Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Author best known for the novel Watership Down.
On the island
Eight records
Agnus Dei from Missa Papae Marcelli
Choir of King's College, Cambridge
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
The opening of the Agnus Dei from the Missa Papae Marcelli by the well thought of Palestrina, the choir of King's College, Cambridge, directed by David [Willcocks].
As Vesta Was from Latmos Hill Descending
I've always liked madrigals very much. I feel that the ability to sing madrigals is the very height of civilized behaviour.
There's something very pure and beautiful about the Goldberg variations. They are, as it were, abstract music, the quintessence of music, pure music.
String Quartet in E flat major, Op. 64 No. 6
It happens to be the first string quartet that I ever really got to grips with and understood, which I did at the age of thirteen as a new boy at my public school.
Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio from Le nozze di FigaroFavourite
I've chosen the first act, which seems … to be about the most perfect music that any human being could possibly hope to write.
Symphony No. 4 in B flat major, Op. 60
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti
A symphony which expresses his maturity and his wonderful optimism and grace and musical power … of all the nine symphonies, I think it's the most purely joyous.
Piano Trio No. 1 in B flat major, Op. 99 (Scherzo)
Yehudi Menuhin, Hephzibah Menuhin, Maurice Gendron
The scherzo … which for its poignancy and wistful grace and charm is some of the most beautiful music that Schubert ever wrote.
Gundula Janowitz (as Ariadne), Rudolf Kempe (conductor)
The quality I find … is this extraordinary sensuousness. It's like being plunged into some marvellous bath of colour and light and scent and sexual excitement.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:16From that [Pacific island] experience, do you think you could endure loneliness for a long time?
I'm quite sure I could. There are great compensations on these islands. They're not desert islands, of course. They're populated by Polynesian natives … They are very, very remote indeed, and you're a very long way in the blue.
Presenter asks
1:42How much does music mean to you?
It means a very great deal to me, although I'm not a trained musician. I have at various times in my life tried to play various instruments. I can play the recorder a bit, I can play the guitar a bit, and once long ago when I was a little boy they even tried to teach me to play the piano. The result is that I can read music after a fashion and appreciate something like a change of key.
Presenter asks
3:44You were brought up in the country [and as a boy you were] something of a naturalist.
Yes, I was indeed. I was born in nineteen twenty in a village south of Newbury in Berkshire. My father was a country doctor … And I'm not happy, really, living in any town. I like the country. Although I'm not a trained naturalist … I can honestly claim to know a certain amount about birdsong, wildflowers, and the like.
The keepsakes
The luxury
Presenter asks
12:27You had written a worldwide bestseller [Watership Down]. It must have been very difficult to follow that.
Yeah. Yes and no is the answer to that. Certainly I knew perfectly well that I was never going to have another success like Watership Down. You can't expect that sort of thing in one lifetime. … I just got on with another novel, having got into the bad habit of writing. I knew it wouldn't have the success of Watership Down and neither Shardik nor Plague Dogs. It's not reasonable to expect it. But I love writing.
Presenter asks
17:20Are you a disciplined writer?
Yes, I do, and I feel quite strongly about this. I've treasured something for years that Benjamin Britten said … he said that he compelled himself to go and work every day, apart from holidays, and he found that the quality of the work … when he was hating it was no different from the quality of the work that he did when he was liking it. And I'm quite sure this is true … I write with great difficulty and I write with a pen and ink on paper. And I cross it out and alter it until it's virtually illegible, then some devoted soul types it, and I cut that to bits.
Presenter asks
21:56[As a naturalist, you would] know what to eat and what not to eat [on the island]. Could you build a hut?
I don't know. I wonder if I would. I'm not quite sure where my desert island is. … I'd like it to be in the Pacific, in the South Seas. … I think with the assistance of the local inhabitants. … Well, you do get these heavy tropical rain storms … You'd have to pull them down, not cut them down. Well, the Polynesians managed to do this when they first came to the islands thousands of years ago. Would you try to escape? Yes, I think perhaps one would try to escape.
“I am one of thousands who never actually fired a gun at a German. But I served in Palestine and Transjordan and Egypt, and also in France, Belgium, Holland, and Denmark, and in India, and in Singapore. So I really saw a great deal of the world at the king's expense, for which I have always felt rather grateful.”
“I used to tell stories to my children to while away long car journeys. One day we were going up to Stratford on Avon to see Judi Dench's Viola in Twelfth Night … and they asked for a story … and I began improvising the story of Hazel and Fiver off the top of my head.”
“The book was not written with children in mind, it was written as a novel. But I knew that it was for my little girls … I deliberately incorporated demanding and difficult passages in it, which were intended to let the child reader get his teeth into something solid, and give him, as it were, a kind of dummy run over the kind of greater literature that he would encounter later on.”
“I like Shardik the best of all the books I've written. I think it's deeper, says more, but it is much more demanding, and of course it disappointed many people by not even trying to be a repeat performance of Watership Down.”
“I write with great difficulty and I write with a pen and ink on paper. And I cross it out and alter it until it's virtually illegible, then some devoted soul types it, and I cut that to bits. And then she types it again, and bits of that are cut to bits, and what usually goes to press is a melange of the second and third type scripts.”