Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Choir master who got Britain singing again through TV, uniting disparate people via song and leading the Military Wives choir to a Christmas number one.
On the island
Eight records
Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47
I started to read about Shostakovich and how he sort of encoded these secret messages in the piece and he was writing under the regime. And that really appealed to me, that there could be within this music that if you were tuned into it, you could hear the man behind all these hidden signals.
George Butterworth (from A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad)
My grandmother, who is a huge classical music fan ... she sent me a clipping, a review of Bryn Terfel's The Vagabond ... It's a very chilling but a very evocative song for me.
The Night We Went to Rothesay O
The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem
This is a choice that takes me back to very happy times when I was living in London. And my dad had this great CD of the Clancy brothers ... I have very strong memories of singing this what I called Darramaduda, and I would just dance.
Ich hör' ein Stimmchen klingen (from Dichterliebe, Op. 48)
This is from Schumann's Dichterliebe, a piece that I came to in my twenties and it was when I first started to study singing classically. It's just this simple picture of a young man, he's in love and it's not going right and the flowers are singing to him and he's just lost in grief.
When I came to consider what the military wives might sing, that was a very difficult choice ... I had met Paul Mealor ... and he told me about this: Now Sleeps a Crimson Petal ... this is the piece where I thought: here is a man of substance.
Soave sia il vento (from Così fan tutte)
Anne Sofie von Otter, Ferruccio Furlanetto, Kiri Te Kanawa; Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
One of my first dates with my wife was to go and see Così fan tutte.
This song I remember as a kid loving. I tried to play the introduction and couldn't work out what the chords were. And then when I came to choose a song for my first series of The Choir, I was in ... looking through these song sheets and this came out and it was just an instant.
Herr, wenn die stolzen Feinde schnauben (from Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248, Part 2)Favourite
I could not imagine a desert island without Bach. I remember in my twenties hearing the voice of Anthony Rolfe Johnson, who features elsewhere on the recording that we're going to hear, and thinking if I could make somebody feel like he's just made me feel, then my life would have meaning.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:38What do you think it is about singing, about communal singing, that has a very unique and special quality for human beings?
It certainly captured me very early on. I always wanted to be in the choir. I was drawn to those events. You know, when we all gathered in the school hall when I was very young and sang, stand up, clap hands, shout Thank you, Lord … Work to define something, whereas when you're singing it's and you've learnt a song, it's very pure.
Presenter asks
10:01Can you tell me more about your mum and dad? It's true that they met through music. That was the beginning of your small family. You were an only child and your mum and dad met because…
Well, they joined amateur dramatic societies. I think their eyes met across the stage. My mum says that she went home and told her friend that she'd met the man she was going to marry and she was only 19. Scandal, 19. But they connected through music and that's been at the heart of everything my family's been about really. Always singing at home, going to concerts, listening to music. If I performed in a concert, even if it was when I was age five, it would be discussed, it would be reviewed, critiqued by my grandmother, who was always very honest and direct.
The keepsakes
The luxury
Presenter asks
11:27How was that young fogey, that developing young fogey, treated at school? Because these are not typical things that a teenage boy in Bournemouth in the eighties would necessarily be interested in.
No, and I think I mean I look back at a lot of my contemporaries and I think well no wonder I seemed odd. … I absolutely loved my music teacher, Stephen Carlston. I was in his thrall really, you know, as you are. I think when you're in a choir, it's like you're an occult. … And I think that for me, he was the person I most wanted to be like at school. And frankly, the other boys who didn't want me to be like that, I think fundamentally, even if you'd asked me at the time, did I want to be like them? I think if you've got me in the right mood, I'd have said no, I'd rather be like Mr. Carlston.
Presenter asks
14:45When you came out of university, your first job was as a youth worker in Bournemouth. You found that deeply traumatic, were your words. Tell me why.
I think I was, you know, middle-class boy from a very caring, loving family. And I just remember seeing a lot of these kids and just thinking, my goodness, you've got absolutely no chance of we certainly don't have the chances that I had. I remember coming home about 10 o'clock at night and I'd be out with my parents till midnight talking about these kids. In youth work, it's very much about them leading you and you have to be there waiting for them to be ready to make music. And I knew that that wasn't for me. I wanted to be more active. I wanted to persuade people and be an evangelist for music.
Presenter asks
18:41Apart from being a great opportunity, it also is quite a decision to think if you were in a world that you were already loving, you had graduated with distinction, you were somebody who had a different sort of musical career or the possibility of such in front of you, to then go into television. It was a wrench.
It was a wrench. It was a wrench. And I remember being at a friend's wedding some years later, about five years later, and a lot of my colleagues at college had were there and they had continued down that path, the classical singing path, and they were all doing well. And I remember having real pangs and real difficulty with it actually.
Presenter asks
27:29You used a very interesting phrase a couple of discs ago: 'I'm somebody who's quite comfortable in a dark space.' I'm wondering, so much of your life is spent with communities of people, groups of people, the idea of being alone — how do you think you would occupy that?
I can't wait. Really? When do we go? … I love it. I love being on my own. I'm an only child and just playing with Lego on my own in my room or or listening to music on my own. Absolutely no problem being on my own. And when the phone rings and I have to come out of that personal space and I have to speak, I always find this a bit of a wrench.
“I think if you always do something that is safe and easy, I think people smell that. You know, if you say, right, we're going to do this thing, it might not be possible, it might be dangerous, it might be exciting. I think there's a real imperative for people to want to be involved.”
“I've never had a more powerful experience of that actual pain and inability to sing and it was a very moving moment because my dad then joined in and that made it worse and then my old singing teacher who was also there, she joined in and then the moment passed and I managed to croak out the rest of the song.”
“When people don't care as much as me about something that I think is very important, I get very upset about that. I think I get very angry about that. You know, I have sort of professional pride and I work hard to give people a positive experience. And if I get a sort of negative experience from them for some reason, I find that very irritating.”
“You as a performer don't need to feel it, you need to make the audience feel it, that's the job. So it doesn't really matter whether I feel it, I need to have connected with it myself at some point, but that's usually a private business.”