Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Lauren Laverne
A conductor who has challenged classical music boundaries, founded the Para Orchestra for disabled musicians, and led the first orchestral headline at Glastonbu
Eight records
It's from a lesser-known score Barry White wrote for a black exploitation movie from the mid-70s called Together Brothers. And it's got the most insane hook.
For me, there was a kind of revolution went on inside my head as a result of these sessions, just being drowned in this music.
Ach, ich fühl's, es ist verschwundenFavourite
I had this aria, this particular recording, Gundaljanovic singing on a little Sony Walkman, and I would play it like on repeat under the sheets in my bed in these vast, rattly, windy corridor-like dormitories that we had to sleep in. It was my one solace, this song by this composer.
She literally glided up the aisle to this music. It's rapturously, almost unfeasibly beautiful.
When he improvises, it's like you have gone to heaven and hell all at once.
Charlotte Harding and Lloyd Coleman
It's in no way like a cover version, it's something so much more evolved than that and it sets audiences on fire as perhaps you'll hear.
Finale from U-Carmen eKhayelitsha
Pauline Malefane and D. Lati Schioni and Dimpo Di Kopane
I just want to listen just for my own pleasure, if no one else is, to the last part of the finale of that great opera as remade and reworked in our film.
There's something about music with drone in it which anchors me and makes me feel comfort and solace.
The keepsakes
The book
Ivor Cutler
There's a kind of surreal nonsense to his his language and his message, but of course there's always a deep human truth enshrined in it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
As a conductor, you've done something unique: you've headlined Glastonbury on the Park Stage. What was that experience like for you?
It was an amazing moment, you know, where you've got that absolutely rammed field full of people all standing in absolute silence. We were playing Philip Glass's Hero Symphony, which is directly inspired by and inhabited by Bowie's great album, the same name. So we're playing that piece, which is very delicate and lightly etched, you know, it doesn't have much in the way of drums and alarms to it, and yet you could hear a pin trot through this field. Very boggy field, it'd been raining all day. And just for that level of kind of rapt concentration from a bunch of people who presumably were feeling a little weary by that point, was something else. I'll never forget it.
Presenter asks
You said that one of your goals as a conductor is exploring and exposing how an orchestra works. What do you want to show us and why?
When I was about six, my mum took me for the first time in my life to see an orchestra rehearse. And I'd never been anywhere near an orchestra in the flesh before, because I was a choir boy and that was what I was doing. And the conductor sort of paused the rehearsal and he turned round and he peered at me and he said, Do you know what, young man, I think you'd have a better time if you came up here on stage and sat in the middle of the orchestra. And nothing prepared me for the that Eureka moment, that sense of being locked in a sonic power shower where you're getting like a a multitude of different bits of rhythmic, harmonic and melodic information firing at you, cascading over you from all sides. I suppose I've spent my adult life, my career, wanting to recreate that Eureka moment so that everyone has that experience. That's what I've been after recreating ever since, and I've tried many different ways of doing so.
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Presenter
BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs Podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. And, for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.
Presenter
My castaway this week is the conductor Charles Hazelwood. Once described as the Heston Blumenthal of orchestral music, his appetite for radical musical exploration is matchless. He has spent his career challenging Britain's musical palette, exploding boundaries and expanding our ideas about what an orchestra can be and do. His repertoire encompasses Beethoven, Bruckner and Barry White, and his critically acclaimed projects include more than 100 world premieres and the first orchestral headline performance at Glastonbury. He formed the world's first professional ensemble of disabled musicians, Para Orchestra, who reached a global audience at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. And on BBC Television's The Scrap Heap Orchestra, he delivered exactly what it said on the tin, and indeed the oil drum.
Presenter
His musical epiphany came when he was fifteen and the drummer in a punk band. Hanging around in a school choir rehearsal, he decided to give conducting a try, and swapped his drumsticks for a baton for good.
Presenter
He says, Orchestral music is my absolute passion. When I started as a young conductor, I was frustrated by the narrow confines of classical music. I wanted to take it out of the concert hall and bring the sheer awesome joy of orchestral performance to all music lovers, wherever they are. Charles Hazelwood, welcome to Desert Island Discs.
Charles Hazlewood
Thank you very much, Lauren.
Presenter
So, Charles, you have
Presenter
As a conductor, done something unique. You've headlined Glastonbury on the park stage. What was that experience like for you?
Charles Hazlewood
It was an amazing moment, you know, where you've got that absolutely rammed field full of people all standing in absolute silence. We were playing Philip Glass's Hero Symphony, which is directly inspired by and inhabited by Bowie's great album, the same name. So we're playing that piece, which is very delicate and lightly etched, you know, it doesn't have much in the way of drums and alarms to it, and yet you could hear a pin trot through this field. Very boggy field, it'd been raining all day. And just for that level of kind of rapt concentration from a bunch of people who presumably were feeling a little weary by that point, was something else. I'll never forget it.
Presenter
What's your first disc? What are we going to hear?
Charles Hazlewood
We had an amazing time at Glaserby last year, again on the park stage with Parrot Orchestra, which obviously we'll talk a bit more about later on. I've had a lifelong ambition to recreate the great Barry White's Love Unlimited Orchestra. This is a songwriter, not to mention a performer, band leader, orchestra leader, almost without peer in that world, RB and Soul and so on. And I've loved his music all my life long. I felt very, very kind of outraged on his behalf when Lenny Henry had his Theophilus P. Wildebeest phase, you know, that sketch, the kind of love-hungry crooner. I felt Barry deserved better than that. So anyway, it turned out that Nick Dewey, who's married to Emily Evis and runs Glasgow Festival these days, he had the same dream. So we got together. Suddenly we found ourselves on the park stage playing Barry White. And one of the best things, Lauren, about the whole process was it encouraged me to dig even deeper than all the white tunes I knew, down to some of the really deep cuts. And so the first track I've chosen is called Somebody's Gonna Off the Man, and it's from a lesser-known score Barry White wrote for a black exploitation movie from the mid-70s called Together Brothers. And it's got the most insane hook.
Speaker 4
Bye.
Speaker 4
It's gonna all command.
Speaker 4
Everybody.
Speaker 4
I just don't understand.
Speaker 4
In the name of justice.
Speaker 4
In the name of peace and soul
Speaker 4
But will this killing and fighting ever cease?
Speaker 4
People ripping off their fellow man.
Presenter
Somebody's gonna off the man performed by Barry White with his Love Unlimited orchestra.
Presenter
You said that one of my goals as a conductor is exploring and exposing how an orchestra works. What do you want to show us and why?
Charles Hazlewood
When I was about six, my mum took me for the first time in my life to see an orchestra rehearse. And I'd never been anywhere near an orchestra in the flesh before, because I was a choir boy and that was what I was doing. And the conductor sort of paused the rehearsal and he turned round and he peered at me and he said, Do you know what, young man, I think you'd have a better time if you came up here on stage and sat in the middle of the orchestra. And nothing prepared me for the that Eureka moment, that sense of being locked in a sonic power shower where you're getting like a a multitude of different bits of rhythmic, harmonic and melodic information firing at you, cascading over you from all sides. I suppose I've spent my adult life, my career, wanting to recreate that Eureka moment so that everyone has that experience. That's what I've been after recreating ever since, and I've tried many different ways of doing so.
Presenter
You're also very keen to change the definition of classical music. You prefer the term orchestral music. Why is that?
Charles Hazlewood
At some point, this term classical music, which is a bit of a misnomer anyway, because the strict term classical music means the era from about 1750 to about 1800. It's a particular point in music historical time. Anyhow, it's become this kind of like all-body word which covers off anything which happens to be involving an orchestra or a string quartet. And then at that point, it sort of starts to become a kind of a snobbish weapon, or more to the point, a place where most people, the great unwashed, don't expect to go. It's almost like classical music is a maiden aunt who sits alone in the front room and no one really wants to go and talk to her. Well, for me, all music of all sorts all occupies the same terrain. It's all part of the same broad stream. There are lots of eddies and currents, different kinds of pockets of activity going on, but they all interrelate. So, in a way, I'd like to say deaf to all terms or categories and just say there is one music.
Presenter
What's next and why?
Charles Hazlewood
Everyone, I think, if they're lucky, can remember one or two, or if they're really lucky, three teachers in the course of their school education who really
Charles Hazlewood
Opened a door to a new world for them, something that one is always grateful for. Well, I had one such in the extraordinarily brilliant and charismatic music teacher at my primary school. He was a man called Mr. Edmonds with very long hair and a serious chain-smoking habit. Now, his idea of a good music lesson was to take us nine-year-olds into the school hall because it was the one room that had a decent stereo, sit us down on the parquet floor and put one of two records on at ear-bleeding volume. One record was Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd, and the other record was Terry Riley: A Rainbow in Curved Air. Now, for me, there was a kind of revolution went on inside my head as a result of these sessions, just being drowned in this music. And it's one man with a number of different organs endlessly overdubbing, in other words, recording one track and then laying another one on top of that and another one on top of that. Now, to my nine-year-old mind, I didn't understand about over-dubbing. I was just like, How the hell is he playing all that at once? And I would go home and desperately try and recreate what I heard with dismal results. But I've never forgotten the great gift that Mr. Edmonds gave me of listening and of exploring and devouring music in that really take-no-prisoners manner.
Presenter
Terry Riley and a rainbow in curved air.
Presenter
So let's go back a bit then. You're the middle child of three. Were the whole family musical?
Charles Hazlewood
The the music that was in our family was all about church, because my dad was a vicar, so, you know, and I was in the choir, my brother was in the choir, we lived and breathed the music of the liturgy really. That was my first real tangible practical experience of music making.
Presenter
You know
Presenter
So did you sing before you played?
Charles Hazlewood
I think I started both of them at about the same time, but what I was really desperate to do was to play the organ. But of course, you can't really play the organ until your legs are long enough to reach the pedals. So I was very impatient and I had to wait till I was about sort of nine or ten before I could actually, you know, get on top of the mighty beast and start to kind of do the thing that really, really turned me on at the time. Pipe organs, I just love'em. Perhaps you'd say it was the original synthesiser, because it's got so many possibilities for colour contrast. You know, there are so many different ranks of pipes with different kind of characters, and it's all about the combination of those different characters, which particular combinations you use. A bit like making a good stock or something.
Presenter
Com
Presenter
It's time to hear some more of your music today. What have you chosen next, and why?
Charles Hazlewood
Well
Charles Hazlewood
Yeah, there's quite a lot to unpack around this next track. First of all, let me say it's an Aria by Mozart. All roads lead back to Mozart for me. He is without question the single most important musical spirit in my particular galaxy. He is the only musician I can think of who somehow can simultaneously express joy
Charles Hazlewood
And pain. And the aria that I'd like to play for my next track is called Achik Fus, well known to many people. It's the great aria from the last part of the magic flute, sung by Pamina, who is desperate that she thinks she's lost her love and she realizes that the only way, probably, for her to find peace is through death. Now, I'll tell you more about why it was so resonant to me, like from the age of 10 onwards, when I was miserably, friendlessly, lonely, and traumatized at boarding school. I had this aria, this particular recording, Gundaljanovic singing on a little Sony Walkman, and I would play it like on repeat under the sheets in my bed in these vast, rattly, windy corridor-like dormitories that we had to sleep in. It was my one solace, this song by this composer.
Speaker 4
First, heaven's shore.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Presenter
The aria Ach il Fulz, oh I Feel It from the Magic Flute by Mozart. It was sung by Gundula Janowitz, accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra, and conducted by Otto Klempera.
Presenter
So Charles Hazelwood, you said that that piece of music was a comfort to you during an incredibly difficult time. What was going on?
Charles Hazlewood
It was, I suppose, the darkest night of my soul that time. And ever since you guys asked me to come on this programme, I have sort of come to a decision that I wanted to tell my whole story. And there are parts of my whole story that I've never uttered in public before. But I feel, as a result of over a decade now of healing and therapy and working on myself, that I feel ready to share the hidden part of my particular story. And it's simply that I was the victim of sexual abuse through most of my childhood. And apart from anything else, abuse is something which thrives on secrecy. It's like that's the toxic energy which it derives its power from. There's another reason for wanting to come out, and this is a form of coming out, I suppose, is I want to say to anyone listening to this programme who thinks they might have the potential to become someone who wants to touch a child inappropriately. You see, all the paedophiles which I knew as a child, they sold it to me as a form of love. Now, that is the most confusing and corrupting thing to get a child to invest in and believe in. It fundamentally messes up your internal wiring. So I would just say to anyone who is frightened that they have some of that in them, don't ever kid yourself that this is love. Don't ever kid yourself that the child can be an equal party in this. All you are doing is giving them a stain.
Speaker 1
So I would
Speaker 1
Mm.
Charles Hazlewood
and a whole bunch of damage inside them which will probably last their entire life.
Presenter
Did you have anybody that you could turn to for help? Was there anybody who was able to give you comfort and solace?
Charles Hazlewood
No. I I couldn't talk to anyone about it. You know, my mum never knew. But, you know, I got in a lot of trouble. I I was exhibiting a lot of symptoms, a lot of kind of behaviours, which nowadays I think any parent would go immediately hang on a minute, what is going on here? But it was a different age and I think those things
Speaker 4
It was a
Charles Hazlewood
Largely passed unnoticed, and then by the time I was sort of ten and a half, I was becoming so unmanageable, really. I was in such trouble at school and so on, that my parents took the view that I needed to go away to this particular kind of boarding school. It's called Christ Hospital. It's actually a very special school, and it's unusual for a boarding school in that, whilst it's an independent school, it's a private school, it's a school really which is aimed at children who coming from poorer backgrounds. So it doesn't have the same kind of ethos or vibe as your average private school. It's in a way, we always saw ourselves as a bunch of misfits, you know. And so I went off there, and you know, for the first three years I was there, I did feel quite suicidal quite a long time. You know, I had no friends and no way of making friends. I didn't really understand how to get alongside other people because I felt so weird and basically disgusting. I just felt disgusting. That's one of the kind of biggest upshots from it. I felt such a sense of self-hatred, self-disgust, day-by-day despair.
Presenter
Hmm.
Presenter
You said you've been through a lot of therapy over a long period of time. To what extent have you been able to overcome your experiences and make peace with what you've been through?
Charles Hazlewood
It's been a long process of recovery. I've been incredibly, incredibly lucky to have my beautiful wife and my beautiful children around me holding my hand and hugging me and just holding me tight and safe as I've worked my way through.
Presenter
You mentioned that your wife Henrietta has been a a constant support along with the rest of your family since your career began really. You know, you've been together many years. I think your next piece of music is for her.
Charles Hazlewood
She is like the yin to my yang, she's my soulmate, she's my laughter companion. I I can't imagine
Charles Hazlewood
Any kind of a life without her. And if there is such a thing as a universe and the universe having intention, I do feel that we were meant to be together, which sounds like the oldest cliché in the book, but it still feels like that, you know, 30 odd years later. And yeah, I just had to play this piece of music because it's one of the most magical memories of my life when she walked down the aisle. We had a small orchestra at our wedding, because why wouldn't you? And there's this orchestral song by Richard Strauss called Morgan, which is all about looking forward to tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. All of our futures together, our now, our present.
Charles Hazlewood
But the next day and the next and and she literally glided up the aisle to this music. It's rapturously, almost unfeasibly beautiful.
Speaker 4
For joy and faith of his
Speaker 4
Point of being free.
Speaker 4
Yes, we are.
Speaker 4
Oh sweetness.
Speaker 4
I think it takes a short break and hear the hair.
Presenter
Morgan by Rickard Strauss, sung by Jesse Norman with the Leipzig Govanthaus Orchestra, conducted by Kurt Mazur.
Presenter
Charles Hazelwood, you went on to study music at Keeble College, Oxford, and you were also the organ scholar there. What does that role entail?
Charles Hazlewood
The great thing about being an organ scholar at a college like Kiev is you've got this amazing great adventure playground, which is your chapel. You've got a really good choir. There's probably an orchestra attached to the college as well. Maybe a choral society of several hundred singers. So you can realise all your most kind of grandiose and ambitious plans of music making because you are basically the boss. You run all the music in the college on top of being a regular student.
Presenter
How grandiose were your plans?
Charles Hazlewood
I remember doing a performance at the Bellios Requiem with a, you know, a choir of, I don't know, twelve hundred people, which is pretty naturally for a kind of nineteen year old.
Presenter
Your career took off very quickly in the beginning and how did you find that transition going from student life to a professional career as a conductor? I mean it's quite a leap, isn't it?
Charles Hazlewood
It is quite a leap and as you kind of intimated in your introduction actually, I from the outset wanted to try and shift the paradigm, tried to push things forward and in different directions from those which they'd traditionally been traveling in and that meant things which now sound completely not revolutionary at all, like talking to audiences in between pieces, like encouraging audiences to move around the ensemble into different positions to get different kind of sonic experiences, about dressing the orchestra in different ways, about doing very unusual programming which were blending orchestral music with strange analogue and other forms of electronic musical instruments. These are all things which don't sound particularly remarkable now at all. But believe me, 30 years ago, I mean, I remember trying to play some minimalist music with a very august and esteemed chamber orchestra, I won't say which one, and we rehearsed the piece through, and at the end of that first rehearsal, those players were ready to commit murder. They were so furious that this music had made them repeat and repeat and repeat in the kind of very hypnotic way that some call minimalism works.
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Presenter
Let's go to the music. What's next?
Charles Hazlewood
Well, I've talked about my obsessive love for pipe organs. As often as I can, I will go to Paris and in particular to Notre Dame. And my goodness, I can't tell you how relieved I was when we all sat watching in horror as Notre Dame burned last year. Of course, that's a beautiful building and it's very, very important. But my biggest fear was that incredible Cavallier Cole organ would be damaged. And by some extraordinary miracle, it was literally left untouched. It didn't even have any water or dust damage. Anyway, the main organist there is an extraordinary improvisator, like the best of them all, called Olivier Latri. When he improvises, it's like you have gone to heaven and hell all at once.
Presenter
Olivia Lattry Improvisation played by Olivia Lattry on the organ at Notre Dame, Paris.
Presenter
So, Charles Hazelwood, you and your wife, Henrietta, are parents to four children, and I know that it was your youngest daughter, Eliza, who was the inspiration for setting up the Para Orchestra back in 2011. Tell us what happened.
Charles Hazlewood
She was born with a form of cerebral palsy. Her form of cerebral palsy, it just affects her legs, so she has some mobility issues. Now, aside from, you know, on a personal level, kind of having to reorient ourselves to some extent, what of course it also made me do was to start thinking very much about people who have disabilities. And then, in the next breath, thinking, well, why is it that all these orchestras around the world that I conduct, that I never encounter musicians with disabilities in these orchestras. Now, of course, it's not like there's a sign on the door of an orchestra anywhere in the world which says if you're disabled, you're not welcome. The problems are much more grassroots and fundamental. I mean, it may surprise you to know that even here in the UK, which I think has a relatively enlightened attitude towards disability, there are still quite a large number of concert halls with a stage you can't get onto if you use a wheelchair. That's how basic it is. Plus the fact that a lot of musicians with disabilities have to use assistive technology to make music. They can't, for whatever reason, play an oboe, but they can play an oboe via assistive tech and a digital platform.
Charles Hazlewood
I was thinking these thoughts and sort of riffing on this problem to myself. 2011, you remember that the Paralympics and the Olympics were fast approaching London 2012, this amazing moment when the eyes of the world were going to be on our community. And I'm looking at the Paralympics model and thinking, wow, that is so inspiring because what it's done, it's completely scooped up the whole issue of disability in sport, but not as a therapy project, not as something for people to feel sorry for, a bit warm and fuzzy inside for. No, this is world-class sport. So at the point of the sport making itself, the disability becomes irrelevant. So I'm thinking, if sport can do that, I'm sorry, music is more universal than sport. Genuinely, every person on the planet has a relationship with music. And yet we're in the dark ages. So I've formed a new orchestra. It's called Para Orchestra. And first performance was at the closing ceremony of 2012 Paralympics. A body of 24 of the most astonishingly talented, virtuosic musicians, all of them with a disability.
Presenter
Sadly, there are no Paralympics this year in Tokyo, but the orchestra, of course, is still going strong. How has it evolved over that time?
Charles Hazlewood
I'm not in the business of trying to create ghettos. And in fact, some criticism I got when I started the group was like, What are you doing? You're just establishing another disabled ghetto. Well, of course, that wasn't my aim at all. My aim was to just shine a big bright light on the issue, get people to change their thinking. But of course, the end goal is integration. It's absolutely about seeing a stage of world-class performers where a healthy proportion of them happen to have disabilities. So now Power Orchestra is, well, I think it's the world's first fully integrated virtuoso orchestra of disabled and non-disabled musicians, and it's going from strength to strength.
Presenter
Disable
Presenter
All right, I think we'd better hear them after we've heard about them. What's your next disc? It's number six.
Charles Hazlewood
This perhaps, I hope, will perfectly explicate what I'm talking about in terms of this kind of like almost death-defying, wild, joyous, ecstatic, off the scale music making which Power Orchestra always brings with it.
Charles Hazlewood
A rather exciting project we did called Craftwork Rework, which is like an orchestral counterpart to that seminal Kraftwerk album, Trans-Europe Express. Two brilliant composers, Charlotte Harding and Lloyd Coleman, basically took the kind of DNA of that album and distilled it into something which is totally different but has still some common DNA with the original record. So it's in no way like a cover version, it's something so much more evolved than that and it sets audiences on fire as perhaps you'll hear.
Presenter
Craftwork Rework by Charlotte Harding and Lloyd Coleman with Joanne Roughton Arnold, and played live by Power Orchestra, conducted by my castaway, Charles Hazelwood.
Presenter
I want to ask you about a project that you started when you were having a tricky time actually. And I know that it was a kind of revolutionary experience for you. It was setting up an opera company in South Africa, working with singers from the townships. What was the thinking behind it?
Charles Hazlewood
It was a real kind of a life-saving moment for me. Me and a brilliant British theatre director called Markton Fermay were running Wilton's music call. Well, I think it's the world's oldest surviving music call. It's on the border of Tower Hamlets in the city of London. So, simultaneously, the richest square mile perhaps in the world and the poorest suburb in London. It's a really interesting dichotomy there. This amazing Renaissance man of South Africa, a man called Dick Enthoven, who had been a politician, had been pretty much forced out of the country because of his outspoken views against apartheid. He came to London, made a lot of money, and of course, by this time, had gone back to South Africa and was very, very keen to put its cultural jewels on the international stage. And he came and started seeing our work at Wilton's and said, Look, I want to invite you two to come to South Africa to form a new opera company to create a platform for the almost unfeasibly enormous army of vocal talent that lies particularly in the black township communities of that great land. And it sort of remade me because I was starting to kind of unravel. You know, I started to lose my sense of why I was even making music. I went to South Africa and those guys completely re-ignited my fire.
Presenter
It's time to hear some more music. What's it gonna be?
Charles Hazlewood
Well, this sort of threadbare township opera company got going and we did a production of Bizet's Carmen, Great Opera, about Bullfighting in Spain, and we premiered it in Cape Town. And the reaction to it was pretty
Charles Hazlewood
Crestfalling, actually. The people who came to see it tended to be the kind of old opera-going fraternity of that country who still had a very unreconstructed view that opera was a form from the old world, i.e., Europe, so it should be sung by European, i.e., white singers. It was really, really so upsetting given that this was post-apartheid democratic South Africa and that these views still prevailed in such plain sight. And it took for the company to come to London, did a run in the West End, to tour to America, to play right across Europe and in various other parts of the world, and to build a real head of steam. Then the reviews were just like off the scale. So then, of course, the company comes back to South Africa, by which time everyone's caught on to the fact that actually these aren't just a bunch of kind of you know sweet amateurs from a township, but they're actually world-class and they are actually putting South Africa's culture on the international stage. So they were greeted like conquering heroes. Suddenly, funds were available, and we found ourselves making a movie of the Carmen, which we shot entirely on location in a huge township outside Cape Town called Kylicha. And the film went on to, well, it won the best film prize at the Berlin Film Festival. I just want to listen just for my own pleasure, if no one else is, to the last part of the finale of that great opera as remade and reworked in our film.
Speaker 4
Welcome in.
Presenter
The last part of the finale from Bize's Ukomene Caia Licha, sung by Pauline Malafane and D. Lati Schioni and Dimpo Di Copane, conducted by Charles Hazelwood.
Presenter
That was a hugely important experience for you. As you say, it kind of got you back in touch with where you should have been going in in terms of your career.
Presenter
It's interesting, isn't it, that when we are collectively in a moment of crisis now, lots of people are responding with music. Our reaction to lockdown and the stresses and strains of it seems to be to connecting with music for a lot of people. Has going through this changed the way you feel about music and what it means to us?
Charles Hazlewood
Yeah, I mean, it has only strengthened my core belief, which is that music for a start is the most universal language we have. It lifts us up, it brings us down. I'm just so aware, and I'm speaking about performing musicians, but I'm also talking about people who like going to gigs, that there is a kind of a desperation ground. I mean, people talk about people being desperate to get back to the pub. Well, I think there are more people who are desperate to get into a space with some other people and have a moment of mass collective witness, a moment of bonding and unity through music making. So, yeah, it's only made it feel stronger for me. And my God, when we do finally get back to something resembling normal, whatever a new normal might look like, those moments when we first get to collectively gather and celebrate humanity through music, those are going to be hell of moments.
Presenter
It's gonna be a little while though because I'm about to cast you away to our desert island.
Charles Hazlewood
Yeah, I know it's about unfair.
Presenter
How are your survival skills, Charles? How do you think you'll get on?
Charles Hazlewood
Well, I'm quite good at lighting a fire. I'm in fact I'm a bit obsessed with fires. I've got a wood burner in my studio, got a wood burner in the house, you know, and and I I'm a bit obsessive about it. It's just something very, very kind of primitive within me that I just love the smell of wood smoke.
Presenter
One more disc to go, though, before I send you off there. What's it gonna be, and why?
Charles Hazlewood
A certain type of music that I've always, always been really drawn to is drone music. One fixed pitch, over and above which, or underneath which, the entire harmonic and melodic landscape kind of chafes and pulls and pushes it, kind of tugging, but it remains tethered to this fixed note. Now, on a really simple level, I guess I've always found it comforting. I've found it there's something very secure about that idea. Because I've spent so much of my life feeling precarious, dangerous, and untethered, there's something about music with drone in it which anchors me and makes me feel comfort and solace. It's Pauline Oliveros, who's the last time we're about to listen to one single D in the middle of this which never leaves. Even though you don't always hear it, you can still smell it.
Presenter
Pauline Oliveros and The Last Time. So, Charles Hazelwood, you will have three books to take with you: The Complete Works of Shakespeare, The Bible, and
Charles Hazlewood
The Bible. Can I is it possible for me to not take the Bible just because I've probably read most of the Bible, but I've never read the Quran and I think it's about time.
Presenter
Panoni
Presenter
Absolutely, it's yours. You can have another book of your choosing too. What would you like?
Charles Hazlewood
Yeah, I mean there are many answers I could give to that question. I think at the moment I'd like a book of poetry by the great Glaswegian bard Ivor Cutler, a man always found sweating over a wheezy harmonium, another instrument I'm a bit obsessed with. And you know, he's a bit like a Shakespearean fool, that there's a kind of surreal nonsense to his his language and his message, but of course there's always a deep human truth enshrined in it.
Presenter
You can also have a luxury item, a treat, to sweeten the experience of being castaway. What would you like?
Charles Hazlewood
Well, it's just a no-brainer for me. It has to be like a really, really good quality espresso machine. There's just something about a really good quality one, and it's about a slightly lower bar of pressure. Again, I'm a bit obsessive about this one sixteen bar.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Charles Hazlewood
Most of the kind of like domestic machines, it's more like eighteen, nineteen bars. It's forcing the water through too fast. You don't get the kind of depth and nuance of the ground beam in the way that you do with this slightly more gentle lower pressure machine. Sorry, I'm a bore, but
Presenter
Wow. That was really specific. Really, really specific.
Charles Hazlewood
It may be specific.
Presenter
It's yours, it's fine, take it.
Charles Hazlewood
Thank you.
Presenter
And finally, and perhaps this is the most difficult question of all for you, which one of these disks would you save above all the others?
Charles Hazlewood
It's not really that difficult for me. It's Mozart. He is my lodestar, he's my sun, my moon, my my lifelong friend, always the only musician I know, the only music I know that can simultaneously suggest the dizzy heights of joy and the lowest, most racked pain. Archie Fuelis is a piece I think which perfectly encapsulates that. It's both devastatingly sad and almost unbearably uplifting.
Presenter
Charles Hazelwood, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.
Charles Hazlewood
Thank you so much for having me.
Presenter
Hello, I hope you really enjoyed that podcast with Charles Hazelwood and I do hope he's happy on his island making a very specific kind of coffee.
Presenter
We have cast away many other conductors to our island and you can find their programmes in our archive at bbc.co.uk slash desertisland discs or through the BBC Sounds app. They include Andre Previn, Daniel Barrenboim, Sir Simon Rattle and Marin Alsop, the first woman to conduct The Last Night of the Proms. Join me next time when I'll be talking to Professor Dame Elizabeth Anionwu, one of the most influential nurses in the history of the NHS.
Speaker 1
Hi, my name's Jarvis Cocker.
Speaker 1
and I'm here to tell you about wireless nights.
Speaker 1
A nocturnal investigation into the human condition.
Speaker 1
A collection of stories about the night,
Speaker 1
and the people who come alive after dark.
Speaker 1
From night clubs to night rail
Speaker 1
From the man in the moon to the land of the midnight sun
Speaker 1
Join me and discover a different kind of nightlife.
Speaker 1
All episodes now available on the BBC Sounds app.
Presenter asks
You're also very keen to change the definition of classical music. You prefer the term orchestral music. Why is that?
At some point, this term classical music, which is a bit of a misnomer anyway, because the strict term classical music means the era from about 1750 to about 1800. It's a particular point in music historical time. Anyhow, it's become this kind of like all-body word which covers off anything which happens to be involving an orchestra or a string quartet. And then at that point, it sort of starts to become a kind of a snobbish weapon, or more to the point, a place where most people, the great unwashed, don't expect to go. It's almost like classical music is a maiden aunt who sits alone in the front room and no one really wants to go and talk to her. Well, for me, all music of all sorts all occupies the same terrain. It's all part of the same broad stream. There are lots of eddies and currents, different kinds of pockets of activity going on, but they all interrelate. So, in a way, I'd like to say deaf to all terms or categories and just say there is one music.
Presenter asks
So Charles Hazelwood, you said that that piece of music [Mozart's aria] was a comfort to you during an incredibly difficult time. What was going on?
It was, I suppose, the darkest night of my soul that time. And ever since you guys asked me to come on this programme, I have sort of come to a decision that I wanted to tell my whole story. And there are parts of my whole story that I've never uttered in public before. But I feel, as a result of over a decade now of healing and therapy and working on myself, that I feel ready to share the hidden part of my particular story. And it's simply that I was the victim of sexual abuse through most of my childhood. And apart from anything else, abuse is something which thrives on secrecy. It's like that's the toxic energy which it derives its power from. There's another reason for wanting to come out, and this is a form of coming out, I suppose, is I want to say to anyone listening to this programme who thinks they might have the potential to become someone who wants to touch a child inappropriately. You see, all the paedophiles which I knew as a child, they sold it to me as a form of love. Now, that is the most confusing and corrupting thing to get a child to invest in and believe in. It fundamentally messes up your internal wiring. So I would just say to anyone who is frightened that they have some of that in them, don't ever kid yourself that this is love. Don't ever kid yourself that the child can be an equal party in this. All you are doing is giving them a stain … and a whole bunch of damage inside them which will probably last their entire life.
Presenter asks
You said you've been through a lot of therapy over a long period of time. To what extent have you been able to overcome your experiences and make peace with what you've been through?
It's been a long process of recovery. I've been incredibly, incredibly lucky to have my beautiful wife and my beautiful children around me holding my hand and hugging me and just holding me tight and safe as I've worked my way through.
Presenter asks
I want to ask you about a project that you started when you were having a tricky time actually. And I know that it was a kind of revolutionary experience for you. It was setting up an opera company in South Africa, working with singers from the townships. What was the thinking behind it?
It was a real kind of a life-saving moment for me. Me and a brilliant British theatre director called Markton Fermay were running Wilton's music call. Well, I think it's the world's oldest surviving music call. It's on the border of Tower Hamlets in the city of London. So, simultaneously, the richest square mile perhaps in the world and the poorest suburb in London. It's a really interesting dichotomy there. This amazing Renaissance man of South Africa, a man called Dick Enthoven, who had been a politician, had been pretty much forced out of the country because of his outspoken views against apartheid. He came to London, made a lot of money, and of course, by this time, had gone back to South Africa and was very, very keen to put its cultural jewels on the international stage. And he came and started seeing our work at Wilton's and said, Look, I want to invite you two to come to South Africa to form a new opera company to create a platform for the almost unfeasibly enormous army of vocal talent that lies particularly in the black township communities of that great land. And it sort of remade me because I was starting to kind of unravel. You know, I started to lose my sense of why I was even making music. I went to South Africa and those guys completely re-ignited my fire.
“I was the victim of sexual abuse through most of my childhood. And apart from anything else, abuse is something which thrives on secrecy. It's like that's the toxic energy which it derives its power from.”
“I felt such a sense of self-hatred, self-disgust, day-by-day despair.”
“She is like the yin to my yang, she's my soulmate, she's my laughter companion. I I can't imagine any kind of a life without her.”
“I'm not in the business of trying to create ghettos. … My aim was to just shine a big bright light on the issue, get people to change their thinking. But of course, the end goal is integration.”
“Music for a start is the most universal language we have. It lifts us up, it brings us down.”