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

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

The program was originally broadcast in 1982, and the presenter was Roy Plumley. This week our cast away as a musician, he's artistic director of Opera North, David Lloyd Jones.

Now you're cast away for an indeterminate period on a desert island with just eight discs. If you had a choice, which you haven't,

I'm afraid, would you prefer discs or scores? I think discs. Right. I think I spend long enough

with scores.

Well there you are, you've got your eight discs under your arm.

What's the first one you're going to play?

Well, in choosing these records, I had to come to some kind of decision and the first decision I took was that I couldn't

possibly choose eight records just as favorite pieces of music. For a performing musician

it's almost impossible to think of a mere eight favorite pieces.

So I thought I'd find eight records that would help to remind me on this desert island

of the things that I most missed in my normal life here in Britain.

And in no particular order, one of the things I would miss was humor.

I do appreciate humor. I hope I dispense a little bit myself. Now we know that

humor is a hard thing to express in music. So what I would like is a piece of music that would get the next best thing to humor, which is wit.

And to me, about the witiest piece of music ever written is the overture to Beatrice and Benedict by Berleers. So I would like that perhaps

in a performance by Colin Davis. The The The The The Part of the overture to Beatrice and Benedict, that's the Berleier's version of Much Ado About Nothing,

played by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Colin Davies.

David Lloyd Jones, I suggest that you might have a Welsh background.

Yes.

Were you born in Wales?

...