Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Conductor, author and musical editor, daughter of composer Gustav Holst.
On the island
Eight records
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:43Imogen, could you endure loneliness?
I'd have a shot at it, because I enjoy living alone. I've always lived alone, except when I've been teaching in a school or somewhere … the real joy of living alone is that one enjoys having one's friends when one gets a chance of them. Even committee meetings become like parties.
Presenter asks
1:23What would you want music to do for you on a desert island?
Well, I'd rather … I'd much rather think it, if I weren't allowed to take miniature scores of my favourite works. I'd try going through the music that I like very much in my mind and imagining I'd got the world's best choir and orchestra … and doing it from memory.
Presenter asks
4:46Your father, of course, was the composer Gustav Holst. Did he start you on a musical training very early? Did he put you to the piano?
I began by dancing to what he played for me, and they tell me that I danced before I could walk … [t]hen by the time I was about four, he taught me folk songs to sing and we used to play duets on the piano … he'd teach me tunes to play on the black notes and I'd sit on his lap … and then he'd play very exciting things with a hand either side of me, and I was so young that I thought I was doing it all.
The keepsakes
The book
Kilvert (Francis Kilvert)
It's my favourite bedside book, and Kilvert believed that it's a positive luxury to be alive.
Presenter asks
6:10You won a travelling scholarship from the Royal College of Music. How did you use it?
I went wherever I liked and did whatever I liked. The pound was a pound … I was given a hundred pounds for six months … I started in Scandinavia and worked my way down to Sicily … living pretty rough and getting hungry very often. I had six weeks in the winter when I was really very hungry … but it was very exciting. One could queue up for two hours for a standing place in the top gallery of [the] Vienna Opera House and have a ticket for ninepence.
Presenter asks
12:11Now what does a composer's amanuensis do?
All the odd jobs … [p]reparing the full score … [t]aking the sketches, which in Benjamin Britten's case are beautifully clear … I had first of all, if it were an opera, I had to make a vocal score … in the turn of the screw, for instance, I had to send it off four or five pages at a time every day. It was actually desperate. But it was, of course, the most wonderful experience in learning about music.
“I began by dancing to what he played for me, and they tell me that I danced before I could walk … [e]ven now if I'm learning a new bit of music that's difficult … I begin to learn the phrasing by dancing it.”
“In the turn of the screw, for instance, I had to send it off four or five pages at a time every day. It was actually desperate. But it was, of course, the most wonderful experience in learning about music.”
“[H]e gave away manuscripts to his friends, and whom he gave them to seventy or eighty years ago, I have no notion … I just hope that their grandchildren have still got them somewhere in their attics.”
“[In Saturn] the listener feels old age approaching, and then you get the almost menacing sound of the bells clashing … and then … the air becomes thin … and one can be reconciled to the idea of old age being something that is welcome.”
“It had to be Bach, 'cause he's much my favourite composer … [the last movement of the second Brandenburg Concerto is] one of the happiest pieces of music I know … [Bach] told his pupils that everything must be possible, and this sounds like that.”