Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
Finest British conductor of his generation; transformed the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and leads the Berlin Philharmonic.
On the island
Eight records
Foxtrot (from L'Enfant et les sortilèges)
the first large scale opera I ever conducted... it has actually very strong emotional memories of me, of the time of attempting to change from being a student into a professional
Herbert von Karajan, Tito Gobbi
It's one of the most extraordinarily optimistic operas I've ever come across, especially for a man at that advanced state of life. And I feel this is a piece that I know not very well now, but a piece that I could live with that would help me.
Sarabande from Cello Suite No. 5 in C minor, BWV 1011
this is very largely tied up with the same girlfriend who had to persuade me to take the tales, as she was a cellist. And so this has its sentimental memories.
While the Vixen Herself is Dreaming (from The Cunning Little Vixen)
one of those pieces which is actually dearest to me, and I feel on the island would be the most use to me. It's Janicek's opera The Cunning Little Vixen. I've chosen here an excerpt which is While the Vixen Herself is Dreaming, and in which there is the most magnificent dawn music. This is the opera I conducted when I first went to Gleinborn to the season, and I lived with it for six months, and the opera just grew and grew in stature. I was very, very sad to lose it, I must say.
Stabat Mater (excerpt from last movement)
I was introduced to this by an English pianist, Paul Crossley, who just played it to me, and asked me to try and guess who it was by. I had absolutely no idea, and it's since become one of the pieces I didn't think I could live without. It's Shimonovsky's Stab at Martyr. This is the beginning of the last movement. Certainly for warm bath listening.
Scherzo from String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat major, Op. 130Favourite
the enormous B-flat string quartet, which is one of the great gems of Beethoven's later life. And I thought what I ought to play is this marvellous in turn witty and vicious scherzo, which really sounds as though it was written yesterday.
Der Abschied (closing passage) from Das Lied von der Erde
Bruno Walter, Vienna Philharmonic, Kathleen Ferrier
reflects perhaps the composer that's most important to me, who is Mahler, which I've lived with... I feel perhaps of all the Mahler pieces, this is the only one that I could live with full time, as there is some sense of real optimism in it.
I listen more and more now to jazz to relax. I was slightly twitchy about choosing jazz, because it's such a spontaneous thing. I wonder just how much it would live up to being repeated. But actually this has such artistry and such pleasure.
Symphony No. 9 in D major (climax of the first movement)
Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Simon Rattle
I would want to take one piece with me conducting and my musical family playing, just to remember the sound. And this is Mahler's Ninth Symphony, The Climax of the First Movement, where you can hear this extraordinary sound in full cry.
I always loved jazz. Jazz was the first music I heard … Now, for a whole lot of my generation, Joan Mitchell wrote the soundtrack anyway. … And I must say also a singing style that you you can hardly recognise her voice from thirty years ago. And I would say the one positive thing in my lifetime that I've seen smoking do is what it did to Jonie Mitchell's voice.
Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 in F major, BWV 1046
This is very important to me because actually these recordings helped take me back to Bach. I'm really in my forties. The composer I had always loved and thought I would never be able to deal with it was just simply too hard. … when I heard once again how wonderfully Bach could dance, and when I heard it played in a Mediterranean way, where all the colours were at the fore.
The Cunning Little Vixen (final scene)
Dalibor Jedlička, Peter Saray, Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras
Opera came to me from working as a student at the Royal Academy of Music at the age of seventeen on The Cunning Little Vixen. It's pretty extraordinary to me to find that I'm living with someone who comes from Bruno, where Janacek was born and lived. And that one of my first walks there with Magdalena was through the forest where the cunning little vixen was written.
Serenade No. 10 in B-flat major, K. 361 "Gran Partita" (Adagio)
Anyone who's seen the play or the film Amadeus about Mozart and Salieri … will remember the moment where Salieri realized what the difference between being good and a genius. It was where this music from the Adagio of the Serenade for Thirteen Wind Instruments came on written by the very young Mozart Mozart who'd just watched his mother dying in agony. Writing what seems to be a mixture between an extraordinary lament and almost. a set of wings to send her up into the air.
The Creation (The great work is completed)
Arnold Schoenberg Choir, Vienna Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt
Well Haydn. in a strange way the most human of all the great composers. And a in a weird way, one of the most underrated because. He's always there, and people tend to forget that he created the symphony, that he created the string quartet he provided music of such wit, intelligence, and beauty ah that it staggers the imagination. And I also think of all the composers he makes you the happiest to be. Alive.
The Paradise and the Peri (Sleep on and rest in dreams)
Schumann's oratorio, The Paradise and the Peri, which was in his lifetime his most enormous. Success. … Once again a piece of music that mixes transcendental joy and grief together in a Astonishing way.
Scherza infida (from Ariodante)Favourite
Well, I've been told very, very firmly that I'm not allowed to take my family as my luxury to this. … To this island. So I thought, well, at least I have to take Magdalena's voice. And so it's as simple and as selfish as that.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:27What sort of music was in your home?
Well, a mixture of slightly old-fashioned jazz, uh, and classical music. There was a time when my father might have become a jazz musician of one type or other. And there were many, many seventy eights particularly which he'd which he'd collected over his courtship of my mother, who ran a record shop.
Presenter asks
4:40Were you put to the piano, or did you take to it?
It's strange because I'm not one of those people who can remember very, very far back in their lives. ... I have seen pictures of myself sitting very happily at the piano strumming things out. My parents bought me a kit of drums when I was little, which I broke within about three days. I think that was the starting point.
Presenter asks
7:03What was the first occasion on which you waved a stick?
Apart from one or two very minor dabblings which were disastrous. I formed an orchestra with a couple of school friends when I was fifteen and we but we decided to put on a concert for the local Spastic Society. And it started as a small chamber concert, and then mushroomed into something quite enormous and very successful actually.
The keepsakes
The book
Miguel de Cervantes
there really is only one choice, which is Don Quixote, because if there is any novel that contains the seeds of every other novel, It's that one. and one that also shows both the joys and the dangers of too much imagination, which I imagine sitting on your own is going to be really a theme.
The luxury
Italian cappuccino making equipment (machine, beans, grinder, milk, fridge)
The day starts with really good Italian cappuccino. So I need everything. I need the milk, I need the little fridge, I need the wonderful beans and the grinder, and the Italian coffee machine, and somehow, once that's done, The day is really okay.
Presenter asks
16:50What sort of music excites you most?
This is very difficult to say. I think ever since I can remember, I've been tied up in music of the twentieth century. Something that I find very directly appealing, particularly as my musical taste started from the twentieth century and only gradually worked back to Mozart and Beethoven. So there there are appalling gaps in my knowledge. I've never heard the Missus Solemnis, for instance, which is something I can't wait for, but I'm waiting for a performance.
Presenter asks
19:28Which conductors have influenced you most?
I've been helped by a number of people. When I was at the Royal Academy, I mean, my technique particularly and the job of being an everyday conductor working was enormously helped by Morris Miles, who was an early influence. Then later I met John Carew, to whom I still go for lessons, and I find absolutely invaluable the discipline that he imparts. ... And Sir Adrian bowed. Well, Sir Adrian I once shared a concert with when I was twenty two and he was eighty eight, which seemed poetic justice somehow. ... I went up to him to shake his hand, and he looked me straight in the eye and said 'Ah, good evening. Bolt's the name.' ... A great man.
Presenter asks
23:03How good are you going to be as a castaway?
Absolutely hopeless. I don't seem to have any capacity for anything at all technical. I remember very well just in London having to ring up my mother in deep darkness to actually find out how to change a fuse. It's terribly embarrassing. It's one of these things I don't know what I would do. Certainly the the question of escaping would never even occurred to me as I as I know that anything I built would sink immediately.
Presenter asks
1:59What is the unique character of the Berlin Philharmonic?
Maybe the quality of the sound coming out of the centre of the earth oh and it has something about lava flow as well. I mean a number of people have said they have the sensation that if you got your hands too close to it it would get very badly burnt. It's a type of desperate enthusiasm that carries all before it.
Presenter asks
2:54When you heard that Claudio Abbado was to step down, did you think, somewhere secretly in your head, "it will be mine, this job"?
Not in this or any other existence, no.
Presenter asks
9:10Were you conscious that you were somewhat out of kilter with the kids around you [growing up]?
I don't think it was more complex, I just think it was different and more obsessive. And anyone who knows what they're going to do when they're ten or eleven is by definition a strange duck. And so, in a way, you know, I am the person who never had to grow up.
Presenter asks
17:31Why did you decide to branch off [to Oxford] and find this other life that had nothing to do with music?
I wanted to see if I could survive without music, whether anything would replace that. I wanted to know. I wanted to know what it felt like, because I think this is part of feeling like a strange duck, of wanting to know whether you could walk without that crutch. … And so I had really an extraordinary year. … each two month term time I did m make myself a rule that I would not listen to music. and just see whether something else would have an equal weight. And indeed the work there did … and that when I when I went back to music it came with a redoubled force.
Presenter asks
26:29What did you make of the criticism [and withering reviews in Berlin]?
I would say anyone who wouldn't say they are deeply wounded. Bye. Reading that kind of thing about themselves must be deluding themselves. What you have to do is try to make use of it as best as you can. It's no use saying that they just simply don't understand. I mean that's that's not the point. The critics are also there, they're also part of our continuum.
“I have seen pictures of myself sitting very happily at the piano strumming things out. My parents bought me a kit of drums when I was little, which I broke within about three days. I think that was the starting point.”
“I remember going and talking to members of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and asking them if they would come and play for me for nothing. And I think well, certainly five or six of them were so shocked that they agreed.”
“I have never been more frightened in my life as before the first rehearsal for that. I was really quite ill. I mean the thought of facing that orchestra... This sent me into near hysterics.”
“I went up to him to shake his hand, and he looked me straight in the eye and said 'Ah, good evening. Bolt's the name.'”
“A bottomless pit of German white wine. When I was happy this would just help me, particularly to listen to the jazz records. And when I was upset, I could drown my sorrows.”
“Maybe the quality of the sound coming out of the centre of the earth oh and it has something about lava flow as well. I mean a number of people have said they have the sensation that if you got your hands too close to it it would get very badly burnt. It's a type of desperate enthusiasm that carries all before it.”
“I think music reached us before language. Words are very, very useful as aids. But in a way they're like the bottle or the label of the real wine is the music.”
“I think anyone seeing the Berlin Philharmonic ought to go and see the film being John Malkovich, if only for the point where John Malkovich finds himself in a world with all other John Malkoviches. It is A world of unlimited possibilities. Uh but even John Malkovich found that idea a nightmare as well.”