Desert Island Discs
Desert Island Discs was created by Roy Plomley in 1942, and the format is simple: a guest is invited by Kirsty Young to choose the eight records they would take with them to a desert island
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnmr
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/desert-island-discs
James Corden
Sun 12 Feb 2012
11:15
BBC Radio 4
Actor and writer James Corden is interviewed by Kirsty Young.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01bwd3t
James Corden, actor and writer of Gavin & Stacey, is Kirsty Young's castaway is the actor and writer .
As a child he longed to act - he found early success in Alan Bennett's play The History Boys and became a household name for the TV show he devised and co-wrote, Gavin and Stacey. These days he's starring in the West End in the comedy One Man, Two Guvnors. It is due to transfer to Broadway in the spring and he says: "I'm well aware that this could well be the best part that I ever play on stage - it's a gift for any actor who has any interest in comedy. It feels like all my dreams come true."
Producer: Leanne Buckle.
Music played
1. Bright Eyes — First Day of My Life
Composer: Conor Mullen Oberst
I'm Wide Awake It's Morning, Saddle Creek Europe
2. Van Morrison — Days Like These
Composer: Morrison
Still On Top - The Greatest Hits, Exile
3. Paul Simon — Gumboots
Composer: Paul Simon
Graceland, Warner Brothers
4. Rufus Wainwright — The Art Teacher
Composer: Rufus Wainwright
All I want, Dreamworks
5. Erasure — A Little Respect
Composer: V Clark/A Bell
Eighties Legend, Virgin
6. Brent Carver — She’s a Woman
Composer: John Kander and Fred Ebb
Kiss of the Spider Woman, First Night
7. Bonnie Raitt — I Can’t Make You Love Me
Composer: Reid/Shamblin
The Best Of Bonnie Raitt, Capitol
8. Danielle de Niese — Vide Cor Meum
Composer: Patrick Cassidy
Hannibal soundtrack, Decca records
Private Passions
Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tnv3
Raymond Tallis
Sun 12 Feb 2012
12:00
BBC Radio 3
Michael Berkeley's guest is scientist, doctor, philosopher and writer Raymond Tallis.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01br1kq
Michael Berkeley's guest today is one of the most remarkable men of our time. Dr Raymond Tallis has recently been acclaimed as one of the world's leading polymaths. He trained as a doctor and went on to become Professor of Geratric Medicine at the University of Manchester and a consultant physician in the Care of the Elderly at Salford. In 2006 he retired from medicine to become a full-time writer. Over the past 20 years he has published fiction, poetry, and 23 books on the philosophy of the mind, philosophical anthropology, literary theory, the nature of art, and cultural criticism, offering a critique of current predominant intellectual trends and an alternative understanding of human consciousness. His most recent books are 'The Kingdom of Infinite Space', reflecting on the mystery of embodiment, 'Hunger', exploring the basic drives behind humanity, and 'Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity', a critique which exposes the exaggerated claims made forr the ability of neuroscience and evolutionary theory to explain human behaviour, culture and society.
Music is deeply important to Raymond Tallis. He has chosen the last movement of Beethoven's Quartet Op.135, which asks the existential question 'Must it be?', to which he thinks we may find an answer in the Beatles' classic 'Let it Be'. Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder explore the celebration of death and sex, while Tallis's great motet 'Spem in alium' creates an awesome wall of sound. FInally,the opening aria of Bach's cantata BWV 82 (Es ist genug) is related to Raymond Tallis's own views on assisted dying when an individual feels that 'it is enough'.
Music played
1. Ludwig van Beethoven — String Quartet in F, Op 135 (last movement)
Performers: Medici String Quartet
NIMBUS NI 5285
2. Lennon-McCartney — Let It Be
Performers: The Beatles
PARLOPHONE CDP 7 46447-2
3. Richard Wagner — Träume (from the Wesendonck Lieder)
Performers: Jane Eaglen (soprano), London SO/Donald Runnicles
SONY SK 61720
4. Mikis Theodorakis — Sto Perigalo to krifo
Performers: Giorgis Hidirakis (vocals)
AERAKES SA435
5. Thomas Tallis — Spem in alium
Performers: The Tallis Scholars/Peter Philips
GIMELL CDGIM 006
6. Johann Sebastian Bach — Ich habe genug (opening aria from the Cantata ‘Ich habe genug’, BWV 82)
Performers: Hans Hotter (baritone), Philharmonia Orchestra/Anthony Bernard, Sidney Sutcliffe (oboe)
EMI CDH 763198-2
Words and Music
A sequence of classical music mixed with well-loved and less familiar poems and prose.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006x35f
The Idea of West
Sun 12 Feb 2012
18:30
BBC Radio 3
Texts, music on the idea of west and the West. Readers: Olivia Williams and Sean Arnold.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01bs9dn
Olivia Williams and Sean Arnold with poetry, prose and music on the idea of west, and the West - powerful concepts in many cultures.
In English and Irish thought the west is associated with happiness, the 'land of lost content', the Celtic land of eternal youth. The sun sets in the west, and our western edge is a seemingly endless ocean.
But what if we follow the sun? In America the west was certainly still the promised land for several centuries, though today the mythology is (to say the least) questioned.
From Russia and the Middle East, the West - and Western attitudes - look rather different.
And there's another recurring association of the west in Western thought... death. But a fascinatingly positive view of death.
Producer Note
Poetry, prose and music looking west, with Olivia Williams and Sean Arnold.
I’ve always been fascinated by the pull of the west in British and Irish thought. Perhaps that’s partly because my father’s ancestors came from the west of Ireland – but you don’t need Celtic roots to know what I mean. The poetry of A E Housman and John Masefield is shot through with a longing for a 'land of lost content' in the west, as is both the music and poetry of Arnold Bax and Ivor Gurney. What has the west wind seen? – asks Claude Debussy. The sun sets in the west – William Wordsworth is ‘Stepping Westward’ at sunset.
Our western edge is a seemingly limitless sea. Legends abound of paradise islands out to the west, just over the western: Atlantis for the classical Greeks (and Manuel de Falla); Cockaigne; the Celtic lands of eternal youth such as Tir na nOg. The tales tell of mortal heroes lured away west by beautiful immortal women: Fand dancing in her garden, the sea (gloriously evoked in Bax’s tone poem); Niamh seducing Oisin away on his wanderings – hauntingly captured by W B Yeats.
But what if we follow the sun? What is really there? – as Columbus challenges us to ask in Louis MacNeice’s radio play, with incidental music by William Walton. And for those who reached North America, the promised land moved ever further west.
The eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish emigrant Bishop Berkeley (after whom the Californian university city is named) and the Russian Jewish New Englander Lenny Bernstein set the scene. My colleague Olwen Fisher – whose mother’s father was the American historian David S Lovejoy – taught me about the new religious and political mythology that created and built the dream of the American West: from the earliest settlers in the sixteenth century to its zenith in the nineteenth century concept of the white man’s ‘manifest destiny to verspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions’.
Arthur Chapman and Aaron Copland celebrate a romanticised Western ‘home on the range’. The dream turns to reality in Amy Clampitt’s epic, complex masterpiece The Prairie, and in the lives and deaths of the Native Americans, expressed once for all by Chief Joseph of the Nimipu (Nez Percé) people, from the Pacific Northwest – who had welcomed the transcontinental pioneers Lewis and Clark in 1805.
Other cultures have their own ‘idea of west’ – or, rather, of the West and Western culture. Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s classic Farsi essay Gharbzadegi (Westoxification) – now fifty years old – and the biting irony of the Iraqi performance poet Mozaffar al-Nawwab are both represented in the excellent recent American anthology Tablet & Pen – Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East, which aims to give voice to ‘a common experience of Western imperialism’ (though in fact only a minority of the writings are overtly political). AsFâr – a pun on the Arabic for ‘journeys’ and the English ‘as far’ – the most recent album by the Palestinian Trio Joubran, three brothers from Nazareth who have lived for several years in Paris, is underpinned by their experience of the reality of ‘the West they dreamed of’.
I’m grateful to Martin Sixsmith, whose history of Russia – ‘The Wild East’ – was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2011, for introducing me to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s powerful speech at Harvard in 1978. The exiled writer’s view of the West is as dark as that as of his self-exiled compatriot Sergei Rachmaninov, and as incisive as the irony of the young Dmitri Shostakovich, satirising the ‘golden youth’ of the West who fail to corrupt the Soviet footballing heroes of his 1930 ballet The Golden Age (or Age of Gold).
Which leads inexorably to the other recurring association in Western thought of the west, the sunset and the western sea... Death. Often, an uncommonly comforting view of death – as Celtic myth comes full circle.
Further listening:
• The sea-sounds of the west of Ireland are courtesy of my colleagues at RTÉ, whose Head of Lyric FM, Aodan O Dubhghaill, produced a beautiful sound-picture of the Aran Islands, Rock, Sea and Sky: http://soundcloud.com/angalldubh/rock-sea-and-sky.
• I stole my idea of title from the great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s remarkable CBC documentary, The Idea of North: http://archives.cbc.ca/arts_entertainment/music/topics/320-1709/
David Gallagher (producer)
Music and featured items
Timings are shown from the start of the programme in hours and minutes.
00:00
Ralph Vaughan Williams — Let Beauty awake (from Songs of Travel) [excerpt]
Performer: Roderick Williams (baritone), Iain Burnside (piano)
Naxos 8.557643, Tr2
00:00
William Wordsworth
Stepping Westward, readers Olivia Williams and Sean Arnold
00:01
Claude Debussy — Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest (What the West Wind Saw, Preludes, Book 1, no. 7)
Performer: Krystian Zimerman (piano)
DG 435 773-2, CD1 Tr7
00:04
John Masefield
The West Wind, reader Sean Arnold
00:06
Ivor Gurney — Far in a Western Brookland (from Ludlow and Teme)
Performer: Adrian Thompson (tenor), Delme Quartet, Iain Burnside (piano)
Helios CDH 55187, Tr16
00:11
Anon (14th c), translated by Bella Millett
The Land of Cockaygne (excerpt), reader Olivia Williams
00:12
Manuel de Falla — Atlantida (excerpt)
Performer: Spanish National Chorus and Orchestra, Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos (conductor)
EMI CMS 565997-2, CD1 Tr7
00:14
Arnold Bax — The Garden of Fand (opening)
Performer: London Philharmonic Orchestra, Adrian Boult (conductor)
Lyrita SRCD 231, Tr3
00:14
Arnold Bax — The Garden of Fand (central sections)
Performer: Halle Orchestra, John Barbirolli (conductor)
PRT PVCD 8380, Tr5
00:17
W B Yeats
The Shadowy Waters (excerpt), readers Olivia Williams and Sean Arnold
00:21
W B Yeats
The Wanderings of Oisin (excerpt), reader Olivia Williams
00:26
Louis MacNeice
Christopher Columbus (excerpt), reader Sean Arnold
00:26
William Walton, arr. Carl Davis and Patrick Garland — Christopher Columbus – A Musical Journey (excerpt)
Performer: Jamie Glover and Julian Glover (speakers) Performer: BBC National Chorus and Orchestra of Wales Performer: Richard Hickox (conductor)
Chandos CHSA 5034, Tr1
00:31
Bishop George Berkeley
Verses on the Prospect of Planting Art and Learning in America, reader Olivia Williams
00:32
Leonard Bernstein — America (excerpt, from West Side Story)
Performer: Orchestra and Chorus, Leonard Bernstein (conductor)
DG 415 253-2, CD1 Tr12
00:32
Various
American slogans and epithets, readers Sean Arnold, Olivia Williams and others
00:33
Village People — Go West (excerpt)
Performer: Village People
Arista 74321178312, Tr6
00:19
Arthur Chapman
Out Where The West Begins, reader Sean Arnold
00:35
Aaron Copland — The Tender Land – Suite (excerpt)
Performer: Boston Symphony Orchestra, Aaron Copland (conductor)
RCA 09026615052, Tr9
00:36
Traditional American — Home on the Range (excerpt)
Performer: The Ranch Boys
Panachord 26038 [78 rpm], Side 2
00:37
Aaron Copland — Rodeo (excerpt from complete ballet)
Performer: Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, David Zinman (conductor)
Argo 440 639-2, Tr2
00:37
Amy Clampitt
The Prairie, reader Olivia Williams. (Excerpt from 'Westward', available in 'The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt', permission granted by The Estate of Amy Clampitt)
00:40
Aaron Copland — Gun Battle, from Billy the Kid (excerpt, from ballet suite)
Performer: New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein (conductor)
Sony Classical SMK 63082, Tr17
00:40
Traditional American — Home on the Range (excerpt)
Performer: Ken Maynard
Yazoo 2023, Tr22
00:41
Chief Joseph
excerpt from an interview in Washington (DC), 1879, reader Sean Arnold
00:43
MDFMK — American Dream
Performer: Mdfmk
Universal MVCU 24067, 12 (on Japanese release only)
00:44
Jalal Al-e Ahmad, translated from Farsi by John Green and Ahmad Alizadeh
Gharbzadegi (Westoxification, excerpt), reader Olivia Williams
00:46
Le Trio Joubran — Asfâr (Journeys, excerpt)
Performer: Trio Joubran
World Village WVF 479055, Tr6
00:49
Mozaffar al-Nawwab, translated from Arabic by Carol Bardenstein and Saadi A. Simawe
Bridge of Old Wonders (excerpt), reader Sean Arnold
00:50
Dmitri Shostakovich — Dance of the Golden Youths (excerpt, from complete ballet The Golden Age)
Performer: Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Gennady Rozhdestvensky (conductor)
Chandos CHAN 9251/2, CD1 Tr8
00:51
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
excerpt from a speech given at Harvard, 8 June 1978, reader Sean Arnold
00:53
Sergey Vasilievich Rachmaninov — Symphonic Dances (excerpt from no. 3)
Performer: Philharmonia, Neeme Jarvi (conductor)
Chandos CHAN 9081, Tr3
00:55
A E Housman
New Year’s Eve, reader Olivia Williams
00:58
Manuel de Falla — Atlantida (excerpt)
Performer: Spanish National Chorus and Orchestra, Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos (conductor)
EMI CMS 565997-2, CD1 Tr14 and Tr19
00:59
J R R Tolkien
The Return of the King (excerpt), reader Olivia Williams
01:01
Arnold Bax — The Garden of Fand (conclusion)
Performer: Halle Orchestra, John Barbirolli (conductor)
PRT PVCD 8380, Tr5
01:05
W E Henley
Margaritae Sorori (To [in memory of] his Sister Margaret), reader Sean Arnold
01:06
Richard Strauss — Im Abendrot (from Four Last Songs)
Performer: Felicity Lott (soprano), Scottish National Orchestra, Neeme Jarvi (conductor)
Chandos CHAN 8518, Tr10
01:13
Emily Dickinson
‘On this wondrous sea...’, reader Olivia Williams
