Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
One of Britain's premier composers.
On the island
Eight records
Sonatine: II. Mouvement de menuet
I chose this record, Roy, because Crossley is a young pianist who I esteem very much. He's played all my own pieces, and he understands French music in a supreme degree.
Nobuko Imai, London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Colin Davis
And Herald in Italy was the strangest of them, this strange sound that the viola makes, and and there it was all so new. And and yet this tune, which I would like to have played now, has a kind of song to us that is absolutely unique, absolutely berliot...
Vespro della Beata VergineFavourite
Taverner Consort and Choir, Andrew Parrott
This lovely, wonderful piece of music, because it's of such grandeur, such variety.
I had a small turntable of a not very complicated kind, and, you know, there were seventy eights of all sorts, and I was at that time finding my way to jazz through recordings. But also there came out the various song records that came from the movies or, you know, the the musicals. But the one the one that absurdly remained is because it has this lyric which cheers me up...
It means something to me, because it belongs to human beings of this date. It's also when I come to play the record which I wish to have from the police, you will hear the sounds. It might have come out of Harry Part. It's of the time there are these same xylophones, these same crackling sounds, and the beat.
Songs for Dov: Song II (Opening)
Robert Tear, London Sinfonietta, David Atherton
I'd like perhaps to be reminded in some reasonable way that I did compose when I was not so lonely on the island.
I've saved to the end the composer who's been with him all my life from the very beginning and Beethoven. This is a r very serious record. I mean it has to be, because we have somewhere to come back to the thing that is inside oneself.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:35Sir Michael, would you rather have scores than records?
I have lost my central vision, and I only have peripheral vision, and I can't read easily, and I can't read a score at all. ... I don't now want to read the score. I would like to hear the sounds. Some of it will be memory, but the records are the things I really would like.
Presenter asks
5:27Were your parents musical?
The answer is no, not in the sense of knowing what it was to have a musical child. They had no idea at all. My mother sang boozy ballads, or what they would call them now, but they were they were lovely sort of songs of which the best were quilter.
Presenter asks
9:29How do you remember [your professors, Malcolm Sargent and Adrian Boult]?
As much, much younger men than we think of them now. ... Sargent ... was a very clear man who thought we were pretty fair rubbish. And he said none of us were ever going to be any good anyhow ... Bolt was a much grander figure ... and he'd been taught by Nikish, and it was a very clear German account. He wanted the score understood.
The keepsakes
The luxury
Presenter asks
15:23How long were you inside [prison as a conscientious objector]?
Oh, the shortest possible. Perhaps by generosity of these distinguished figures who suggested it, and and I don't know how much to do with me, I got the minimum sentence with three months. Now, as I behaved myself quite nicely and properly in prison, I therefore came out after two months.
Presenter asks
18:32What was the inspiration for [your first opera, The Midsummer Marriage]?
I came to feel that I knew what the opera the opera that I wanted to write should be, and that it should be an opera which should have two great things behind it. One was Mozart, which was the magic flute ... And the other was the Midsummer Night's Dream of Shakespeare ... Out of these came this belief that I could put somewhere upon the stage this going from this world of the everyday into the theatre of magic.
“I lived at the simplest level, absolutely to keep time to compose.”
“I did as little as I could. I earned practically little. I let somebody else do it if I could possibly do it, so that I could always go on composing. All the time.”
“But if the music has something inside it which people can hang on to, they will hang on to it, and sooner or later if, if, if it's real. It will come through.”