Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
An opera producer best known for controversial productions of Janáček, Shostakovich, and Dvořák at English National Opera.
On the island
Eight records
Louise Winter, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Mark Elder
One tends to think of modern music, twentieth century music, as sort of angst-ridden and morbid and very difficult. And this is a wonderful piece by Shostakovich, who was a master of being ironic and funny and quixotic and very surprising.
Choir of St John's College, Cambridge, George Guest
My second record is one of those sort of Proustian bits of music that it evokes smells actually almost as much as anything else. And this goes back to my chorister days.
I was s suggested to me that I would like to go and help this priest who was running a mission and a school in Zululand. And I did all sorts of wonderful things with them. I trained a choir and I taught them Shakespeare and and you know, they taught me, of course, far more about all kinds of much more important things
String Quartet No. 2 (Intimate Letters): I. AndanteFavourite
this is the opening of his quartet, Intimate Letters, which was about his muse, really. He had this in his sixties. He really composed all his great pieces in the last twenty years of his life, which is also a rather inspiring thought.
On Wenlock Edge: III. Bredon Hill
Ian Partridge, Music Group of London
I think I'm going to miss landscape on this desert island. In fact Uh the island bit is all right, but I'm not really so very keen on the desert bit. Um landscape is something that's very important to me, and I suppose by that I mean uh English landscape.
The Cry of the Hounds and the Huntsman
there is a music in the English countryside, or of the English countryside, which to me is something so intrinsically part of its structure, of its hedgerows and its fields, and how it came to be what it is, and it's a sound that is a very dear part of my life actually
Les Nuits d'été: I. Villanelle
Régine Crespin, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Ernest Ansermet
this is purely and simply an exquisite piece of music that I love very much, and I love the timbre of a French singer singing French to contradict my previous remarks.
this last record I've never heard because it was chosen by my children, Emilia and James. And so it's not only something I've never heard, but it's also like a little sort of musical snapshot of them.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:19Why can't you just produce Don Giovanni or Tosca exactly as the composer intended and exactly as the audience seems to want it?
Well, because music is the most intensely imaginative language which we possess as human beings. And for that very reason it uh strives, I think, constantly to liberate us and to be liberated from meaning. And this is the permanent tension between... Music and what people say, the text that people speak in an opera, and also what happens on stage.
Presenter asks
1:57Why should they discover anything more about Carmen if you set it in an automobile graveyard than if you leave it where Bizet put it outside a cigarette factory in Seville?
Oh, because it was devastatingly shocking. For the audience of Bizet's time to find an opera which was traditionally about kings and queens and and you know such safe subjects uh to find an opera set in the slums of Seville and with with this dangerously, overtly sexual woman uh parading around the stage was viscerally dangerous. So you have to try and transplant it into something that is dangerous for us. The visual world changes so radically that Bizet's music still sounds as vibrant as it did then, but Seville has become a picture postcard. So i so you render something which was meant to be a shock into merely the picturesque.
The keepsakes
The book
Geoffrey Grigson
this is an anthology uh by Geoffrey Grigson called The English Year, which is a collection of little bits of prose and poetry in the form of a daily diary, really. So it would keep me making my marks on the on the tree, you know, and giving me a little taste of what that day would be like maybe on Breedon Hill.
The luxury
it's quite large and um it requires a certain amount of equipment and quite a lot of maintenance, all of which I shall require to be done as part of the contract. Um it's a cropia lawn.
Presenter asks
Isn't the producer in opera of rather more secondary importance than the musical director or the general director?
Well, ideally, the relationship between a conductor and a producer should it should be one of equals, in which nonetheless you defer ultimately t to the conductor because he is running the performance. But of course, the fact is that there's an awful lot that goes on in an opera which is in outside the conductor's control, or has become so, because of the complexity of the molten stage. I mean, in the nineteenth century, there weren't really such things. We are, in fact, one of Hans Keller's so-called invented professions, probably along with many other twentieth century professions. By which I think he meant spurious professions, actually.
Presenter asks
11:46What was the first opera you ever heard, and how old were you?
Well, my my parents in the war started going to um an organization called Music Camp... And in the coronation year, they decided to do Fidelio. And I can remember very vividly sitting in the cross beam of this barn, and hearing um uh Floristar and the prisoner's Aria... And I was five, yes.
Presenter asks
26:26Do you think there's some onus on us, the audience, to work harder at modern music, because otherwise we're being sterile in our approach?
No, I think that's rubbish. I think actually it's our job to entertain the public. And uh this is a very kind of airy, fairy, ivory tower view that somehow it's the audience's fault. I mean we began with a piece of Shostakovich which I think would have set anybody's feet tapping. Now he was to my mind the person who would have who could have established a twentieth century popular operatic language. And and he was silenced by Stalin.
Presenter asks
29:38Do you believe that English speaking audiences should be sung to in English?
I certainly do. I mean, to me, the idea of anybody... Uh walking out in front of a paying public in a theater. And deliberately addressing them in a language they don't understand is... either impertinent or just terribly stupid. Uh I mean, it is such a nonsense.
“An opera house is primarily for me an urban thing. An opera is an urban art form. It sits in the middle of the city and it addresses the public of a city. It draws them together into the darkness and it inspires them simultaneously to share all kinds of feelings that they would be much too embarrassed to share with these strangers next to whom they are sitting if they if the lights were suddenly switched on.”
“There's no point in dealing with the material if you're afraid to put your hands into the tub and get them dirty. And I think that it's a gesture of respect towards the great artists, towards Bizet, Verdi, and so forth, that they're not made of porcelain. These are great masters. They're very robust people. They're made of steel.”
“the stage is in some sort of way a sacred space. It is, you know, right from Greek times, it's a mythic space. It's a space where people are placed in order to speak directly to the hearts and minds of a large public.”