Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Conductor and composer best known for movie scores including 'Chariots of Fire' and 'The Talented Mr. Ripley', and collaborations with many top artists.
On the island
Eight records
Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines
This was my first exposure to real inventive jazz, and it came to me on the radio in Johannesburg when I was quite a small person, in my adolescence, in fact.
Piano Sonata No. 20 in G major, Op. 49 No. 2 (first movement)
I slowly, slowly sank over these men of a couple of hundred young people and I opened the top and I started on the Beethoven and suddenly there was an attempt at silence and then there was a total silence from the entire couple of hundred people and at the end there was the kind of applause you only get from stupefaction at the other end.
Hymn to Diana (from Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings)
Peter Pears, Dennis Brain, Boyd Neel String Orchestra, Benjamin Britten (conductor)
I went in and came away with the entire serenade. If anybody is singing or playing that piece, I'm there.
Symphony No. 1, fourth movement
BBC Symphony Orchestra, Edward Gardiner (conductor)
I think that I can safely say to myself that when I grow up I want to be like that.
I played it. I adored it. I played it to the management. We loved it.
Anything to do with memory with cats is tied to that opening night. Never forget it.
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
the moment you ran through the music, and you suddenly realize that this scene can't be improved on.
Theme from 'Reilly: Ace of Spies'Favourite
Dmitri Shostakovich (original), arr. Harry Rabinowitz
Would you like to do it? and I said, Yes, with pleasure.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:22You say a heart of pure granite. Do you really have a soft centre?
It's the nicest statement I've heard for some time. I work as fast as the devil will allow me to do. I can get through scores and memorise, etcetera., in no time at all. And if I think there's a good bit of sentiment available, I exploit it. And so, yes, I'm I'm partially connected to the words you used.
Presenter asks
2:16Doing it very quickly – what's that all about? Why the speed?
Well, I learned when I was s a small person, I learned to read music very quickly and very accurately. And generally speaking, among the people that I came to join in the profession, there were some pretty damn good talents, but very few people could read fast and accurately. So I could get through a score which could normally take somebody like twenty minutes to put right. In other words, to make it sound good, I reckon I could do it in seven and a half minutes.
Presenter asks
5:47Tell me a little bit about your parents.
Father was an emigré from Russia in the year 1912, and he had come away with a degree in pharmaceutical practice, what we would call a chemist in the old terms. And when he came to the port at Cape Town, they said, We're very pleased to see you here, but you can't practice as a pharmacist. And he said, Why not? And they said, We don't recognize your degree. So he had to join in with the ordinary physical and mental life of people who wrapped parcels or ran cafes or whatever. My ma, on the other hand, was born in South Africa of Russian Jewish parents, and she and my dad met, I suppose, around about 1912 and probably got married about 1914. And so I was born in 1916.
The keepsakes
The book
Stendhal (Henri Beyle)
He adored music and writes about it with enormous sensitivity. He wrote a biography of Rossini. And that's pretty good.
The luxury
I was born with a faculty called absolute pitch. In other words, if you drop a teaspoon, I can tell you what note it is, or if you play a note, I can tell you what the name of the note is. Now I need verification of that as I get older. So my pitch pipe will help me to adjust my sense of pitch.
Presenter asks
11:14When you were in the military, was it Cape Coloured's one side, blacks here, whites there, Jews there? How did it work?
Well, it did work in the colour of the skin. They were separated. I was a corporal by then. The sad part of it was when people like me who were well intentioned we wanted to take labour and black talent and train it, or improve it, or welcome it anyway. We had to do it in secret because he was not allowed on the streets after ten o'clock at night. Unless he had a pass, a pass, and this white man, meaning in my age now twenty one years old, had to write on a piece of paper and say, I hereby authorise James to be on the streets until ten thirty to night. That's quite one of the worst things about their part, I think. I say one of the worst. It became much more violent and much more awful.
Presenter asks
22:49Barbara Streisand has a reputation for being something of a stickler. How did you find her?
Well, the stickler part of it I'd heard about. And in fact, I didn't really believe it, but the more I heard about her efforts in the recording studios. the more I realized that there was something there that she was not prepared to release. She'd can't keep absolute control. But turning up at the studios one day in Barnes, London, South West, thirteen, With an excellent orchestra. We were told, as we were assembled and shutting keeping quiet, having tuned up, they said Miss Streisand will, as she usually does, enjoy a dish of Chinese food at about one hour and fifteen or twenty minutes into this session. And I thought Who's kidding who? You know, we're gonna stop while Chinese etcetera. And by God, at one hour and fifteen in when we'd done sort of three takes and we were battling to find out why she was wanting to record it again. Waiters came in with trays and Chinese food, and Miss Streisand went to the control room and had a Chinese meal. Now If you can do that and just sort of take all the circumstances of a recording session and just think about your chopsticks. Jonah, you're on a different world, different level. And I have to say. That was one of those rare occasions when I signed Harry signed the wrong contract. He just signed for the fee for conducting the recorded session instead of a farthing per disc royalty or something like that, because it was a big success. It was a big success.
Presenter asks
26:17When you are going through the process, do you know when the films are hit? Do you get a sense of that as well?
I don't, but other people can. The team that produced Chariots of Fire, David Putnam was the producer and said about three quarters of the way through the work on that movie. Putnam said there's a smell of success here. Now I'd never heard anybody say that about a film before. It's easier to predict failure. You can think they made a balls up with this. The critics will hate it, or the public will not understand what it's all about. Until the orchestra has played the first ten measures of the music for a movie, nobody knows what it sounds like. They all think they know it's going to match, and it's going to be loud in this battle scene, and it's going to be soft in the love scenes. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Put up the images, put the music against that, and you know whether it's going to work or not.
“I work as fast as the devil will allow me to do.”
“my father said, take that rubbish out of here immediately.”
“Music got into me to the point where it says, If you do this good, sonny, you'll have a good life.”
“The woman in the painting talked to me. And she said, You're having a thin time, aren't you? ... stick at it.”
“I signed the wrong contract. He just signed for the fee for conducting the recorded session instead of a farthing per disc royalty or something like that, because it was a big success.”