Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Tenor celebrated for lieder and opera performances; previously an Oxford historian researching witchcraft and magic.
On the island
Eight records
I first heard him singing on a record at school when I was fourteen in a German lesson. And I became sort of totally obsessed as a teenager with German leader and I listened to Fischetiskau singing all the time because I found it a beautiful voice, I found it very engaging and even when I didn't understand the words I felt he was talking to me.
This is the Countess's Aria from The Marriage of Figaro. I choose it partly because well, mainly because The Marriage of Figaro is my favourite opera. But I also choose it because when I was fourteen or fifteen and my voice was on the turn at school, there was a house music competition and the head of house decided it would be great if I could sing two pieces, one in my sort of slightly failing soprano voice and one in my very as yet very, very weak tenor voice.
Piano Sonata No. 31 in A-flat major, Op. 110Favourite
This is Beethoven's penultimate piano sonata, Opus 110, and it's a recording by Arta Schnabel, which was r Arta Schnabel was the first person really to record all these sonatas in the nineteen twenties, so the sound is slightly dodgy, but he does this amazing thing of sort of gesturing towards an ideal playing of the piece.
Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
This is Bob Dylan, and it's just the most beautiful song I think about lost love and the most he captures this incredible tone in the way he sings it and in what he's written of sort of being upset but trying to pretend that he's not really upset and he doesn't really give a damn about it.
Now until the break of day (from A Midsummer Night's Dream)
Britain's been an incredibly important composer for me ever since I was a child because he very cleverly wrote a lot of music for children. So you're sort of indoctrinated with it as an English schoolboy from the age of eight. So I had a lot of lot of Britain sort of churning around in my head.
Piano Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 44
Beaux Arts Trio with Samuel Rhodes and Dolf Bettelheim
Track number six is the opening of Schumann's piano quintet, and I love this piece and I was introduced to it by my best friend in music, Julius Drake. I met him in November 1992. We did a concert at Hokem Hall, and in the second half he played this piece.
This is the quintet from the end of Thomas Addis's opera The Tempest which I was in for the premiere of and then the revival of at the Royal Opera House. I knew Tom before that and he wrote the part of Caliban for me in this piece which was an incredible excitement.
Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen, BWV 51
Emma Kirkby with the English Baroque Soloists conducted by John Eliot Gardiner
This is the first movement of a cantata, Fifty-One, by Bach, which I first got to know at school when I was little, but I got to know it, and then w when we got married in St James's Piccadilly in 1992, a wonderful singer called Ruth Holton sang it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:14Was it a sort of schizophrenic existence [running academic and singing lives in parallel]?
Yes, I think it was. I felt embarrassed by it. I've found out since that people found it quite fascinating that I was doing these two different things, but I found it … Unsettling.
Presenter asks
3:42If your hand hadn't been forced by the publicity, do you think you might have been content to continue on the path of the two lives?
I don't in the end I don't think it would have been possible and I think it would have the crunch point would have come. I'm really grateful to Keith Thomas, who was this person who sorted it out for me, that we could sit down and we could finish it in an orderly way, because it meant I could write the book and feel that I'd achieved something that I wanted to achieve and then I could move on to the next stage of my life.
Presenter asks
6:35What was family life like as a little boy [growing up in Streatham]?
Yeah, it was … Um, in lots of ways a very secure suburban life. I mean, my parents got divorced. I was sort of ten or eleven when th that started, but I there was an incredible sense of sort of quiet security about living in suburban Streatham and having my friends round the corner and going to I I sang in the local church choir. I d I remember it as being quite idyllic in a way.
The keepsakes
The book
Leo Tolstoy
I'd like to have War and Peace because I've it's very long and I've read it many times because I go away a lot and I know I like it, so I know it will give me consolation.
The luxury
computer with pictures of family and friends
I thought of having a sort of computer with lots and lots of pictures of my family and friends, because I when I go away again, that's something I just do endlessly. I look at photographs of people I love and it helps me feel better about being away.
Presenter asks
8:12Were you close to each other [with your brother Mark]?
We were very close to each other and he was really an inspiration to me because he was so interested in history from a very early age. And he used to um he used to give me slide lectures on art history when I was little and set me exams. And he just really encouraged my interest in books and in and in history.
Presenter asks
31:39Does your family suffer because you have to be away, or does your work suffer because you don't want to do the travelling?
I think my family suffers, but l I try to make them suffer less than they would do otherwise, I suppose. It's on my mind all the time. But I try not you know, I've given up doing opera abroad in the sense of doing new opera productions abroad.
“I think I'm just probably an anxious person and I just wanted something to be anxious about. And then that probably fed beautifully into my anxious performances as a leader singer, because that's all about angst.”
“I use angst in performance because that's what Leader is about. It's romantic poetry. It's about lost love and death and anxious making subjects. But I as a performer I think I'm very unanxious. It makes me fi I being on stage and performing makes me feel … Confident. Which is funny'cause I wasn't a confident performer as a child.”
“I loved this thing so much and I so wanted to do it that somehow I made it work. And maybe the struggle actually is also what made people like it. I mean you know that's why I love you know Bob Dylan's got a dreadful voice but I don't care because it expresses emotion to me. That's what singing should be about for me.”