Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A broadcaster and arts administrator who directed the Edinburgh Festival, became controller of BBC Radio 3, and directed the Promenade concerts.
On the island
Eight records
The Cunning Little Vixen (prelude)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
I suppose the most magical evocation I know of the natural world.
Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30 (second movement)
Vladimir Horowitz with the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra
There's a moment of such startling virtuosity that even now when I listen to it I feel slightly sick and I think yes, and that's why I'm not a pianist.
String Quartet in F major (first movement)
The Ravel Quartet, String Quartet, seems to me to somehow to be France.
Così fan tutte – 'Soave sia il vento' (trio)Favourite
Carol Vaness, Delores Ziegler, Claudio Desderi; London Philharmonic Orchestra
Right from my earliest years, Mozart was part of my life.
Symphony No. 5 (first movement)
I think he's one of the great original voices of the twentieth century. And the fifth symphony … has in it an extraordinary moment which is really the individual against the state.
I think Wozzeck is without any question the greatest opera of the twentieth century.
It's a great volcanic eruption. It's like watching lava roll down a mountainside.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:15The whole concept of background music is anathema to you, is it?
No, I understand it. I mean, all of us love music, and some people like music as a background to their lives, but it's not the only place for music. And I worry very much about an idea that somehow or other that uh music can exist as wallpaper. … I don't mind that. But what I want is that when people take music seriously, they take it seriously.
Presenter asks
5:27You've introduced more music that isn't familiar [at the Proms] and refused to let us wallow too often in the stuff we know and love. Isn't it high risk not to have it there?
Well, we have a proportion of it there, one would never reject that. … But I don't feel the obligation to do the same popular concertos every year. And curiously, over the nine years I've run the Proms, nobody's complained about that.
Presenter asks
7:24All of your predecessors from Henry Wood through Adrian Boult, Constant Lambert, Malcolm Sargent, Sir John Barbirolli were professional musicians, which you aren't. How much did you feel the lack of that qualification?
The keepsakes
The luxury
A small model theatre with working lights
I'll have my little theatre and all the opera libretti, and I'll spend my evenings putting on my own ideal opera production.
It's extraordinary because I never thought when I was young, you know, I thought I was going to be a historian … I studied music, I was a reasonable pianist, and I studied composition, but I'm not a professional musician. I am a professional listener, though … I'm very conscious of the fact that I'm not a professional in the sense that many of my colleagues are, but I do find working with professional musicians an enormous sympathy and understanding for someone like myself.
Presenter asks
15:13You got into the BBC on one of the much coveted general traineeships and you were soon working on the new BBC Two under Hugh Weldon, who by your own account gave you ten years of misery. Why didn't he like you?
It's very complicated. I don't know. I mean, I have a sort of tremendous ambivalent feeling about Hugh because … he had his favourites … and his favourites were Humphrey Burton and Melvin Bragg and people like that, and not me. … I don't know. I find myself these days sounding like him sometimes, and I owe him a lot, but I he didn't think I was any good, and he didn't think I had a future in the BBC.
Presenter asks
32:25You gave up what you've described as the 'best electric train set in the world', the Proms, next year. What are you going to do then?
I really don't know at this stage. I mean, I I just felt that um I mean very nicely the BBC asked me to stay on longer, but I felt ten years was probably enough.
Presenter asks
32:39You've had Edinburgh followed by Radio Three followed by The Proms. If you stop doing all of that, you stop having a position, people stop listening to you. Is that bearable when your voice has been heard?
I'm not so concerned about being listened to in this way. I mean, what these jobs have given me have given me a public position, but I I don't need to have, as it were, a public perch. I mean, I'm in many ways a very private person. … I'm good at silence, and I'm good at solitude, and I also it's only that way that I think. So I don't have to have a great public platform, and also I mean, being practical about it, I've had some of the very best jobs in this country. I'm 60 this year, and I don't suppose I can expect to go on having great jobs like this forever.
“The French have a wonderful phrase for it. They call it music d'ameublement, furnishing music.”
“I was brought up in a tradition where if you didn't understand something, you did a bit of work.”
“I don't disapprove of anything, I mean except except intellectual laziness.”
“I think they probably had perhaps more tact and more understanding. I don't know what it was, but I mean I started … talking to every support group and every professional association and trying to get real help … and after five years I found I'd got nowhere.”
“People come to me all the time and say, 'cause I don't like new music and I say, Are you boasting or apologizing?”
“I'm not so concerned about being listened to in this way. … I'm in many ways a very private person.”