become a musician. I wouldn't be sitting here. But I recently became involved with Brass for Africa, which is a very small charity run by a very visionary man who said, come and see what we're doing, and come with Guy Barker, who's a wonderful friend and great trumpet players. And so we went to Uganda and we saw firsthand how street children, you know, they live on the streets and if they're caught by the police, they're rounded up and put in prison just because they live on the streets. They were taken in by these certain orphanages who were working with Brass for Africa and every child in the orphanage played an instrument. And very quickly you could see how these children, whose circumstances were just horrific, were utterly transformed by the fact that they played these brass instruments. You know, they had something to live for every day.

Presenter26:54

And what about children here in the UK and music? I mean that's a a very strong thing that you said just as you began to talk there about the fact that if you hadn't had the music lessons and there hadn't been the state structure in place to enable you to connect with music and tuition and so on, you would not now be the world class performer.

Presenter27:12

doing what you are doing. And you've said in the past that you think it is a basic right for children to have music lessons. But surely if it's a choice between maths textbooks or music lessons, schools are going to choose the maths textbooks, and a lot of people would think they're quite right for doing so.

Alison Balsom27:28

You can't choose one or the other. Of course, you can't dump your math textbooks. Education is not about getting a job, though. Education is about making a rounded human being. And to take away something that we know for a fact you can watch a baby in any part of the world, a toddler, a small child, an older child, a teenager. You can see the way they light up when they hear music and the way that they engage with other people, the way that they're able to use their self-discipline. It's just so obvious to me that it's an important thing. And just because we can't harness it into a specific profession doesn't mean it's not as valuable as the subjects which of course we must also take in school.

Presenter28:06

Are you knocking on the doors of government at the time? Are you?

Alison Balsom28:07

All the time.

Alison Balsom28:09

All the time. Yeah. I mean, you know, our tiny country on the global scale punches above its weight because of the culture and because of the arts. We mustn't lose that. And the more I travel around the world, the more I see that that's one of the the greatest things that we have to offer as a country. And I think we've got an incredible legacy. We've got to find a way of continuing that.

Presenter28:29

Let's have some more music, Alison Balsam. We're on to your seventh disc of the morning. Tell me about this.

Alison Balsom28:34

To arrive at this was really just because it reminds me of one of the greatest projects of my life, which was commissioning a play stroke concert. I still don't know what to call it, which was at Shakespeare's Globe called Gabriel. And it was about the trumpet in 1695 and all that it represented, you know, the ceremonial, the baudy, the heroic and fanfare brilliance. And right at the end, there's a scene where there's a funeral procession, and this is the music that we played at that point.

Presenter30:01

The march from Purcell's music for the funeral of Queen Mary performed there by the Aquale Brass Ensemble conducted by Sir John Elliott Gardner.

Presenter30:09

I read somewhere, Alison Balsam, that you return every year to play Christmas carols with the Royston Town Band. I'm hoping that's true, is it?

Alison Balsom30:15

It is.

Presenter30:16

What sort of welcome do you get?

Alison Balsom30:18

Oh, I've just speaked.

Presenter30:18

Are they lining the streets for you?

Alison Balsom30:20

Oh, no, not at all. I just sit in the back row, play the carols, and it's one of the very few occasions when my brother might get his tuba out and play, even though he's a wonderful musician, he rarely plays. So he we might be playing carols together, so that's really lovely. There's a man who's been playing in the band over seventy years, so I'm just a newbie, really.

Presenter30:37

Um I'm about to cast you away. W will you?

Alison Balsom30:39

Do you survive? Are you a practical person? I think I'm pretty practical. I think I take after my dad in some respects, that I just love to m you know, do up an old piece of furniture that I've found at a junk shop or mend a I'm always doing DIY, I'm always making things. Do you have a full toolkit at home? Oh yeah, yeah, I do. I have a big cupboard of like really good big drills and all sorts of

Presenter30:55

Oh.

Presenter31:00

For insurance purposes. Is Alison Bolson actually allowed to do that with her hands? Are you?

Alison Balsom31:04

I don't think about it too much. Um, you know, I love to go surfing, I love water skiing, I love to go on the Hobycat with my family. And if I thought too much about what might happen when I capsize, I could, you know, probably capsize even more.

Presenter31:17

Tell me about your final piece of music, then. What are we going to hear, Alison?

Alison Balsom31:20

It was so hard for me to choose. I'm just so in love with Bach, and the more I hear, the more I realise I don't actually know all of what he's written. I still can't really get my head around the fact that one man wrote this much music of this quality. And often, the more I hear it, the more I hear new things in it, and the more amazed I am about it. The Matthew Passion is one of my greatest loves of all music, but I couldn't really find one track that would represent all of Bach for me. So I've chosen this, which is from the St John's Passion Equally as.

Alison Balsom31:51

are hauntingly beautiful.

Speaker 432:01

Oh wait, wait, don't we?

Speaker 432:13

For great slides.

Presenter33:02

The chorus Rest well, you holy bones from Bach Saint John's Passion, sung by the Collegium Vocale, conducted there by Philippe Herewecher. So it is time then for me to give you the books. You get the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and your own book to take along to. What are you going to take?

Alison Balsom33:17

I was going to choose Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea because I found it so moving when I read it and it's full of so much simple courage and grace, but it's such a short book that I might sort of memorise it too quickly and that will be it. And so I think I would have to choose the complete scores of Bach because I find his music endlessly nourishing and invigorating and and so many emotions I can find in it and I don't know enough of it and I feel that if I had the scores I could just disappear and live inside those scores.

Presenter33:47

Right. Bound in one volume, then, that is yours. And a luxury too.

Alison Balsom33:52

Well, I think my luxury would have to be my trumpet because even though it's funny for me to say that because so much of the time, you know, if I'm at home and I've finished for the day, I'll literally hide the trumpet so I don't have to think about it or see it. It used to belong to a a friend of mine and I now play it and I would say it's almost like a guardian angel. It looks out for me. I think with all that time on my hands I might actually be able to really master that instrument. I mean no one ever really masters an instrument but I could have a good go on the desert island.

Presenter34:22

And the disc that you would save, above all others?

Alison Balsom34:24

As soon as I found out I was gonna be invited on the programme, I knew exactly which desc it would be straight away because it's really has defined my musical life because it was the first thing that took my breath away and it's Trevor Pinnock playing the Brandenburg concerto number five.

Presenter34:29

That's unusual.

Presenter34:41

It's yours then, Alison Balsam. Thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Alison Balsom34:45

Thank you.

Presenter35:27

You've been listening to a download from the BBC.

Presenter35:29

You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website bbc.co.uk slash Radio4