YouSaid · the spoken record
Felicity Lott
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- 51
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- 2008-07-13
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- 2008-07-13
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- 1
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“apart from a box of tissues that I'll need if I listen to all these things. I'd like lots of champagne and pistachio nuts really frivolous, please.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my book is going to be something I haven't read since I the night before finals I'd like to take Victor Hugo's Liserables It's your”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But my final piece is the is part of Capricio by Richard Strauss. I'd have to take Richard Strauss because he's been really a very important part of my professional life and that goes back to Gleinbourne tour in 1976 where they finally let me in. And let me play this wonderful part on the tour, and I've been playing it all the rest of my life. Performing life.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I always think when I'm going away to do a concert or whatever, I think oh, wonderful be glad to be on my own, and I'm after about a day I don't know what to do with myself, but I'm terribly impractical, really. I don't think I'll be able to build myself a shelter I'd be a complete useless person on this island.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean I can't do anything else anyway. I don't know what to do, I don't know what to do with myself. Anyway, there we are.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I can't imagine life without it, really. I can't imagine I don't know what I'd do I mean I haven't got a million things that I feel I haven't had time to do really I just love what I do I mean I have such fun here I say I'm terrified all my life But I have such fun Yes, that's”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know when I first heard this, a long time ago, I think in another life. I say I don't listen to a lot of music, but this brings me to of comfort and it's spiritual in a way it isn't church music or anything but it's got tremendous humanity and I just love it and it's Schubert who's one of the absolute greats I find his songs quite difficult Schubert seems a huge mountain to climb for me and these are two wonderful pianists climbing a wonderful mountain”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I do now, yes. I haven't actually got any opera at all except for the one woman show of Lavois. And it's not a decision that I've taken. I don't know, maybe it's better, I don't know. It's funny. It's not awfully funny getting older, but I feel I've sussed out a few things that I never. I never had before, but you know, things change, you can do things that you couldn't do and you can't do things that you could do, so it's a swings and roundabouts.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think about it I mean'cause some of me feels absolutely the same. I don't know that my voice feels absolutely the same What one doesn't know as a singer is what actually gets across the orchestra to the audience at the back, you know. But obviously things change. I just hope that somebody's going to tell me that I ought to stop before everybody says what a shame she didn't stop before. I would hate that to happen. But I have such fun. And people still seem to come.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd always played kind of stately ladies, princesses, countesses, Because it being so tall, you know, carry the clothes quite well, I suppose. But this is sexy and wiggly.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, you're so wonderful he's eighty, I think, now, and he was, I don't know, what, seventy five, six, seven or something then. I should picture him at my island. What about the”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I've always sung when I go to France I sing a lot of lighter French funny things, and somebody said would I like to do La Bellelen offenbas Bellen. Marminkovsky and it was the most wonderful experience because I met this lovely Laurentpelli producer whose sweet, sensitive, lovely guy, full of amazing ideas and I'm supposed to be the most beautiful woman in the world as Helen of Troy and there were these fantastically beautiful young practically students and they can all sing and dance and do everything and here's me and he found a way for me to be to pretend to be the most beautiful woman in the world and I just had a ball.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, for a departing vicar. My sister sings as well and my brother in law, so we did a concert for our vicar who was leaving our little village. But my mother, at the end of the performance, did you made us love you we didn't wanna do it we didn't wanna do it brought the house down fantastic performance so I mean don't go on the stage with children, animals or my mother”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and with Gabriel as well, yes, the three of us. Given consistency, and she's given lovely ones on her own too doing readings and being hysterical, doing Joyce Grenfell monologues, and we do duets. Yes, she's quite talented in many directions, my daughter.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She's thrilled a bit, really. She's been wonderfully supportive always, and comes to performances whenever she can, although I mean, I do get quite nervous with my mother there. I don't like being surrounded by people before a performance I get very nervous when I want to be on my own.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was sort of easier when she was a baby because she travelled everywhere. Me, of course, and gradually we began to travel as a family circus with both my parents initially and then with just my mother later on. I remember going with dad and mum to Chicago in 1987, being met with this wonderful stretch limmer and all of us being so excited. I think my dad was probably as excited as anybody.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was actually doing a concert performance. Gabriel was the narrator and I was the soprano solist and He had a very beautiful voice. He was quite good looking too, and caused quite a lot of havoc at the time, but in both our lives.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it was a problem I remember saying in one interview a long time ago that I got used to bending bending my knees for tennis and then I said please don't put that out But in the big dresses you can you know get shorter as you drew closer to the ten of the other side of the stage quite funny”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is from Benjamin Britton's midsummer night stream. I love all the versions of Midsummer Night's Dream. I love the Mendelssohn version, but I would really love to have a memory, a memento of this production, which was a fabulous one by Peter Hall, Peter Hall, tutor at Gleinborne in 1981, conducted by Bernard Heitink, who has been so important in my life, really, and I'm still singing with him now. It's great. I've been looking at him on the rostrum for all my life, I feel. And this is just the end of the opera where James Bowman as Oberon and Ilya Anna Kotrubas as Titania in this lovely production we did are blessing the house.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're not very deep now, really no, they're a bit close, actually. I mean, trying to get through performance without bursting into tears was hugely difficult in lots of operas I've been in. Pathetic, really. I mean, one shouldn't take it all so personally. Yeah, I did get involved with things.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I don't know. I'm too tall or perhaps I sang badly. I say I was a really bad auditioner, and that was so wonderful, and the producer of that was so extraordinary it was John Cox. And we got on very well, and he could see something in Gorky me that I didn't know I could do and help me amazingly.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, with the opera I've done, I've been really lucky, and actually it's the only way I could possibly have done it is to have long rehearsal time so that I really get to know everybody so I don't feel that here I am coming in and doing my performance in the middle of something that already exists. I mean, for me, I was so lucky too after two or three auditions for the Glimon Chorus, I was accepted to sing on the Glymon tour to do a real part on the tour. And then one has the most amazing nurturing at Glymorne.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I work with a repetitor, somebody who comes and plays piano for me. I try and sort it out a bit myself because I can play the piano a little.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I listened to other people's recordings, of course. And wonder how you're going to do this. Oh, that's right. Wonder how I'm going to do it, yes. Oh, certainly I do listen to other people's recordings, yes.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the songmakers have been really important in my life because When I started singing, you could only do song recitals really if you were frightfully famous. Elizabeth Schwartzkoff would come and do recitals at the Wigmore Hall, and everybody else would do a debut recital and then kind of disappear, it seemed, anyway. The songmakers was to try and make song recitals more accessible, and so we spoke and sang a Schubert song than a no coward song and a bit of Oscar Wilde text and all kinds of things to sort of liven it up a bit for possibly a new audience who might come and hear beginners rather than established artists. And this, I think, was on our first recording, called Voices of the Night.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He played for some of my lessons with Flora Nielsen, who was a wonderful teacher at the Royal Academy. He played with me. And we supportive and encouraging of his friends and full of brilliant ideas, and he started this group when we left the academy called Songmaker's Almanac”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it does amazing things for my confidence if there's somebody who is respected who thinks I'm okay, then maybe I am and maybe I can be. I'm pathetic, isn't it? But it's still like that. I suppose one is a bit vulnerable in this business. So one is tremendously helped by. Conductors or when I was at the academy I met Graham Johnson who's been kind of important.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I kind of go to pieces if I think I'm putting myself out there to be shot at. So I never won anything and I always thought the principle was quite fond of me and gave me this prize because I never won anything else.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they gave it to me because I couldn't. Well, I don't know. I was useless at competitions and auditions and all those things. I have a kind of nerves that I'm... I mean, I know I'm not completely useless. I realise.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I was going to try but they gave me so many opportunities I sang in operas and we had terrific teachers there John Streets, who was the opera head of the opera class.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was given a recording of Tony Bennett when I was in my first year, and I don't think I'd ever heard any music quite like this, with all my You know Mozart and Handel and all the things I used to sing, and suddenly this was a hole, whole new door, an opening.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She said, if you were to do a little bit of work, maybe you could do something with singing. She was called Elizabeth Maximovich, and I bless her.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I had so much free time between my attempts to teach do English conversation which was complete riot. And anyway I went and enrolled at the conservatoire in Grenobel and found a teacher there.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my dad said when he came to see me on stage for the first time at least she didn't knock anything over So I presume did a lot I don't know I was I don't know I thought I was awfully unattractive with my short curly hair and my specks and I didn't fit into any of my personal ideas of what people should look like if they wanted to be singers anyway you know I was what? Oh Mitsi Gayner or somebody South Pacific is that right? Yes, those girls in the musicals, those little petite, yes. Fred Esther and Ginger Rogers and I mean doing all that dancing. I couldn't do that. I mean that was the sort of thing. I used to watch those films when we got a television, we first got a television and they'd have things like that on TV and I'd watch”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like structure, yes, I like to be told what to do, and then I was very happy to learn what I was told to learn, but I never very good at being curious at all the other things, like I would read the set book, but I wouldn't bother to read all the ones the other ones he wrote.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You passed the 11 plus. I passed the 11 plus. Yes, I did. Well, I was a good learner. I had a very good memory. You liked structure.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I've chosen this because I've always been part of church choirs or church quartets. And I sang also in King's College, Cambridge, sometimes with the choir of Kings. I mean, this piece of music that I've chosen isn't anything I've ever sung, but it's a glorious piece of English church music, I think. And this is... Parry's wonderful setting of I Was Glad”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He probably wasn't ever shown any signs of affection when he was a little lad. But he was, I mean, he was always the life and soul of the party. They had endless parties at home and always music.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I think so Yes, I think so When I think about it now He found it quite difficult to express affection, although I mean I know he loved me to bits, but it was almost too close to the surface for him. Yes, it was difficult for him to hug”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Yes, very. He had a very hard start in life'cause he was the youngest of five children, and his father died in the flu epidemic in nineteen eighteen when he was fired. sent up to her. An orphanage in Derbyshire and he used to tell most amazing stories of coming down to in the wash basins and to swap around pieces of bread to get a thicker crust in the morning. I mean awful extreme poverty. Yes.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had seen lessons, piano lessons, violin lessons, I joined all the parties. Brown church choir and it was great, it was lovely. Very directed, very structured”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, I'm sure they couldn't shut me up. In fact, we had an old school and college reunion last year and a friend brought a recording when I was twelve, I think. I was seeing eyes.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, they did. What did they do? They did concert party, and my father wrote sketches piano, a sort of pub piano by ear. And my mother sang still sings beautifully, actually in lots of choirs. My father died about twenty years ago in nineteen eighty eight. But no, there was music everywhere always. And did you love to sing?”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suppose my first performance was for my grandmother on a recording which I have at home singing away in a manger and Rudolph the Redeemer.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my first choice is the Mozart Symphonia Conciertante. I think I've always known this. We must have had a recording of it at home. I love duetting. I love musicians playing together. And I love in this particular piece the wonderful build up as the orchestra sort of rises up. The anticipation something's going to happen and then suddenly these wonderful instruments come in.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One has an idea in one's head of how this glorious music should be, and well you'd never quite manage it. Perfectionism is a song.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah well I don't know actually I love silence now more and more and I listen to spoken voices more and more I mean it's crazy really I haven't quite got the house sorted to sit comfortably somewhere and listen to music Do you listen to yourself ever to your own performances? Not really no because”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh euphoric actually, because it went quite well. And then I thought, Oh here I am, my life's going to change, but it didn't actually for quite a long time.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I jumped in at the English National Opera for Barbara Walker, bless her, who was ill, and so the whole day was spent in a complete rush of going through staging and working with the conductor and trying to find a dress that fitted because I was always quite a lot taller than everybody else with bigger feet. Walking six feet tall? Not quite, but five foot ten and a half I used to say. I think it all went by so quickly and I was on stage really almost before I had a chance to think what was happening. So once I was on there I felt reasonably happy.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To somebody they like, which class might not be doing. Yes, that's right. It's awful, isn't it? No, I do, I think, so it makes perfect sense.”
2008-07-13 · Desert Island Discs · Felicity Lott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source