Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A sculptor and a founder of pop art, known for innovative public artworks like Tottenham Court Road tube station murals.
On the island
Eight records
Reminds him of Ronnie Scott's and a golden period in jazz.
Django Reinhardt and Eddie South
Ben Bernie, Maceo Pinkard, Kenneth Casey
Reminds him of his uncles and the Scottish-Italian community.
Oh! What a Lovely War
Reminds him of his time after the army and at Oxford.
Elegy from Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 31
Peter Pears, Dennis Brain, Boyd Neel String Orchestra, Benjamin Britten (conductor)
Reminds him of his room in Bloomsbury where he made his own furniture.
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Simon Rattle (conductor)
Reminds him of a friend who played piano and the stimulus to be a civilized man; loves the fairy tale of Petrushka.
Opening of Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra
Francis Poulenc, Jacques Février, Paris Conservatoire Orchestra, Georges Prêtre (conductor)
Reminds him of his first happy summer in Paris on the Île Saint-Louis.
Opening of L'Enfant et les SortilègesFavourite
Flore Wend, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Ernest Ansermet (conductor)
His favourite disc; pure magic, like a fairy tale.
Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen (Queen of the Night aria) from Die Zauberflöte
Roberta Peters, Berlin Philharmonic, Karl Böhm (conductor)
Reminds him of seeing The Magic Flute in Salzburg; he made a print on Mozart based on this moment.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:54How do you begin when an airport or cathedral asks you to create something to enhance their space?
It's very difficult at times to visualize it. I mean, if it's something like half a kilometre and so on, the best thing you can do is make models. And you make tiny models and then you go up to a working size. And you have to do all that if you're going to have costs and timing. So that slightly lies out the province of just being the classical artist, working entirely on his own efforts in the studio.
Presenter asks
9:46How did the Italian community keep the politics alive as well as the language?
Well, they kept that very live because I was sent practically for free every year for three months from the age of ten. And I was in actually in Rome when the war broke out between Britain and Germany. And in the back of our shop, we lived behind the shop as much as we'd lived above it. And my father had a large map of the Abyssinian War, and there were two great Italian generals, one called Graziani in the south and one Badoglio. And my father used to put pins in. He used to listen to the Italian radio every day. I think it's the radio of Florence that has a nightingale, as a call signal. But it wasn't very nasty. It all seemed very, as a child, all very clean and rather noble.
Presenter asks
12:59The keepsakes
The book
A Latin book on tropical plants (with English glossary)
Commissioned from Kew Gardens or the Chelsea Physic Garden
Well, one of the best subjects at school that I enjoyed very much was botany. And I'm also a friend of the Chelsea Physic Garden. So I seem to be warming up about plants quite a lot. And um I would like either a nice man at Kew Gardens or the Physic Garden to to make me a book. I don't think it'd be too difficult about tropical plants. But I think of the Sunny Islands. I'd go berserk if I didn't know what all these plants meant. And I'd also like the book to be in Latin um with an English glossary at the end.
The luxury
Well, running through an awful lot of medieval paintings and paintings of Bruegel and Bosch, there's a wonderful sinister musical instrument called a hurdy-girdie. And a friend I told a friend of my enthusiasm, and they brought a hurdy gurdy kit back from America. ... I thought I'd do something clever. It would I think I'd have all the time to make it. And after I've made it, I think I might even set some songs in Latin from the book that I might be able to Game.
When Mussolini declared war on Britain, you and your family suffered, didn't you?
Well, this wonderful life. There's I think with all the Italians in Scotland, they all knew each other, then they all played cards together, and it was a very beautiful world. And it all came this disastrous night. Everything all came to an end. It was never the same again, because all the shops were there were rioting and looting of the shops. And my father was taken off, and I never saw him again. He died on a ship that was torpedoed. ... It was being taken to Canada. ... And my mother, who was Italian, she had to also leave, but she wasn't arrested. She had to just live thirty miles from the coast.
Presenter asks
18:11How did you know art was what you wanted to do, when your parents had little interest in the arts?
But there's a long, long history of a lot of great artists coming out of unknown. I mean, that's the nature of. I won't say genius, but that's the way it is. Art, as it was demonstrated at the Slade, was not acceptable to me and a few contemporaries. And one of the brilliant contemporaries went ahead to Paris to report back, and I joined him. He's a very nice man. And he gave me his room that he used to live in, and so on. So that's when I got the feeling by seeing French artists and living in France. I thought this made some sense.
Presenter asks
27:10Which of all the things you've created has given you most pleasure?
Well, I don't know about pride, but I like doing a sculpture in Arne which was done in Austria, in a town called Linz. ... I made a model and they made this giant iron sculpture which is outside Bruckner House and I like it very much because people can come out in the interval. It's indestructible and they can sit on it and it can weather the seasons and at times the with the elements, parts fill it with water and you can see the sky. ... And at times, over the years, askets and then plants grow. And that that's the one that I like very much and enjoy looking at.
Presenter asks
31:54Being all alone on the island – does that have a tremendous amount of appeal for you?
Enormous. I mean, I spend every day improvising for things that people would normally discard. Apart from rubbish being washed up, there might be some interesting bits of wood and so on. But I think I would enjoy it more than I enjoyed perhaps living in England at the moment. I mean, I don't have an answer. I hate all these things like answering machines, fax machines. I don't have any of that. And I think finally when I die, written on my tombstone might be he had no answering machine, he had no fax machine. He didn't have a file of facts. He just had pencil and paper. And he managed really rather well.
“It all came this disastrous night. Everything all came to an end. It was never the same again, because all the shops were there were rioting and looting of the shops. And my father was taken off, and I never saw him again.”
“No, it's very strange. I didn't feel any of that.”
“I felt absolutely at at home because it was such an absolutely different world from this grey London.”
“I like doing a sculpture in Arne which was done in Austria, in a town called Linz. ... I made a model and they made this giant iron sculpture which is outside Bruckner House and I like it very much because people can come out in the interval. It's indestructible and they can sit on it and it can weather the seasons and at times the with the elements, parts fill it with water and you can see the sky.”
“I think finally when I die, written on my tombstone might be he had no answering machine, he had no fax machine. He didn't have a file of facts. He just had pencil and paper. And he managed really rather well.”