Stephen Hough

Stephen Hough0:00

This is the BBC.

Presenter0:04

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.

Presenter0:15

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

Presenter0:37

My castaway this week is the pianist Stephen Hough. He's been performing at the very highest level for decades now, with worldwide appearances at every major concert hall, twenty-five proms, a catalogue of over fifty recordings, and an almost laughable number of awards to his name. His considerable abilities then are clear for all to hear, but as he exits stage left, his accomplishments continue. He writes, paints, and composes, too, being proclaimed by The Economist one of the world's twenty living polymaths. You can imagine his childhood, can't you? Highly intellectual, highly strung musical parents, obsessively coaching their tiny son, and his teenage years devoted to an abstemious life dominated by endless practice.

Presenter1:20

Nope, it wasn't like that at all. He spent a long time begging his parents to even buy him a piano. They eventually got a second-hand one for a fiver. Later, at New York's prestigious Juilliard School of Music, he'd while away his days hanging around the corridors smoking cigarettes. He says now, When I'm playing these great works, it's almost like being a priest or a rabbi. You're dealing with areas of human life you can't put your finger on. I love that there are no words.

Presenter1:47

When I'm on that stage, it doesn't matter. We can share something of what it means to be on this planet at this time. So welcome, Stephen Hough, to our imaginary island. In spite of those fifty recordings, when I read that you said that, it struck me that actually that, you know, the ephemeral moment of live performance might be really the very thing for you, the pinnacle of what you do. Would that be fair?

Stephen Hough2:09

I think when it works in a concert hall and you feel that the audience is with you and you have this moment of sharing, it's a pretty incredible thing. But recordings are good too, because you want to grasp the ephemeral as well. And I think the combination of the two is is what makes modern musical life so wonderful, actually.

Presenter2:28

As I mentioned, you have of course performed at all the great venues and halls around the world. Are there one or two that stand out where you always know that the audience you're each going to give each other a very good night?

Stephen Hough2:39

The PROMS is pretty spectacular. I think partly because it's so many people in the room, I think around 6,000 people. And when 6,000 people are quiet, it's quieter than being on your own in a silent room, because there's a kind of electricity to that quietness. It's not so much the applause. I think people think that that's what we want to get from an audience. No, it's that moment when we share a kind of breathlessness. It's almost like a hallucination, really, with the music as a sort of a drug, in a sense.

Presenter2:40

Right.

Presenter3:08

Tell me about the first piece we're going to hear this morning. What is it?

Stephen Hough3:11

We're going to hear one of my favourite pianists, someone who sadly died before I could have heard him play, Alfred Courteau. He's a pianist who was on one of the first records we owned when I was a child, and he's someone who has remained very close to me. I find his way of playing open so many doors. He was such an imaginative player, and with this, the Schopenha Preludes I'm going to take with me, these tiny pieces, each one of them he makes into some sort of epic emotional drama. You just feel that everything is expanding in his vision.

Presenter4:46

Alfred Courteaux playing part of Chopin's Prelude in A Flat. Tell me, Stephen, have you been performing professionally since 1983, I think? Yes, and you're.

Stephen Hough4:54

Yes, that

Presenter4:56

You're fifty four now. How differently do you approach what is the same job compared to when, say, you were a a thirty year old doing it? If you're playing a bit of ruckman and off or whatever it happens to be, what's the difference now?

Stephen Hough5:09

Well, you do learn certain things in the experience of playing concerts, but I still find that I'm nervous backstage. But much more important, I'm excited still about playing this music, even pieces that I've played many, many times. And I often look over at the world of the actor, an actor who's in a show for six months, let's say, running eight shows a week, and you go in the middle of the fourth month, and still there's fire when that actor walks out onto the stage. And to me, that's a great inspiration, because that's what we need to have. If we're going to go out onto the stage, it's not that we won't have an off night, but there has to be something of that energy every single time. We have to find new insights into it every performance.

Presenter5:47

There is that hard slog of travel that underpins somebody's life who works at your level. Are you good at at dealing with that, that sort of itinerant lifestyle of here we are on another plane, booking into another hotel room, sitting alone again at at midnight? You know, h how do you deal with that?

Stephen Hough6:02

The loneliness doesn't worry me, and that's why the island is not such a concern for me, because I'm an only child. I spent a lot of time on my own, and since I've been professionally working, I spend most of my life alone, come to think of it. Even backstage, unlike a chamber music performance, I don't even have a pianist, if I'm a violinist, in the next room warming up. I'm there completely alone. I have friends all over the world, and that makes traveling wonderful. But I like the time also alone. I like those intervals between being either on stage with thousands of people in the audience or being with friends at a dinner party. I like that time. Tell me about your next.

Presenter6:39

XP

Stephen Hough6:40

Piece of music, then. What are we going to hear? This is the second piece today. This is the violin piece by Fritz Chrysler, Liebes Leit, arranged by his friend Rachmaninoff, who was one of the greatest pianists of all, and of course, now better known as a composer, although at the time he probably played more than he was seen as a composer. This track was on one of the very first records that my parents bought when I started learning to play the piano. We had no classical records in the house at all. My mother went into Dawson's in Warrington, a little music shop, mainly selling guitars, but they had a small section of classical records too, and bought this record called Keyboard Giants of the Past. And I think it's probably the most important thing that happened to me in my learning the piano because it introduced me to some of the greatest players and a style of playing which I still love, and to this track of music, which is one of the great examples of how to play the piano.

Presenter8:28

That was Chrysler's Liebesleit arranged and performed by Rachmaninoff.

Presenter8:32

So, Stephen Huff, as you say, you were an only child. You were born in the early 60s. Your mother was Netta, your father, Colin. Tell me about them.

Stephen Hough8:41

My father was in British steel. He was a technical representative and travelled all over the north dealing with people's steel problems, but his heart was in the arts. And for a complicated set of circumstances, being born in Australia, his parents separating, spending time in India, he never got a chance to explore his artistic side until later in his life. In fact, right at the end, he died around the age I am now, so he was in his mid-50s. He did an open university humanity degree, and it was a great joy to him at the end of his life, finally to do something that he would have preferred to have done when he was 18. Of course, there was the war as well, and many people's lives were not so easily directed at the areas that they would like to have explored. I often think of him now. He was born on the 11th of November, and every time the clock I see in a digital clock 11-11, I think of him and think of how he would have enjoyed being part of my life since.

Presenter9:38

And your mother, that's the one.

Stephen Hough9:40

My mother is still alive. She was the practical parent. She would service our cars until the days of computerization in cars. I never forget the time when we were looking around a house once and the estate agent was showing us round the kitchen. Oh, very nice, the bathroom. Oh, very nice. Then we got to the garage and there was a pit in the garage. We have to live here because I can get under the car to fix things. But I just look back also and I'm very grateful for parents who were just there, who were never pressing me to do things, who were always supportive.

Presenter10:10

How did you find the piano?

Stephen Hough10:11

We had an aunt who had a piano, and we'd visit her

Stephen Hough10:15

And during tea and biscuits, I would go over and try and play nursery rhymes on this piano. I memorized a lot of nursery rhymes, according to my parents, when I was a kid.

Presenter10:22

A hundred, I read, is that right?

Stephen Hough10:24

I think that's what, yeah, I was passionate about the piano. I said, Can I have a piano? Can I have a piano lessons? They bought me a little toy piano. That didn't work out. And eventually, this five-pound German upright from an antique shop in a village close by. And in those early years, I wanted to do nothing else but play the piano. My mother would actually have to drag me off the pianos to go and get some fresh air, go and play some games. But things went wrong, I suppose.

Stephen Hough10:49

Really when I started at Cheatham School in Manchester, which I really want to emphasise is now a wonderful place. I've been there many times to visit and the atmosphere there is fantastic. It was not a wonderful place when I was there. It was chaotic educationally. But in some ways, although looking back now, the freedom that I had, I think, enabled my imagination to grow in weird ways, which I'm grateful for now. I didn't have a sort of methodical education. I wasn't bound by endless exams and endless homework. I can't remember doing any homework looking back. I used to watch television all night.

Presenter10:56

I've been there.

Presenter11:23

So much more to talk about, Stephen Huff, but for now let's fit in the music. Tell me about your third. What are we going to hear?

Stephen Hough11:28

Well, this is Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven, because this piece symbolizes that whole period of my aimless youth when I would spend my time in the bedroom burning jostics in my um flare trousers and my platform heels, doing absolutely nothing except listening to rock music. It also I think is a very beautiful song.

Speaker 411:50

There's a lady who short

Speaker 411:54

All it glitters is gold and she's buying the stairway to here.

Speaker 412:03

When she gets there she knows.

Speaker 412:07

If the stores are all closed, with a word she can get, what she came for.

Presenter12:19

Led Zeppelin and Stairway to Heaven, yes. You described it, Stephen, have in your bedroom, jawsticks burning, flares on, platform shoes. Do you look back at that young boy and does he seem like a different person altogether?

Stephen Hough12:33

Completely. It's actually quite chilling for me to hear that because it's it's such a different part of my life that I almost can't I mean, I can remember it very clearly, but it it feels like I've I've been reborn into a different person.

Presenter12:45

You said that as you hit adolescence, around about twelve, you had what you characterise as a sort of mini-nervous breakdown. What happened to you?

Stephen Hough12:55

Well, I was afraid of being mugged for some reason. And then, after sort of overcoming that fear, I was mugged. I mean, not seriously, but enough that I was punched in the stomach by a couple of guys wanting money. And then a man came up to me and said, Would I like to come to his office? Because I I was crying at the time. And so the combination of the physical violence of being mugged, and then this rather sinister man offering to take me to his office, which was a complete coincidence, it just made me feel very uncomfortable. And I had to see the doctor quite a bit, and I didn't want to leave the house. I didn't want to go to school. I had almost a year off school, actually, around that time.

Presenter13:31

And just to be clear, in the years that had uh preceded that you had been doing extremely well as a young, talented pianist. Indeed, at the age of eight, I think. You'd been in a piano competition and the judges had remarked that, you know, you were an outstanding pupil and there had been a a headline in the Daily Mail with a photograph of you saying, Could this be the next Mozart? Well, I mean, that's the tabloid press for you, but.

Stephen Hough13:53

Uh

Presenter13:54

What do you remember at that time between the sort of ages of say eight and twelve prior to to the attack and the sort of sense of being sort of agoraphobic?

Stephen Hough13:55

What do you remember that?

Stephen Hough14:03

Well, those were the times of of spending my whole life at the piano, I suppose.

Presenter14:06

I suppose. And when your parents found themselves with this little boy that they loved so much who didn't want to come out of his room, what did they do to try to help you through that?

Stephen Hough14:16

I was never told off I I'm amazed, really. I think if I had children I'd be saying, You can't watch six hours of television a day, you know, why aren't you reading something? or But they didn't. Was it real trash T V? Oh gosh, yes. I can still remember some of the plots and the and the characters.

Presenter14:30

Um

Stephen Hough14:30

Uh

Presenter14:30

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how you get a concert pianist for a child. You let him watch as much trash T V as he wants. Tell me about your next piece of music.

Stephen Hough14:38

This piece of music is one of the most important pivot points of my life because my composition teacher at Cheatham School suggested I got to know it by playing the chords that are part of this section that we're going to hear and saying, What's this, my boy? And I didn't know. And he said, It's the dream of Gerontius. He said, Go and get the records and study it. And I loved it instantly. It was my first introduction to Catholicism, which later became an important part of my life. And it was my first reintroduction to serious music, having had this period when I was listening to Led Zeppelin and Burning Jostics. So here was me listening to Roman Catholic music by a Catholic composer. And it was around the time I was, I suppose, 14 or so. And it really planted a scene.

Presenter16:28

That was part of the Go Forth Chorus from El Gar's The Dream of Gerontius, performed there by the combined Halley Choir and Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus and Ambrosian singers with the Halley Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbara Raleigh. You said, Stephen Hough, as we went into that, that this was a pivotal moment in your life, a pivotal piece of music, and

Presenter16:47

The main reason for that was it connected you to Catholicism. Are you saying that if you hadn't heard that piece of music you then would not have gone on to become?

Stephen Hough16:57

Very possibly, yeah, because it sort of opened that particular door at a time when I suppose I was quite vulnerable in other ways, and it brought a whole new seriousness to my life.

Presenter17:08

Am I right in thinking that you seriously considered the priesthood at at one point?

Stephen Hough17:12

At two points, actually. The first point, very immaturely, I just loved the whole Catholic thing, and I thought the Franciscans would be the best because they wore these wonderful brown robes and I could have a rosary hanging from my knotted cord around my waist. It wasn't quite as flippant as that, but there was an element of the theatrical about it. And I wrote to the Franciscans around the time I'd got a scholarship to go and study at the Juilliard School, and I said, you know, I'm going to give up this scholarship and I want to come and... And the novice master said, well, I think you should go to the Juilliard for two years, actually, and then come and see us when you come back. It was a very wise bit of advice. I think he could see that I was immature about this decision. But then later, it re-emerged in a more serious way, probably about five or six years after that moment.

Presenter17:56

And what happened on that occasion?

Stephen Hough17:58

I started to take my practice of Catholicism much more seriously, and I really felt that perhaps I had a vocation to become a priest.

Presenter18:05

And later on you wrote about the complexities of living life as a gay man and also being a committed Catholic. I'm wondering as a young man being gay and being Catholic in the seventies and eighties, how personal did the Church's rejection, revulsion even at that possibility, strike you, given how close you were to your Catholicism?

Stephen Hough18:29

Well, I realized at one point if I wanted to become a priest, or indeed to be a serious Catholic, at least as I understood it at that time, um that meant a lifelong of celibacy as a as a gay man.

Stephen Hough18:42

And I rebelled against that very much for a couple of years. And then I came to a point when I thought, well, I'm going to give this a go. Maybe it can work. And it did. I lived, not as a priest, of course, but as a serious practicing Catholic, not thinking it was possible to have any kind of emotional connection with another person in that particular sort of way for about 15 years. I lived this solitary life, I suppose, very much as a sort of travelling monk. I was always considering whether I would give up the piano and become a priest. And I was told constantly by bishops and priests and monks, no, your altar is the piano. I remember one priest describing his priesthood as being a bringer of joy. And I thought that was a wonderful phrase, because in a sense I think that's what I as a musician would love to feel that I can do, is when I play concerts, actually to bring joy. I'm not hectoring, I'm not preaching. I just play this music, and sometimes that music touches hearts in a way that I have no power over. The person receiving it doesn't really know what's happening, but something is healed, something is brought comfort to, and if that happens at any time in my life, I'll think that my life has been worth living.

Presenter19:53

Let's have some more music, Stephen Huff. We're going to listen now to your fifth.

Stephen Hough19:58

This is the B minor mass of Bach. Bach, the greatest composer, probably, but someone that I've always had a bit of a blind spot for. So I want to take this to the desert island because I'm sure that if I sit down with Bach there we can become friends.

Presenter21:14

Part of the Kyrie liaison from Bach's B minor Mass performed there by the Monteverde Choir and the English Baroque Soloists conducted by John Elliott Gardner. Stephen Hough, you were accepted to the Royal Northern College of Music. You were just sixteen years old, really very young indeed, I think their youngest ever acceptance of a pupil. And while you were there, you won the piano section of the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition. I think that was in its inaugural year.

Stephen Hough21:27

Yep.

Speaker 321:27

Uh

Presenter21:37

And then you ended your degree by winning this very significant scholarship that allowed you to go and study well, anywhere in the world, I think, under the terms of the scholarship. And you chose, as we know, Manhattan's Juilliard School.

Stephen Hough21:46

Return to the scholarship.

Presenter21:50

Did it seem like a long way from Warrington?

Stephen Hough21:52

Yes, it did. But it was a wonderful experience. And I remain passionately devoted to New York. So I've lived there the longest I've lived anywhere in in the world. I've been living there since nineteen eighty one. I came out of my shell at that time. I really grew up.

Presenter22:08

Were there any sort of sleazy New York dive clubs, disco nights, partying till 5 a.m.? Was there any of that?

Stephen Hough22:15

Oh yes, yes, absolutely.

Presenter22:16

I'm so glad.

Stephen Hough22:19

Yes, the discos of course were very in then and I did go to quite a few discos over the years and I can still remember the horror of waking up, of course very late, but with the din my ears still actually ringing from the music that I'd heard eight hours earlier and that was scary. I thought this can't be good for these eardrums.

Presenter22:20

The very inn.

Presenter22:39

You won a highly prestigious international piano competition whilst you were a student at Juilliard, and that launched you really did it on your international concert career. That was the the parallel.

Stephen Hough22:49

Totally the beginning. I was 21 and suddenly I really had to grow up instantly because I had to get a manager. I was playing with the Chicago Symphony in a few months. So what repertoire do you want? Then I had to get a social security number and pay taxes. And every concert when you start a career is a debut. Everything is like an audition. And it was stressful. People look now to winning competitions and they think that that's the achievement. But in a sense, it's really just the beginning of that road. And it's how you use those years after the win to have a sense of humor, too, I think is also important. It's rather funny that we should be nervous standing in the wings of a concert hall and we're going to walk out and people are going to clap these two pieces of flesh together that make this weird noise we call applause and I sit down in front of this instrument that was invented you know 150 years ago and and played this concert it's all a bit ludicrous really if you think about it

Presenter23:38

So you sort of embrace your inner perfectionist and neurotic to kind of get you there and then see the absurd nature of it all. Is that the balance?

Stephen Hough23:46

Yeah, it's the balance. It's the balance between everything matters and nothing matters. And to me if one can get that right, then that's kind of the most wisdom one can get out of human life.

Presenter23:57

I'll take that. I'm going to put that in my pocket and take it away for the day. For now, let's hear some more music, Stephen Half. We're on your sixth. Tell me about this.

Stephen Hough23:59

Don't

Stephen Hough24:04

This is the Berg Lyric Suite for String Quartet. It's chosen for a number of reasons. One, because this is the recording by the Juilliard String Quartet. And Robert Mann, who was the first violinist of the quartet for 50 years, was a very important person in my life. He was chairman of the Naumberg competition, which is the competition that I won. And he was very supportive to me in the years that followed. We played a lot of chamber music together. And this piece, this movement, this crazy third movement of the lyric suite, I think I would find endlessly fascinating on the island to listen to.

Presenter25:34

That was part of the third movement from Berg's lyric suite played there by the Juilliard String Quartet. Stephen Haufo, an important part of your musical life more recently has been uh composition. You've uh written more than thirty published pieces. What is the sensation, having played so much great music from our greatest composers, what's the difference in sensation of performing a piece of your own music?

Stephen Hough26:00

Well, it's just so much more personal in that way. There's a kind of energy and excitement from within that I don't think, although I have I'm certainly very excited and energetic playing other people's music and playing music of the greatest composers, but I think when you're writing your own music, it's just.

Stephen Hough26:17

Well, maybe it's like your child. You know, you can say, Well, my child isn't Mozart, but you you have a a sort of connection to that child, however lacking in gifts or intelligence that's fantastic and close and is the most important thing in your life. And I think that's a similar thing. These pieces are my children.

Presenter26:34

One of your most um probably well known pieces Nearly Didn't Get

Stephen Hough26:38

This was a mass that was commissioned by Westminster Cathedral and I'd been sketching it over, I usually take about a year to sketch and I keep things in my briefcase. And I had three days at my mother's home and very little else to do. And so I took out my sketches and I put them together, put them in my briefcase, played a concert with the Halley Orchestra in Manchester. It was a Sunday evening, got in my car and drove back to London and had this car crash and I overturned on the motorway at 80 miles an hour. I was spinning round in the car and landed in the hard shoulder.

Stephen Hough27:14

And I was conscious as the the car was turning that I had these sketches with me and I would never get to hear this piece that I'd spent so many hours in the previous three days working on. And then I was alive, and so the piece did eventually get performed, and then was later orchestrated.

Presenter27:30

That's a profoundly affecting experience that you went through during the composition of a piece. Did did it affect the piece that you wrote?

Stephen Hough27:35

Good.

Stephen Hough27:36

I think it did. I'd I'd composed three of the movements. The Anios Dei I sketched actually waiting for a brain scan. I was sitting there and I had a couple of hours to wait. And I think it's a much more anguished movement than it might have been otherwise.

Presenter27:50

Literally on that note. Tell me about this then, your seventh piece of music.

Stephen Hough27:54

Well this is one of my own compositions. I thought it would be nice on the island to have some reminder of this part of my life. But also because it was written for my friend Stephen Isseris, the cellist. He commissioned this from me for a friend of his to play who'd lost the use of his right hand. So it's a sonata for cello and left hand.

Presenter29:13

Stephen Half and Stephen Isserlis performing Les Adieux from my Castaway Stephen Half sonata for cello and left hand. It struck me as I listened to that, aside from how beautiful it was, that when I spoke to your friend and their fellow player Stephen Isserlis about listening back to recordings, he said to me, Well, I absolutely don't. I can't bear the thought of it. It would be like a dog going back to inspect his mess, I think indeed, he said to me, which really profoundly did shock me. But as you were listening to that there, what what was occurring to you about that piece of music, about your composition and your playing of it?

Stephen Hough29:43

Being on this desert island alone, listening to that, it reminds me of all the wonderful friendships that one has in the musical world. I mean, there are some bitchy people around, but musicians on the whole are tremendously supportive. It's a wonderful community of friends and people who are involved in these emotional experiences on stage together. So, having this on the island, I could say that no, I don't want any of my recordings, but actually, I think I would like to remind myself, especially if I lived a long time, which I hope to do on this island, of former life, and of former friends and ways that we've made music together.

Presenter30:15

When you think back to your twelve year old self, it it is an extraordinary life that you have fashioned for yourself. As you say, you spend a lot of time in New York, you have an apartment there, although I know also you live in London, you live this international career, you're under

Presenter30:32

Scrutiny, you know, by the finest eyes in critical musical thinking, and so on and so on. It's a big life.

Presenter30:40

When you think of that.

Presenter30:42

A little boy who didn't want to come out of his room.

Presenter30:45

Who was worried about the world, who didn't want to be mugged at the bus stop? What does he seem like another person altogether?

Stephen Hough30:48

Cool.

Stephen Hough30:51

In some ways, but also I often think

Stephen Hough30:54

The wings of the Sydney Opera House, you know, how far this is from Felwall, where I grew up, and maybe.

Presenter30:58

From Bell

Stephen Hough31:02

Someday I should go back and open a sweet shop in some little village somewhere. There is part of me that's uncomfortable with a certain kind of international life. I often sort of feel that I want to retreat back into my bedroom with the purple walls and the Led Zeppelin stairway to heaven. Of course, not really, but I'm very happy with my life. I'm very lucky not to get depressed. And I say lucky really because that's something that some people live with in a very terrible way. And I'm really deeply grateful that I'm basically an optimistic sort of person.

Presenter31:37

We've learned then, with regard to sending you away to the island, that you will be fine with your own company, but I'm wondering I don't know if your hands are insured. Are your hands insured? Have they done much DIY?

Presenter31:48

Would you be capable of building the shelter? Would you go to fish? Would you.

Stephen Hough31:49

Would you like

Stephen Hough31:54

I'd certainly try. Yes. I th I'm not sure about building. I'm not very good with very heavy stuff.

Presenter32:00

Let's have your final piece of music.

Stephen Hough32:02

Well, this remains in the area of friendships. This is Eric Coates, of course, well known as the composer, in fact, probably best known as the composer of the theme music of this very programme. And this is Robert White, very dear friend of mine. And it's Eric Coates' Bird Songs at Eventide. I have a real sentimental streak, and I love music from this sort of Edwardian period. It's a sort of combination of all of those things in my life that are important to me.

Stephen Hough32:37

Down the echoing avail The birds softly call Slowly the golden sun sinks in the dreaming west.

Stephen Hough32:55

But songs at even tide

Presenter33:27

Bird Songs at Eventide, composed by Eric Coates, with lyrics by Rodney Richard Bennett, performed there by Robert White and accompanied by my castaway Stephen Huffin. You did mention to me, I hope you don't mind me saying so, Stephen, that during that it it's rather become your your party piece with Robert White. If you find yourself at the right dinner party with the right piano, you can sometimes finish the evening with a rendition of that.

Stephen Hough33:47

We nearly always do, and I I've now played this piece from memory, and and he does too, and he's singing it at the age of eighty as beautifully as he was on that recording, which is I think from about twenty years ago.

Presenter33:57

It's time now then for me to give you the books. I'm going to give you uh three books. So there's the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible, and you get to take another book of your own.

Stephen Hough34:09

Well, I've chosen to take Proust, a cherche du temper dieu, in a dual language version. I don't know whether one exists, but we'll find one, I'm sure. You have influence here for two reasons. One is that I've dipped into it over the years but never read the whole thing. And I would love to to study some French while I'm on this island. And I think there's no better way, really, than doing it than being able to sort of go between English and French and learn my French this way. I might have a rather sophisticated vocabulary when I finish, but I think that would absorb me for many happy hours.

Presenter34:17

I'm sure we'll find one.

Presenter34:20

So we do.

Presenter34:43

And I've been told that your Bible has to be a specific version. I've got a note here. Tell me more about that.

Stephen Hough34:48

I want to have the Tyndall translation, which is the earliest version in English, by one person, at least a hundred years before the King James Bible. It's also, it would be having some of the most beautiful poetry with me, as well as being something that would be inspiring. That's yours, then. A luxury, too. What will yours be? I want one of the hatmaker in Chicago Optimo's $20,000 straw hats.

Presenter35:16

Twenty thousand dollar straw hat.

Presenter35:18

What accounts for the price tag, I wonder?

Stephen Hough35:20

Handmade with the finest threads you can imagine. Takes almost a year to make each hat. But I think being on the island it would be very useful and I'm presuming this is a warm island. It'd be very useful as a protection against the sun and it's a rather splendid item to have.

Presenter35:35

It will be my greatest pleasure to give you that, then, as your luxury and uh finally, perhaps most difficult, for musicians who are cast away, which one of the eight would be your one to save from the waves?

Stephen Hough35:45

I think I'd probably take the Elgar dream of Gerontius just because of its place in my life as a very important um changing point.

Presenter35:55

Stephen Hoff, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.

Presenter36:39

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4.