YouSaid · the spoken record

Ian Bostridge

lines on the record: 50
first: 2008-10-26
most recent: 2008-10-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think it would have to be the OPIS 110 sonata, as I said I'd die to it, and I'm sure I will die on the island because I have no practical capacities at all.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why I thought of having a sort of computer with lots and lots of pictures of my family and friends, because I'd want to go away again, that's something I just do endlessly. I look at photographs of people I love, and it helps me feel better about being away.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd like to have war and peace because I've it's very long and I've read it many times because I go away a lot and I know I like it so I know it will give me consolation.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the first movement of a cantata fifty one by Bach, which I first got to know at school when I was little, but I got to know it, and then when we got married in St. James's Piccadilly in nineteen ninety two, a wonderful singer called Ruth Holton sang it. We had a lot of beautiful music at our wedding, and it'll remind me of that really, really beautiful day.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For you to see him say. Well, I didn't tell him this, and I will eventually, but I realized when I got there that I sang even song there, so it was sort of very, it was very moving for me.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yesterday I went to hear him sing at the school choir I went to South Cathedral and sang Evensong. It was really, really lovely.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I think children should, I think it's good if children like something different from their parents because they have to not now, he's eight now, but when children are adolescents, it's surely normal for them to kick against their parents a bit. I won't be saying that when he's a teenager. No, he won't, I'm sure. But he's got a lovely voice, which is not something, I mean, to my shame in a way, it's not something I've encouraged at all.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not much when Oliver was littler he came to the tempest, for example, and maybe there was a sort of time where he was not little enough and not old enough, and maybe now is the time for him to come to more stuff.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is, but it isn't because I couldn't, I mean, it isn't really sacrificed because I wouldn't be able to cope with it. I did a production of death in Venice with Deborah Warner, who is my great directorial inspiration and who I love working with. We did that in London and we're going to take that abroad and that will mean going even though we've already rehearsed it that will mean going to New York for five weeks. But the family, I think, will be able to come out in the middle. But it's really tricky. I mean, the last time I did an opera abroad was in two thousand four, and I was in Munich for nine weeks, and okay I could come home at the weekend, but it's not a life that I could lead, really.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think my family suffers, but I try to make them suffer less than they would do otherwise, I suppose. It's on my mind all the time. But I try not, you know, I've given up doing opera abroad in the sense of doing new opera productions abroad.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We met in, well, we were at school together. We didn't meet at school. We met sort of shortly after that through mutual friends. And then I was in my last year at Oxford. She was in her first year, and we met and talked a lot, and then I think she'd already asked me to go to Paris with her as a friend, and we went to Paris, and by the time we went to Paris, we weren't just friends. And that was when she was nineteen and I was twenty one.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the quintet from the end of Thomas Addis's opera The Tempest which I was in, the premiere of and the revival of at the Rollop Brouse. I knew Tom before that, and he wrote the part of Caliban for me in this piece, which was an incredible excitement. But it's exciting as a piece as well because it shows us all that this tradition is not dead. People worry classical music's dead, operas aren't being written. And this quintet is the most for me. It's sublime. And you've got so much sort of rough, complicated, difficult music going on in other parts of the opera, but then there are moments in the opera where you have these incredible moments of simple beauty, and they tell so much more because of how they're placed.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“or my father's dead, but he was very proud of my success, and he was the sort of father who wouldn't like to say to me that he was proud of my success, but I'd hear from other people that he'd actually been quite boastful, which is nice. But I think he found it very difficult to understand. He came to hear me the only time he really heard me do my thing. He came to hear me sing Vinterizer when I was already a successful singer at my old school. And I remember him turning round to my old friend Sarah, whom I've known since she was three and saying after the fifth song, and you know there are twenty four of these songs. Are there more? The idea of sitting and listening to twenty four songs about lost love and alienation was not his cuff tea. My mother loves music.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He is a writer he's just written a wonderful, scholarly but at the same time incredibly readable and humane biography of Florence Nightingale, and the same with my wife Lucaster who wrote a brilliant study of the Bronte's in the nineteenth and twentieth century of the Bronte myth. They've got this capacity to Well, to really go into the archive and to assimilate material and be empathetic and then produce something people want to read. I think I've always been much more of a sort of short term a few clever paragraphs and then move on person.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't really, but I mean if I thought about it now I suppose I would have ended up being a not very successful academic because I don't think I had the if I think of the people I admire as academics I don't think I quite had that in me in fact I think my brother is a far more scholarly person than I ever was I was a sort of”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Track number six is the opening of Schumann's Piano Quintet, and I love this piece and I was introduced to it by my best friend in music, Julius Drake. I met him in november nineteen ninety two. We did a concert at Oakham Hall, and in the second half he played this piece my wife turned pages. First time she'd ever done it, it was quite for her she was incredibly nerve wracked by it, but did it brilliantly. And I was just completely seized, both by the piece but also by the passion of Julius's playing, and we've gone on to work together now for sixteen years. He's a fantastic, fantastic musician, and he makes my life possible because I love travelling around with him and we have such a great time.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if you love the music, then somehow, I mean, you have to work technically to convey that love through what you do. But I mean, it seemed to work even before I could manage it technically because the other peculiar thing was I didn't really start to grapple properly with technical issues until nineteen ninety seven, so after I'd recorded Yishana Miller in and I was having to stand up and sing incredibly difficult things, not knowing whether I'd really get through or manage it. It was a sort of triumph of San Awford, the triumph of the will at the beginning. I loved this thing so much and I so wanted to do it that somehow I made it work. And maybe the struggle, actually, is also what made people like it. I mean, you know, that's why I love you know, Bobdylin's got a dreadful voice, but I don't care because it expresses emotion to me. That's what singing should be about for me.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not really. I was just very lucky that I straight after that Rick's progress in Japan. I recorded Dishana Millaren with Graham Johnson, who had incredible faith and trust. I was completely unknown, and he gives me this plum recording in his very distinguished and celebrated and successful Hyperion Schubert edition, and because that was a success, which was an incredible stroke of luck, I could that gave me the opportunity, a boy from Stretham, to become a leader singer, singing leader in Vienna. It's sort of surreal.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I probably didn't. I mean, it was a great surprise, I think, to both of us, and I think lots of decisions about it sort of emerged as we went along, because I don't think we really knew what it would involve. I mean, the very first job I did when I became a professional was to go to Japan for five weeks. And at the end of that, we both decided that I'd never do anything. In a way, it's lucky that happened at the beginning because it meant I knew what I had to do in terms of sort of limiting my exposure to opera, which I love doing, but it means if you really are an opera singer the whole time you're away a lot, and I'm incredibly lucky, incredibly lucky that I do song because it gives me this possibility of not doing opera sometimes.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and then I got involved in the operas, and the first opera I ever did as a grown up was Mid Summerite's Dream. I did it with British Youth Opera in London, and then I did it with Bas Lerman and the Australian Opera in Edinburgh. And it was that second experience was just completely revelatory because I'd always thought, oh, well, you know, I sing songs, but that's, you know, you can't make a living singing songs. It's just a sort of amateur thing. But suddenly I was in this show and I just loved being it and Baz gave me the space to invent things and it was so exciting. And this midsummer night stream is utterly beautiful and the end of it, the very end of the piece is just, you know, it can move me to tears. It's so beautiful.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is Britain, and Britain's been an incredibly important composer for me ever since I was a child because he would very cleverly wrote a lot of music for children, so you're sort of indoctrinated with it as an English schoolboy from the age of eight. So a lot of Britain sort of churning around in my head.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a different experience, and I suppose it's the thing that started me thinking about could I be a singer, but I couldn't really work out how it worked because I thought if you're being paid sixty pounds for a concert, how does it add up? Not that I was being paid a lot of money for being an academic, but it didn't really seem to make sense in terms of buying food. But it was incredible, incredible experience, and also incredibly inspiring to see how important music was locally to people, the sort of local patriotism that went into this music making.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Later on I just entered a lot of competitions and some of them I did incredibly badly and some of them I did well in and the ones I did well in were actually very good because they gave me the first one the National Federation of Music Societies competition gave me work. I went around the country to various music clubs, music societies, choral societies and sang for sixty quid.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I was doing, I wanted, I thought going to university was about, and this is something I inherited from school, that you just did all the things that you loved. So I put on maybe three or four song recitals to tiny audiences in my college. But it was just this incredible. wonderful life of being able to do the things he loved.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Um I thought I was going to be an academic. I mean I'd had this thing with physics and cosmology when I was a teenager and then I did my A-levels and I think I was sort of too lazy to do them so I after a year I gave up and I shifted all my eggs into the humanities basket and ended up doing history. I'd been sort of educated so much for that that I suppose I seemed I'd become an academic.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just like, I mean, I sing a Schubert cycle called Vinteriser, and it's just the same thing, but expressed in a different way. And I mean, so much pop music like that comes out of Schubert, really, to be honest. I mean, it's the inheritor of that tradition.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is Bob Dylan, and it's just the most beautiful song I think about Lost Love and the most he captures this incredible tone in the way he sings it and in what he's written of sort of being Upset but trying to pretend that he's not really upset. He doesn't really give a damn about it.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mr Punk, he was a punk, and he wasn't really a punk at all, but he listened to it. He listened to the stuff, and we used to listen to John Peel on the radio. I mean, punk, I can really appreciate because it has a sort of vigour and energy, and I still, when I hear it, it appeals to me a lot more than a lot of sort of processed packaged stuff. I mean, the nihilism of punk is inherited from nineteenth century romanticism, and it was death obsessed, punk, really. Punk was part of romanticism, definitely.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, I was in, I was a scholar at Westminster, so actually I was living with I mean I was one of nine very peculiar little boys who spent most of their time arguing about whether Wagner was any good and what mass did a photon have. But we did, I shared a study with a very sort of laconic cool boy called Ben, who was”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got it for my birthday, my father got it, and I remember him buying it and then hiding it in his hand. and he hid it in the safe and I kept creeping into the safe and looking at it because it was so exciting but I knew eventually I'd get my hands on it and be able to listen to um All this incredible stuff.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah, sort of. I mean, music is so much music is about last things in a way, it expresses all sorts of inexpressible things and allows one to Confront impossible things, I think, and that is one of for me one of the most amazing pieces in that vain, I suppose.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is Beethoven's penultimate piano sonata opus one hundred ten and it's a recording by Arta Schnabel which Art Schnabel was the first person really to record all these sonatas in the nineteen twenty so the sound is slightly dodgy but he does this amazing thing of sort of gesturing towards an ideal playing of the piece it's sometimes a little bit out of control I mean that was what they were said about Schnabel he wanted to play the impossible somehow”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, neither of them had been to university, but they were very keen to encourage our intellectual interests. I remember when I was at Westminster, I was at school sort of in the shadow of Westminster Abbey, and my father was working across St. James's Park in Palmau in his office, and we'd meet every Friday and he'd take me to Hatchard's to buy a book every week. So there was always this encouragement not to make lots of money, but to actually to fulfil ourselves intellectually, and that I'm from my mother as well, who is amazing now in her eighties and is still going to she's just started philosophy classes and goes to music classes and is always learning.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so, I think I was always slightly embarrassed performer. I used to always blush, I remember when I sang as a little boy, and I remember the very first time I sang a solo at my church choir. I went wrong and I burst into tears, and the vicar was incredibly nice to me, but it's I suppose that's a sort of oxperience. It's funny, I don't feel that anymore, I feel when I perform I feel very I mean I use angst in performance because that's what Leader is about it's romantic poetry it's about lost love and death and anxious making subjects but I as a performer I think I'm very Unanxious it makes me on stage and performing makes me feel confident, which is funny because I wasn't a confident performer as a child.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really from I've been so lucky in my life with teachers I've had at least a dozen amazing, amazing inspirational teachers and there was a teacher at my preps called Michael Spencer who was fabulously enthusiastic and ambitious in the best sense for us to do fantastic things. That was where it really opened up and also he played us records in music classes and that got me into listening to stuff.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the Countess Cesaria from the marriage of Figaro. I choose it partly because mainly because a marriage of Figaro is my favourite opera, but I also choose it because when I was fourteen or fifteen and my voice was on the turn at school, there was a house music competition and the head of house decided it would be great if I could sing two pieces one in my sort of slightly failing soprano voice and one in my very as yet very weak tanner voice but I did sing it but Agundal Yanovitch sings it an awful lot better.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“twelve or thirteen I gave a lecture on cosmology and electron general relativity to my class because I found that fascinating.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were very close to each other, and he was really an inspiration to me because he was so interested in history from a very early age, and he used to give me slide lectures on art history when I was little and set me exams. And he just really encouraged my interest in books and in history”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, my brother and I were both completely completely useless at all forms of sporting activity, and I think to my father and to my mother as well who had been captain of the hockey team it was a little bit mysterious how they had managed her to breed these degenerate children. We really were singularly I mean maybe I shouldn't speak for my brother because maybe he was better than me but I really was always in team four and I was always the last to be picked and”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and Millwall, eventually, which is like the most extraordinary to go from playing for Millwall to being a leader singer there couldn't be much of a great and my father and he came to hear me sing as a grown up. There was a level of incomprehension”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hum in lots of ways a very secure suburban life I mean my parents got divorced. I was sort of ten or eleven when that started, but there was an incredible sense of sort of quiet security about living in suburban Stratam and having my friends round the corner and going to I sang in the local church choir I remember it has been quite idyllic in a way.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I didn't feel why I didn't feel terrified, but I didn't. And he was. He was very charming and he just couldn't believe how skinny I was and that I could make any noise and I didn't make that much noise, I still don't make that much noise but he couldn't believe I could make any noise at all.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I don't think you should meet your heroes too much. I mean I haven't made friends with him. But he was very kind and very inspirational. I was just recording that piece, Duchenne Milleren, and Graham Johnson, the pianist on that project, took me to see Fisherty's cap, and he sort of sang in my face nose to nose. That was his way of sort of inspiring me really and teaching me, and it was incredible, and obviously the most enormous thrill.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While the man singing this, Dietri Fisher Diska is the reason, I suppose there are lots of reasons I'm a singer, but he's my great inspiration as a singer. I first heard him singing on a record at school when I was fourteen in a German lesson, and I became sort of totally obsessed as a teenager with German leader, and I listened to Fishity Scout singing all the time because I found it a beautiful voice, I found it very engaging, and even when I didn't understand the words I felt he was talking to me.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't in the end I don't think it would have been possible and I think it would have the crunch point would have come. I'm really grateful to Keith Thomas who was this person who sorted it out for me that we could sit down and we could finish it in an orderly way because it meant I could write the book and feel that I achieved something that I wanted to achieve and then I could move on to the next stage of my life”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was pretty clear because I had a three year research fellowship to write a book, and in the vacation of that second year I went to the summer vacation, I went to Australia to rehearse a production of Midsummer Night's Dream with Baz Lerman, the film director, which we then took to the Edinburgh Festival and it got a lot of press, and somebody somewhere picked that up and mentioned it to somebody, and it started to become clear where I was going, and we made I sat down with my academic mentor, who sort of had supervised my thesis and was the head of my college and we decided together that I'd cut down on the singing for the next year I'd finish the book and then from the autumn of 1995 I'd become a singer full time and that's what I did so I was thirty.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would think I wasn't serious, yeah, which I don't, as I said, I don't actually think is true. I think they were actually much more generous and much more interested in that, and I think I'm just probably an anxious person, and I just wanted something to be anxious about, and then that probably fed beautifully into my anxious performances as a leader singer, because that's all about.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think it was. I felt embarrassed by it. I've found out since that people found it quite fascinating that I was doing these two different things, but I found it unsettling.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a wonderful escape, but it was slightly it was very stressful, it was very stressful performing because I hadn't. really been trained to do it. I mean I hadn't been trained even to cope technically with the demands of singing that much and singing in such an exposed way. And then going back to Oxford to be an academic again, that was stressful as well.”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, music is a sort of release for me, I think, and I didn't have a musical education. I didn't study an instrument at school. I started music O level but gave up after about two weeks so I never learnt my key signatures or music theory and that sort of thing. And whatever I have picked up on the sort of theoretical side of music has come in bits and pieces through working. So”
2008-10-26 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Bostridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source