Hello, I'm Christy Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1978, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Our cast away this week is a singer who covers a very wide range of songs.

It's Kathy Biberian. Mr. Biberian, where do we start? Let's have the first disc. What have you chosen?

Well, the first recording is a folk songs, Bulgarian folk songs. Basically because I adore

folk songs, and they were practically the first things that I heard when I was a little girl.

They were Armenian and Russian, actually, but I have since become a great fan of the Bulgarian

folk songs. Also because my father was born in Bulgaria, even though he came from an Armenian

family. And somehow, even though it's an environmental background, it has an enormous influence

on me. And what about the song? It's three voices, female voices, working in seconds and

beautiful dissonances, and some of the widest use of the voice that I know. I think it's one of

the most exciting pieces of folk music.

The drums roll by the chorus of the ensemble of the Bulgarian Republic.

Right, so you were born of Armenian parents in America, of course. Yes, in Massachusetts.

Did you hear a lot of music as a child? Were your parents musical?

My mother is very musical. My father could take it or leave it and generally left it. But

my mother had a lot of records around, and she was wise enough to permit me

to use the records, even as a little girl. She figured that, all right, if a record broke,

it was okay. But the important thing was that I should want to play a record and hear music.

What sort of record were they made? They were opera. Most of them were opera.

The first record was sort of like the blinding revelation that Saul had in the Bible.

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