Danielle de Niese

Danielle de Niese0:00

This is the B B C.

Presenter0:03

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.

Presenter0:16

For rights' reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. You can find over two thousand more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Disc's website.

Presenter0:49

My castaway to day is the opera singer Danielle Denise, a diva fit for our times. Her lyrical performances and charismatic presence have made her a star. One somehow gets the feeling that she was always headed for the top. As a young child she won singing competitions in her homeland of Australia, and once the family moved to America she had, at fifteen, her professional debut with the Los Angeles Opera. Just four years later she was gracing the stage of the Met in New York. But her big break came at Glenbourne, and if it were not the stuff of public record, it would frankly sound made up by a Hollywood scriptwriter.

Presenter1:29

In two thousand five the soprano scheduled to play Cleopatra fell ill, in stepped my plucky castaway and stole the show.

Presenter1:37

It would seem she not only wowed the crowd and the critics, but the owner too. She later married the man for whom Glinborn has always been the family home.

Presenter1:47

She says when you share your interpretation of music, you are bearing your soul to the audience, transporting them to a different place and time. You give people part of yourself, and you need to be willing to take the risk to be truly great.

Presenter2:05

That sounds terrifying.

Danielle de Niese2:09

It is terrifying. In that thrilling way, I get nervous and

Danielle de Niese2:14

I often think, you know, why do we keep doing those to ourselves, go back out into the lion's den, you know, into the stage, this great unknown?

Presenter2:18

Yeah, that is

Danielle de Niese2:21

And then there's so many things that can happen.

Presenter2:22

You have said also that fear is a big part of singing, and so is faith.

Danielle de Niese2:27

What

Presenter2:27

I mean

Danielle de Niese2:27

Well, because I feel fear when I sing. Not all the time.

Danielle de Niese2:32

It's funny, it's a sort of paradox that lies within me of the stage is the most natural place that I can be. It's where I give everything of myself, but I get fearful about things before I go on. But once you get on stage, I'm in the service of the character, so I'm no longer in the service of myself.

Presenter2:50

You're all in then, obviously.

Danielle de Niese2:51

Yeah, I am all in.

Presenter2:52

We were getting a cup of tea made for us actually as we sat down and I said, You you don't take milk, presumably you don't touch dairy and you said, Oh yeah, sure, I touch dairy. In your real life, you're not too precious about real life. I mean about catching colds or about all that sort of stuff.

Danielle de Niese2:58

Have you said oh yeah?

Danielle de Niese3:02

But yeah, but I can

Danielle de Niese3:04

Well I

Presenter3:05

Hate catching

Danielle de Niese3:06

Ding.

Presenter3:06

Yeah.

Danielle de Niese3:06

Coals. But it happens and

Speaker 13:06

Uh

Danielle de Niese3:09

That's kind of what vocal technique is for. Because, you know, the amount of days that I've had in my career where I've woken up and been in perfect voice and uttered my first note and gone, Wow, it's here today. I'm gonna sound great today five, you know, handful of perfect, perfect performances, you know, where everything worked out the way I wanted. And technique is there for every other day.

Presenter3:23

Okay.

Presenter3:30

Yeah.

Danielle de Niese3:30

Uh

Presenter3:30

What has been your premise for choosing your eight disks today?

Danielle de Niese3:33

Well, it took a while because music is my whole life, so my whole life is a soundtrack and I'm always uh attached with headphones. You think about actually landing on a desert island as a castaway.

Danielle de Niese3:46

And you never see anyone again. And this is all you have. And so, in a way, it is your life. This is music that would sustain you. Yeah, this is music that would sustain me, but also music that.

Presenter3:52

Yeah.

Danielle de Niese3:56

I actually do want to hear on repeat a thousand times over.

Presenter3:59

Tell me about your first disc then, Danielle Denise. What are we going to hear?

Danielle de Niese4:03

I grew up in Hancock Park in Santa Monica. It was where I went to school, and it was the 90s. It was the time of life when you could love pop music and you could love rap music. You could love Alanis Morissette and you could like Snoop Dogg. This band called The New Radicals had this amazing kind of pop candy kind of song of which the refrain says, You've got the music in you, don't give up. This world's gonna pull through. One dance left. And it closes out by saying, You only get what you give. And I just love this song. It's become a sort of.

Danielle de Niese4:37

Like a mantra for me, and I have it in my headphones all the time. Sometimes before going on stage, when you're in my dresses, and they rip out my headphones, they're like, What are you listening to?

Danielle de Niese4:48

But it gets me in the zone. They call me the Michael Phelps of opera because of'cause Michael Phelps always has his headphones on. I didn't like that anymore.

Presenter4:53

Sure.

Presenter4:55

Let's hear.

Speaker 15:03

You feel your dreams are dying over time You got the music in you Don't let go, you got the music in you One dance left, the sword is gonna pull through Don't give up, you got a reason to live Can't forget, we only get what we're doing

Presenter5:31

The new radicals, you get what you give. Um you strike me as the sort of person in everything that I've watched, I've watched a few documentaries, I've obviously listened to you in preparation for talking to you, that wouldn't necessarily be interested in

Presenter5:43

can I say this politely, a middling career.

Presenter5:47

You're always you're always aiming for you know, for the top.

Danielle de Niese5:50

Yeah, my mom told me dare to dream. She always used to say this, and I had this little picture above my bed. And she's definitely instilled in us that we couldn't be on earth without having big dreams. You know, she used to say, God gave everybody a talent, and we have to discover what yours is. And she firmly believed this. And I felt so lucky that I'd figured out what mine was so young because I had their support and I had their nurturing to help me to uncover that. And it's definitely what I want to do with my son too, is help him to discover.

Danielle de Niese6:24

What he loves.

Presenter6:25

When you come off stage, are you energized by what you've been through or exhausted? Energized.

Danielle de Niese6:31

Generally, after that, I'm up for hours with just the remainder energy of that kind of like radio wires between me and the audience. Tell me about your second disc. Evergreen is one of the very first songs I learned with my mom. And to try to describe what my mother did for me.

Danielle de Niese6:52

This was an ultimate gift in a way when you consider what profession I took up, which is that she taught me the difference between singing and interpreting.

Danielle de Niese7:01

And she taught me that music is so much more than ink on paper. And it's what you do when you take those notes off the page that makes music. And she I remember her singing this song for me. And I only know her version. Funnily enough, listening to Barbara Streisen's version, I kind of went, that's not how my mother sang it to me, because she made it her own. And I learned.

Danielle de Niese7:27

How to think in that way from the way that she sang to me. And she applied that to every song she taught me. And this was one of the first ones. And I can still hear her and see her.

Danielle de Niese7:37

Singing and interpreting and phrasing certain parts of this song, Love Ageless and Evergreen.

Danielle de Niese7:45

That they'll just stay with me forever, and if I hear this song, I'm eight again, looking adoringly at my mum.

Presenter7:52

Love's soft as an easy chair

Presenter8:01

Love fresh as the morning air

Speaker 18:09

One love that is shared by two.

Speaker 18:18

I have found

Presenter8:25

Barbara Streisand, Evergreen. Danielle Denise, you have a really interesting cultural heritage. Your parents uh are Sri Lankan, but you were born in Australia.

Danielle de Niese8:34

That's right.

Presenter8:34

So how did they get to Australia? What?

Danielle de Niese8:36

Papa.

Danielle de Niese8:36

My parents moved separately when they were young students. So they met in Australia. My parents are mixed with Dutch and Scottish heritage, so they're called burghers, B-U-R-G-H-E-R, and it was quite a common move that the Sri Lankan burgher population, which only made up about five percent of Sri Lanka's total population, did because English was their mother tongue and they grew up with British schooling, Western

Presenter8:39

Gosh.

Danielle de Niese8:59

Clothing. My mum is a Presbyterian, my dad is a Catholic, so they had this colonization, Commonwealth existence, which went away when Sri Lanka was no longer a colony. And so this was a very common thing to go to the Commonwealth countries where they felt more at one with the culture.

Presenter9:10

And so

Presenter9:15

And you've described so beautifully as we went into the last piece of music your mother singing to you. That w music was in the house. It was part of life.

Danielle de Niese9:22

Yes, it was always there. And I and my mother sang to me as a baby, I heard these cassettes, they used to record these things. I could copy what she was doing.

Presenter9:32

What age were you when you first performed, as it were, when you weren't just in the kitchen singing with your mother?

Danielle de Niese9:38

Six. Five. I went to the Johnny Young Talent School and Johnny Young was I guess like the Simon Cowell of Australia, but he was a big talent scout and had a show in Australia which was a bit like Australia's Gut Talent.

Presenter9:51

Is it a competition, then?

Danielle de Niese9:53

No, it was a like a talent school. So it was a talent school. And by eight, then I did uh Young Talent Time. I won the Talent Discovery of the Year, which was I Went Houston Medley of The Greatest Love of All and I Want to Dance with Somebody.

Presenter9:53

Just performance.

Presenter10:02

What did you sing?

Danielle de Niese10:07

In super fabulous matching color coded outfits that my mom had hand made for me, which was amazing. What did you win? A grand piano, which I still have and five thousand dollars. And you know, that's a lot. So

Presenter10:19

Yeah.

Danielle de Niese10:20

It was amazing. Tell me about your next disc, Danielle Denise. This is your third. So my huge idol as a child was Dame Kiri Takanawa. And my parents would say to me, you know, Kiri is from the Southern Hemisphere. Kiri is from a mixed background like you.

Danielle de Niese10:35

And Kiri is singing all over the world now. So if Dame Kiri can do it, you can do it. And that's all I needed was just one role model. You know, I already had one in my mother. So then to have somebody who was actually accomplishing their dreams that I felt close to was amazing. And this recording was one I've heard my whole life. And it's this, to me, the sort of the bar of everything great. It's beautiful singing. She has one of the most beautiful voices that's ever come to earth from God. And I've been lucky enough to study with her as well and meet somebody who's my idol. And after meeting them and working with them, it made me idolize her even more.

Presenter11:18

My colour.

Presenter12:05

Mozart's Mitra di Quel Arma Ingratha, sung by Dame Curie Tikana were there with the Paris National Theatre Opera Orchestra conducted by Lauren Moselle. Your whole family then uprooted themselves, Danielle Denise, and moved to LA. Was this to support your talent? Was this to give you room to grow in a city that could give you what you needed? That was a big part of it.

Danielle de Niese12:24

Um

Danielle de Niese12:25

That's a big deal, isn't it? It's a huge deal. I mean, my parents cashed in their retirement. They sold their house. You know, this was once we decided that we were going to stay in America. This was a huge move.

Presenter12:25

That's a big deal, isn't it?

Presenter12:27

My parents.

Danielle de Niese12:34

It's an amazing sacrifice they made for me to continue my training.

Presenter12:37

Yes, so you're training by this time you were around about eleven when you moved

Danielle de Niese12:40

Yeah, ten. I'd sort of done everything I could do in Australia, which sounds insane, right? I was ten years old. So, but I'd won every I stud for it in Australia up to age 18.

Presenter12:49

And just to be clear, because one of the things I was wondering is, you know, you went to LA, of course, it's the home of the pop industry really, and great music is made there. You went to a performing school where I'm guessing there was singing and dancing.

Danielle de Niese12:55

Yeah.

Speaker 112:56

Yeah.

Danielle de Niese12:59

The kingdom down the centre.

Presenter13:01

You had chosen opera by that point because it was original, because other people weren't trying to do it? What was the problem?

Danielle de Niese13:07

Yeah, it was a combination of feeling it was the most natural and lovely way to sing.

Danielle de Niese13:13

And I was able to do it naturally, so it felt easy, and I felt it was special.

Danielle de Niese13:21

I've always been stimulated by it and I love it and I am lucky. I know how lucky I am because of the amount of friends I have around me that I know had mixed relationship with music and

Danielle de Niese13:30

fell out of love with it'cause, you know, a music career can be really tough. There's a lot of you know, as many troughs as there are peaks and those knocks every one of us has to g get back up from. It's not easy.

Presenter13:42

Let's hear more of the music you love, Danielle Denise. We're on your fourth disc of the day.

Danielle de Niese13:45

This is such a funny song. So Australia has a summer for Christmas. Sri Lanka, where my parents come from, is a hot country. So one of these Christmas things that we would have is this Calypso Christmas Carols by the DePaul Chorus. And this is such a funny song. We loved listening to this song as a kid. Andrew and I, my brother, it's so funny. It's about a guy who goes doing the Christmas rounds and keeps stopping by friends who say, you know, stop for a drink at my house. There's 12 round bottles. And he does. And he gets in so much trouble with his wife, Sally. And it's called a Christmas present for Sally, but he gets in so much trouble because he lost that present. And my dad, like, adored this song. And he would, him and my mom would laugh about how much trouble he'd be in if the same thing happened. And it reminds me of.

Danielle de Niese14:34

the very unusual nature of my particular upbringing where, you know, a lot of multi different kind of cultural influences and I feel the heat of the Christmases that I remember when I hear it.

Speaker 114:45

Well he started home about three youth and he

Presenter14:53

Uh

Speaker 114:53

Smile.

Presenter14:53

Yes, I started home with a holly tree And a present for my wife Sally As I passed the house of my friend John seen the up the window and called to me Would you pass my door without scares and opt While the sun's so high before six o'clock I got twelve rumbot line and up the shelf'tis Christmas Eve come and help yourself the Deporturus with Hamilton Grandson. How do you keep a performance from becoming stale?

Danielle de Niese15:29

I just pretend it never happened before. I go on stage every night and I

Danielle de Niese15:33

Always say to myself, this day never happened. It's so easy to go on autopilot.

Presenter15:38

Yeah, that's what I'm wondering. I just don't. I know this, I've sung it, this is my 20th performance of it, blah, blah, blah, blah. No.

Danielle de Niese15:44

I can't do that. I just put it in my mind that it's that that never happened or that the count never said that to Suzanne until that day. That day is always today. You know these

Presenter15:54

These paparazzi shots um that that people so enjoy uh reading in magazines, where they say, Well, you think she's glamorous, but look at her when she's out at Walmart or here she is getting into the car taking her kid to school and peop you know, people look like normal our stars look like normal people. You know, they're not wearing makeup and they're in their sweatpants, they've got their birken stocks on.

Presenter16:12

I've never seen a shot like that of you. Are you ever like that?

Danielle de Niese16:15

Are you ever undone? Sure. I mean, I live at Glenbourne, you know, where there's 30 guests that make the Glenbourne operas come alive, stay in the house. And I've had the odd moment. I remember one of the first, the earliest ones I had. I came bolting down the stairs with wet hair. And I saw Sir Charles McCarris on the stairs. And we just made an album together of Mozart. And so, you know, we're two professionals who have seen each other in a professional situation. And there I was with a wet head of hair. And I remember. I remember feeling odd about it and I remember him looking at me oddly because I was not dressed in the way that I normally am. Yeah, I have my undone moments.

Presenter16:58

I mean, living at Glanbourne, that is something to live up to. I I was watching a documentary with you in it and one of the final shots was you walking across this grand lawn outside this grand house, and I think you had one or two at least one or two beautifully manicured dogs and you were swishing in this fabulous dress.

Speaker 117:11

And you were swim

Presenter17:15

It's something to occupy that space, to be the sort of chatelaine of a great house like that. Do you feel that that's something that you've learned to be, or did you always feel at at home there?

Danielle de Niese17:25

I think I just accepted what it was to live there because I fell in love. So I

Danielle de Niese17:31

I haven't changed, I don't think, at all as a person, or I certainly didn't kind of go, well, what's the job description of Chatelaine? So, you know, I must now go and swan around the house or something. But and it was something that definitely the press did project onto me, you know, the idea of the American coming in and changing all the curtains and redecorating and you know, all that kind of thing. And I'm not interested. But that's because I, fortunately, have the great strength of having my own job. I have my own career. And so I don't feel the pressure to come into a place like Glenbourne and go, right, I have to leave my fingerprint everywhere so that people know that I'm here. I'm doing all of that fingerprinting on the stage so I can just be happy and be in my surroundings and

Speaker 117:51

And I

Speaker 118:05

Yeah.

Danielle de Niese18:13

We've definitely got a few letters from people who've stayed there who have been amazed at how warm and fuzzy the whole place is in terms of its atmosphere, not in terms of the way.

Danielle de Niese18:22

that it's changed or anything. And so I think that's a good testament to our family life.

Presenter18:27

Some more music, Danielle Denise. We're on your fifth.

Danielle de Niese18:30

This is a duet from Les Miz Arab. And Le Miz Arab and me have this long history. I was one of the two finalists to play Cosette when the musical first came to Australia. I didn't get the part. I then sang for Johnson Lyft, the casting agents who cast Le Miz on Broadway every year in Los Angeles when they visited since I was 13 years old. And every year they'd say, how old do you know? How old are you now? And just after I turned 18, I get a call from them. asking me to come to New York while I was still finishing high school and sing the role of Eponine on Broadway, learn the role and be in the ensemble. And so I got permission from my school to go for two separate stints of about three weeks each, along with my physics homework in tow. And just continued this amazing love of Les Miz. Eponine is a beautiful role and this duet fascinated me from childhood.

Danielle de Niese19:23

Also because it's got a death in it, and I was fascinated by what it would be like to die on stage.

Speaker 119:32

Little fall of rain.

Speaker 119:36

Can hardly

Presenter19:38

How do you know?

Speaker 119:38

Uh

Presenter19:38

Uh Yeah.

Speaker 119:40

I'm Yeah.

Presenter19:41

Uh

Speaker 119:42

Uh

Presenter19:42

So

Presenter19:43

Mind me. Turn all

Presenter19:47

You keep me safe.

Speaker 119:48

Keep missing

Presenter19:50

Till you was me would keep me close.

Speaker 219:53

Close.

Speaker 219:56

I'm right, I'm right.

Speaker 220:03

Crow.

Speaker 120:05

Uh

Presenter20:05

A LITTLE FALL OF RAIN from Les Miserable performed there by Francis Raffaelle and Michael Ball with members of the original nineteen eighty five London cast. It was composed by Anan Boublille, Claude Michel Schoenberg, and Herbert Kretzmer, and I had the pleasure our listeners sadly did not, Danielle Denise, of you singing along there towards the end.

Speaker 120:23

Towards

Presenter20:25

I've spoken to actually it tends to be actresses mainly who say this, that as their career has grown and grown and grown and they know that people are buying the ticket to see them, you know, you're no longer the unknown. People are buying that rather expensive ticket to come see Danielle Denise because you know she's really fabulous.

Speaker 120:36

Right.

Presenter20:41

Does it feel worse before you go on stage, that sense that you know that the audience is there for you?

Danielle de Niese20:46

Yeah, it doesn't feel worse, but it's a shift that happens in your career because when you're at the beginning, you have no burden of expectation. So you you go out just fearless and you you feel comfortable leaping because there's no other place except to get to the other side.

Speaker 120:55

Exactly.

Danielle de Niese21:03

And when you become more established, you get that. I heard she was so great. Let's go and see if she's that great.

Danielle de Niese21:10

I try not to let that become a thing that makes me change.

Danielle de Niese21:15

Because there's another really fine line when it comes to performance, which is that if you try too hard, it becomes this thing you can almost smell from the stage.

Presenter21:25

You spoke about the fact that you started your work as a singer so young and you were an eight year old and then a fifteen year old and on it went and on it went. One of the the greatest changes physically that you've been through now is is pregnancy. When you were pregnant, presumably you had to stop singing at some point.

Danielle de Niese21:39

Oh my dear, it stopped around seven and a half months. In the last month of pregnancy, I lost my voice altogether.

Danielle de Niese21:45

Really? Well, I sounded amazing. I sounded like this very sexy, husky James Bond.

Danielle de Niese21:50

kind of character of James, you know, I really I was I was thrilled with that. But I couldn't sing. I just couldn't sing. I sounded like I had laryngitis. And I saw the doctor and he said, Go have your baby and come back in three weeks. And of course I knew that in three weeks after the birth

Danielle de Niese22:06

Supposed due date, I was due to start rehearsals at Glenborn. Three weeks.

Danielle de Niese22:11

And ambitious? Yeah, totally ambitious. I couldn't say no to it, and I thought, if the baby pops out in time, I'm not giving that up.

Presenter22:11

Temperature.

Presenter22:18

Let's fit in some music. Tell me about this, this is your sixth.

Danielle de Niese22:22

My husband's gonna call under a rock if he hears this.

Danielle de Niese22:26

This is a song by Coldplay. It's called Swallow in the Sea. And.

Danielle de Niese22:32

Is playing on those programmer things that you program the music into, or it plays on shuffle and it comes out through a speaker system. So it was playing on a programmer.

Danielle de Niese22:42

The night my husband kissed me for the first time. It's a cold place, so it's not like something really Glanborney, you know? Um and there's a line in it which says I could write a song a hundred miles long, Well, that's where I belong and you belong with me. And it's just gone right to the center of my heart. And

Danielle de Niese23:02

I think it's a good song for a desert island too, right? You belong with me, not swallowed in the sea. I was kinda floating around in the water there, about to go to my death, I think of that moment.

Speaker 123:12

And I could write a song A hundred miles long Well, that's where I belong

Speaker 123:23

And ye belong with me.

Speaker 123:26

And I could write it down, Or spread it all around, Get lost and then get found, Or swallowed in the sea.

Presenter23:44

That was cold play and swallowed in the sea. Your husband can come out from under that rock now. He's safe. It's not cheap to go to Glinborn, Danielle Denise. You know, that there's always as there has been for a very long time the conversations that surround what are broadly viewed as the elite forms of art, you know, ballet and opera and so on, that you know

Presenter24:04

Most people can't go. They can't afford it. Even if they wanted to go.

Danielle de Niese24:08

Opera is expensive to put on. It's one of the most multimedia experiences when you consider that you've got, you know, a stage production, you've got the values of a play, you've got crew, you've got a much bigger orchestra than in a musical, you've got huge casts of singers, and then you have all of the different matias of prop making, wig making, makeup design that go into creating these characters. You know, and you don't have a soundtrack to play. There's musicians, 60, 70, 80 musicians that have to come in, plus a chorus. So there's a lot of people that have to take a paycheck home to put on an opera. And the great thing is that we have these super passionate supporters of opera who are wealthy, who many times step forward and say, I'm going to cover this bill so that somebody else can buy a ticket for 30 quid. And Royal Opera House has got that scheme. Glenborn has its under 30s where you can get a ticket for 30 quid. So these things are there, but I do recognize that it's a really normal preconception to have that you can't get in and it's too expensive and all that. And those tickets are there, but there are ways to get in.

Presenter25:17

More music, Danielle Denise. This is your seventh. Tell me about it.

Danielle de Niese25:21

This is particularly personal. I picked this piece because I

Danielle de Niese25:25

Was listening to this a lot when I was pregnant with my son. And I was in this kind of serene state of.

Danielle de Niese25:35

Calm, and I definitely had in my mind hold on to this. I became slightly obsessed with this piece, and I love Rachmanenoff. I love hearing this because it has a very sweeping sense to me of everything that is warm and good in my life. And I remember feeling that way, that sense of nurturing, that sense of.

Danielle de Niese25:55

Like really caring about something that was almost as fragile as cotton, you know, and you want you try to hold it and you don't have to do much to hold it, but

Danielle de Niese26:04

You have to figure out how to cradle this thing. And you know, when life is inside of you, it's just uh I just remember that feeling and this would remind me of that.

Presenter27:10

part of the slow movement from Rachmananov's second piano concerto in C minor, performed there by Lang Lang, with the orchestra of the Marinsky Theatre conducted by Valieri Gyrgiev.

Presenter27:22

I get the feeling as I've listened to you talk about your list today that you really are genuinely one of those castaways who's thought quite thoroughly about what it will be like to be castaway on a desert island.

Danielle de Niese27:32

How do you think you'll call?

Danielle de Niese27:34

I hope that I would uh find the inventive ways to survive. Be like Tom Hanks, you know, and castaway and make a spear and start eating sashimi. I caught a tuna fish on my honeymoon and I remember saying to Gus, The only thing I want to take to a desert island is wasabi, so that I can have some sashimi because I can catch tuna with my wooden spear.

Presenter27:55

We'll come to your luxury in a moment. There's one question that I really do want to ask you, because it has been such a trajectory for you.

Presenter28:02

Over the years of all your hard work and your career, do you have an ultimate goal? Do you think if I do that?

Presenter28:07

I know that I've reached the pinnacle.

Danielle de Niese28:11

I

Danielle de Niese28:12

Don't have one goal.

Danielle de Niese28:15

I want to share my passion and exuberance for classical music.

Danielle de Niese28:22

Do other things and do those things while being a classical musician and promoting classical music. So, do other things in order for people to say.

Danielle de Niese28:31

Wow, she's passionate about this thing, and she's an opera singer, who does that. And I want to let people in to the power of music, that it is a transformative experience. And we've slightly gone on a little bit of a tangent in terms of classical music becoming less mainstream than it used to be. And it's nobody's fault, it's just mainstream music has changed a lot. And my experience of having been a television show host, having done musical theater, so my whole life has been a sort of yin-yang of opposites, of living both inside and outside the classical world. And that's why my greatest thing that I can do is just be my absolute true self and put myself in places where if people connect with me, they'll go, I connect with her, I understand her, who she is as an artist, I want to know more about her, and I want to know her music. Oh, she's singing.

Speaker 129:19

Does it not

Danielle de Niese29:23

Opera? Great. I'll go see that. That's what I would love to see happen, that it opens up people to the possibility that classical music can be just as beloved to them as any other kind of music.

Presenter29:35

Let's have your final track, Danielle. Tell me about this.

Danielle de Niese29:39

I didn't know whether to choose this, but I chose a track of my own. Not because I love hearing my own voice, which you know I don't, but.

Danielle de Niese29:49

This is a really interesting moment in my career. I made my fourth album, Beauty of the Baroque. I chose this because it reminds me of this moment when I got the first edit of the disc. And I was in New York with my parents, and we sat around the kitchen table, and we put it in the City Player, and we played the whole edit. And this was, I think, the last song. And I was listening to this. It came on, and this is a song I've known since I was six, seven years old. You know, we had Kathleen Baddle or somebody like that, you know, singing this in-house all the time. And I listened to this track of myself, which is already like a cringe-worthy experience when you're an artist because all you hear is everything that you didn't do. But I had one like moment, it was like a little like sun ray that came through all the other judgment I put upon myself. I heard this and I actually liked it. And it was the most amazing moment for me personally to hear something and kind of go, I might be okay.

Presenter31:17

I am God to hear to the home.

Presenter31:25

A furnace is avoided.

Presenter31:34

Oh god.

Presenter31:52

That was Bach's Sheep May Safely Graze, sung by my castaway, Danielle Denise. She was accompanied by the English concert conducted by Harry Bickett. How was it listening to it this time? You managed to enjoy it? Just a nice memory, you know, the one and only time, you know. I'm going to give you the books. The complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible are what every castaway gets, and along with it, they take one other book. What are you going to choose?

Danielle de Niese32:06

Yeah.

Danielle de Niese32:09

Great.

Danielle de Niese32:14

I kind of went with my very first instinct, which was one of my favorite books when I was a kid, which was The Great Gatsby, which is a kind of melancholy book actually. And um but it's sort of melancholically beautiful. So that's why I thought I could take it to the island because I would read it again and again and find new colors and new shades of melancholy and

Danielle de Niese32:33

I really love that book.

Presenter32:34

We'll give you that. You're allowed a luxury. I don't know if it's going to be Wasabi-based. What are you going to choose as your luxury?

Danielle de Niese32:42

This was hard, you know. I was thinking about whether I would choose something that's scent-orientated to remember my loved ones. But of course, scent runs out, right? So then you just end up with a dirty rag of sorts or whatever. But my very first thing that I thought of was that I would take a slide projector. Because I remember when I was a kid, my dad would, you know, all the photos were on slides. And mom, dad, Andrew, and myself, we would sit and this, he'd pull the screen down and we would have these amazing slideshows. I'm looking at all these pictures of things. And if I could have a magical slide projector that had all the photos I've taken over my life and sit there on the island under the stars and just reminisce, if I could just see all my loved ones, everything else I could do with my mind. Music I will always hear. So, you know, and smells I can remember. But I would probably look at them every night and they'd become like works of art where I could find new details in these slides. You can definitely have that.

Presenter33:38

Now, this is a very unreasonable thing that I'm going to ask you to do. If you had to save just one of these disks from the waves, which one of these.

Danielle de Niese33:38

Perhaps not.

Danielle de Niese33:43

I know, I know.

Danielle de Niese33:47

Which I haven't thought of yet.

Danielle de Niese33:51

Probably I would choose

Danielle de Niese33:53

Evergreen.

Danielle de Niese33:55

It's one of my youngest memories, but it's also, it kind of describes my whole life because love is so important to me.

Danielle de Niese34:02

You know, my love for my husband, my love for my children, my family.

Danielle de Niese34:06

And love is ageless and evergreen and that is something you'd want to have circling around you at every moment when you're alone. Because, you know, being alone is a terrible fate, I think. Um so to have that I'd probably s I'd probably save

Presenter34:19

Evergreen. It's yours. Danielle Denise, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you, Kirsty, so much for having me.

Presenter34:37

I hope you enjoyed this edition of Desert Island Discs. You'll find over 2,000 interviews with artists, musicians, scientists, sports stars, comedians, and more at bbc.co.uk/slash desertisland discs. And I have a favour to ask: if you could rate and review the Desert Island Discs podcast wherever you download your podcasts, it'll really help other people find us. Thanks again for listening.

Danielle de Niese35:14

This is the BBC.

Speaker 235:17

This is a story about a man called Otto von Wechter. He was Austrian, a lawyer, a husband, a father, and a very senior Nazi. It's a story of life and love and of a curious death.

Speaker 235:31

You could say it's a sort of mystery story.

Speaker 235:35

Otto Vechter is a Nazi you've never heard of.

Speaker 235:38

Because he escaped justice.

Speaker 235:41

I'm Philippe Sands and I'm going to take you on an unexpected journey.

Speaker 235:46

To find out what actually happened.

Speaker 235:48

to Otto Vechter.

Speaker 235:51

It's a journey that goes right to the heart of something called the Rat Line, the Nazi escape route out of Europe that started in 1945.

Speaker 236:01

Along the way we're going to meet an unlikely caste of Nazis, fascists, assassins, spies, sons of spies, lovers, murderers.

Speaker 236:11

and an elderly man who lives alone in a castle steeped in family secrets, who I've come to know rather well.

Speaker 236:18

To subscribe, just search for Intrigue, the rat line, wherever you get your podcasts.