Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Australian composer and Master of the Queen's Music.
On the island
Eight records
Sir Adrian Boult / London Philharmonic Orchestra
For very special reasons, the Ninth Symphony of Vaughan Williams, I think perhaps the least known, is an incredibly youthful work, enormous virility and energy, and is a forward-looking work conducted by Sir Adrian Bolt, somewhat um Vaughan Williams's junior, but nonetheless the energy and the life force and the hope. ... Also Vaughan Williams was a formative influence. In Australia I used to have by my bed a record player and I used to wake up and before anything I'd put Vaughan Williams very frequently on the record player.
Yehudi Menuhin / Sir Adrian Boult
I would not, and this is not false modesty, like to be on my island exclusively with my own music. I can live on the memories of it. But in this particular case, um my own violin concerto was recorded by Yehudi Menoun with Sir Adrian Bolt, that formidable ... conductor. And I was in America, I wasn't at the recording sessions, and the scherze, which is in the middle of the work, is very, very fast. ... I got back to England to hear the test pressing of the record, and it was absolutely faster than light. And in my opinion, a faultless performance with enormous fire.
Messe de la Pentecôte (movement)
Olivier Messiaen (assumed performer)
Partly because I'd love to have the sound of a French organ, and partly because I'd like to have the music of this greatest master of our time in the organ repertoire with me, so I thought I'd choose a movement from the Mass for Pentecost. Also, because I'm a committed Christian, I would like a reminder of this intensely personal, spiritual, Catholic world, which is Messian's natural habitat.
Ernest Ansermet / Orchestre de la Suisse Romande
I simply have to have the sound of a chorus, as well as having sounds of solo voices. And I chose the Symphony of Psalms largely because it seems to have durability. Also Stravinsky is very much another god of mine. And the barbaric, noble quality that one finds in this period of Stravinsky's music is something that appeals to me very, very deeply.
Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550 (slow movement)
Life would be incomplete without something of Mozart. And I chose Benjamin Bitten's recording of the G minor symphony. ... I can remember in my teens hearing this G minus symphony and experiencing an ordeal of terror through music. I felt very real fear through music. ... It it is one particular moment in the slow movement that we are going to hear, conducted with I think great profundity and and precision by Britain, this terrifying and totally anachronistic chord that comes when you least expect it and you feel Mozart has plunged right outside time, right outside space.
My Bed is a Boat (from 'From a Child's Garden')
From a Child's Garden with words by Robert Louis Stevenson. And this song is called My Bed is a Boat, and it is a marvellous piece of optimism in the face of oncoming death and a belief in immortality.
Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73 — Scherzo (third movement)
Sir Adrian Boult / London Philharmonic Orchestra
I always remember Sir Neville Cardus saying that if he had one composer for his desert island, it would be Brahms. And I suspect sometimes, when nobody's listening, that perhaps Brahms is the greatest, as well as the most complete of all composers. And I would not be able to live without Brahms. The difficulty over this choice was which Brahms work to choose. It was simply in my mind essential that I think our greatest Brahms conductor, Adrian Bolton, should be the conductor. So I chose the beautifully supple, delicate, marvellously calculated performance that Sir Adrian has given of the Schazzo from the Second Symphony.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:37How well could you endure prolonged loneliness, do you think?
[Composing is] a perfectly lonely path. Nobody can go it with you. So I have inside myself the habit of loneliness.
Presenter asks
4:24Do you come from a musical family?
A very good amateur musical family, I should say, and um having grown up in a vicarage, one finds music, both inside and outside church, very much around one. I always fell asleep hearing either my mother accompanying my father, or my father accompanying my mother, singing. And the tradition I was brought up on on such things as stainless crucifixion, Victorian music. And I have not yet, I'm afraid, reacted against Victorian music.
Presenter asks
5:17How early did you feel an urge to compose?
Well in the Australian countryside, in a perfectly frightful place, I mean unbelievably hot part of the countryside, there was little to do there, few enough children. I was the first child and the only child. The piano was there. What else was there to do? And I played and I composed, I can remember from the age of three.
The keepsakes
The book
The Lyric Dramas of Strindberg
August Strindberg
I would take the lyric dramas of Strindberg for several reasons. One is I have a great love for um Sweden, and I've read um him in the original. And moreover, the um I think one of the great spiritual documents is the great trilogy to Damascus, the three pilgrimage plays, which are a microcosm, if you like, of all the grief, all the wonder of the world, and ultimately of the hope of the celestial city.
The luxury
It's a curious luxury, but it would be a puppet theatre if you would let me have a puppet theatre. Yes, indeed. It's it's a whole world. And the theatre's very dear to me, and To be able to create my own plays, I think I'd sooner be a playwright than a composer.
Presenter asks
When you came here to live, had you any contact [in London]?
None. I didn't know anybody at all. I was terrified to dial a London telephone number. I was a very shy little boy. I had to scrape around to earn a living, and I had no idea how to do so. And I had a super job as an organist, choirmaster on the Isle of Dogs in Limehouse, which is a lovely part of London to live. right down on the docks where you can look at the Thames angling in various ways. You can look up and down the Thames. And it was a beautiful church and I played nightclubs during the week and played the church organ on Sunday.
Presenter asks
13:10You began before you wrote operas, you wrote musicals, No Bird for Bacon, for example. Was that to you part of the same thing?
It I felt that it was a way towards learning the craft of writing for the theatre. I now no longer believe it to be so. I think you have to plunge straight in and write opera. ... Verdi was very much the model. ... When you get into the world of opera and you get into the world of music, drama, and you see this fascinating, wonderful physical, intellectual, spiritual cooperation of voice, body, movement, the wonderful smell of grease paint, you want your children to love it, and opera can be very, very difficult. And so I began to write operas, weeny little operas, for my own children, so that they would learn to love them.
Presenter asks
17:08Last year you were honoured by being appointed Master of the Queen's Music. How far does that office date back? What's the history?
1626 and the 19th Master and the youngest this century and the first Australian. After the appointment was announced, the correspondence was absolutely enormous. The obligations, which Her Majesty does not impose, are absolutely formidable, and these are things that Sir Arthur Bliss, my predecessor, carried out with fantastic conscientiousness. And it's very, very hard to follow, Arthur. One thing I would like to do is to see that patronage is extended more, not by Her Majesty personally, but generally officially, to British jazz, which I believe is splendid and is growing in richness and diversity.
“Composing is essentially a very, very lonely path. Nobody can go it with you. So I have inside myself the habit of loneliness.”
“Well in the Australian countryside, in a perfectly frightful place, I mean unbelievably hot part of the countryside, there was little to do there, few enough children. I was the first child and the only child. The piano was there. What else was there to do? And I played and I composed, I can remember from the age of three.”
“I won't conduct. I had a choir in Australia when I was in my teens, and there was no platform. The audience and the choir were on the same level. And I thought to effect a pianissimo, I was doing this quite automatically, I was walking backwards while cautioning the choir to sing more and more softly, and I trod on the instep of a lady sitting in the front row. So I thought that was the termination of my career as a conductor.”
“I want to work and I love working. Um my favorite time of day is the ten minutes when the birds start before the dawn comes, which is beautiful. And then with grapefruit and coffee off I go until I um feel exhausted.”
“I can remember in my teens hearing this G minus symphony and experiencing an ordeal of terror through music. I felt very real fear through music. ... It is one particular moment in the slow movement ... this terrifying and totally anachronistic chord that comes when you least expect it and you feel Mozart has plunged right outside time, right outside space.”