Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Businessman and managing director of GEC, known for his long tenure and aversion to publicity.
On the island
Eight records
Symphony No. 1 in D major (3rd movement)
Mahler was born a Jew but became baptized. He wasn't particularly Jewish in his upbringing, neither was I for the larger part of my life after the war started. But in this work, suddenly the conventional Vietnamese music becomes very Jewish. It reproduces Eastern European statal melodies. You hear a Jewish wedding at one point. And so to keep me in mind of my origin, I would like to take an extract from the third movement of the Mahler First Symphony in D major.
Così fan tutte (Suave sia il vento)
Agnes Baltsa, José van Dam, Margaret Marshall and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
I think I'd like to hear now an extract from Cosis Hantuti, recorded in Salzburg, and um what I think the most beautiful and probably the most significant part of the opera, the closing part of the of the trio Suave su ilvento.
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, 'Choral' (3rd movement)
The greatest orchestral work ever composed is the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, D minor Symphony Choral Symphony. And it has a slightly special connotation because during the war we had the blackout and Cambridge is most of the institutions in Cambridge are in Trumpington Street and beyond it. And Trumpington Street is very, very wide. And if you were on one side of the road, there was no way in the blackout of knowing who was on the other side of the road. So the little clique with whom I hob-nobbed, it was mostly a table tennis playing clique at the time, used to whistle the theme from the last movement, the choral movement of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, the choral part, as we were walking along. And by that means we could recognize each other.
Lucia Valentini Terrani and the Philharmonia Orchestra
this is a very fine piece of music. Amwutti is a great conductor of choral music, and this was a recording he made rather a long time ago, but it's still very, very high class stuff.
Handel's rather an underrated composer. A Gluck who was the great man in Vienna even at the time of Mozart had a portrait of Handel at the bottom of his bed so that he could see it every time he woke up. And I think he was quite right.
Cheryl Studer, Dolora Zajick and the Orchestra of La Scala Milan
In Cambridge I turned away from the nineteenth century and went back to Baroque music, which I thought more pure. And only later did I come again to love Verdi, largely through the instruction that um I had from my Stromuti. And the piece of Verdi probably which is the finest of all the things he wrote is his Requiem and of that I would like to hear the Recordari.
I Capuleti e i Montecchi (Act I Duet)
Agnes Baltsa, Edita Gruberová and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
the piece I would like is the a duet of the second scene of the first act in which Romeo and Juliet sing together. This marvellous sound of these two girls' voices soaring.
One of the elements in the programme was an Egyptian march I'd never heard before by Johann Strauss. And this piece struck me as embodying the whole sense of fun and celebration which marked that occasion.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:44Would you describe yourself as a shy man?
I am shy, I must say, that I I find it rather surprising that BBC's PRO's or Publicity Department has not picked up more of these rather disagreeable cuttings which have appeared from time to time, which I'd rather hadn't been there.
Presenter asks
1:57Why do you not speak up or take to public platforms like other business leaders?
Well, John's retired. He he no longer has an executive role. I am fully engaged. In trying to run the business, and I don't have time to do all these other things.
Presenter asks
6:54What happened to your parents, and who looked after you when you were orphaned?
My father had a bad heart and he got pneumonia. and died of congestive heart failure. My mother had cancer. My father died in nineteen twenty nine and my mother in nineteen thirty four. ... One of my brothers took me in for a bit until the war, and when the war came I was sent off with a label and a gas mask and a train to the wilds of Warwickshire.
The keepsakes
The luxury
Presenter asks
11:23Do you think you get people's backs up by constantly attending to what they might regard as their detail?
Um well, what I hope happens is that they regard it as our detail and that um as I regard it as their policy and their strategy. I mean, I don't think that we should freeze out the people who make um do the work in the trenches.
Presenter asks
32:35How important has the recognition of your knighthood and peerage been to you?
I think it's quite important. I'm not going to say that those were things I did only for my wife, as I've heard some of my friends say. I mean, I think that recognition does lend incentive and does entitle you to a certain respect from your comrades and the people with whom you have to deal. I must say that I prefer to have them than not have them.
“I don't believe it possible, um at least for me. to be a great policy maker without knowing what the thing is about. And in order to know um what decisions to make and on on large matters, I think you have to know what the detail is.”
“I think that the customer is king. The only thing I can remember of my years as an undergraduate was the title of the first economics textbook I ever saw when I was seventeen. And that was The Consumer is King. And I never forgot that.”
“I'm not actually thinking of retirements, I didn't have that in mind. ... No, I don't think I would be very happy retired.”