David McVicar

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 5 October 2008

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the opera director David McVicar. He is hailed as the opera director of his generation and is in such great demand that he's booked up for the next five years. Opera appealed to him when he was still a boy, offering him a means of escape from his lonely and unhappy childhood in Glasgow. He immersed himself in it so much that now, he says, it's pretty well impossible for him to come to an opera fresh, somewhere it will already be in his memory. He says: "I didn't choose to work in opera - opera chose me. But I think opera made the right choice."

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.2	The program was originally broadcast in 2008. My cast away this week is the director David McVicker. Growing up he was by his own estimation
0:32.2	an awkward we sawed from a Glasgow
0:34.2	comprehensive he's only 42 but for years has been described as Britain's leading
0:39.1	opera director of his generation and he's in demand all over the world, so much so that he's booked up until 2013.
0:47.0	Vibrantly theatrical, revelatory inventive, his work is testament to his passion and belief in the power of performance.
0:54.3	I want to put people in touch with themselves, he says, to put them in intense burning, agonizing
1:00.6	contact with their souls.
1:02.3	David McVicker, do you think are... agonizing contact with their souls.
1:03.0	David McVicker, do you think our day-to-day lives militate against us being in touch with our true feelings?
1:09.4	Oh yes, definitely, I think the ground of everyday life irons everything out and I think
1:16.7	wonderful things about the nature of life performance is that it can dredge things up inside people.
1:26.0	It's certainly why I'm interested, why I work in live performance. It's the ephemeral nature of live performance in a theatre that excites me and it's also the fact that it's a communal action that takes place between
1:35.0	human beings and I find that very very exciting. You work right now in the area of
1:40.2	opera. Is there something particular then about opera that again you think manages to make contact
1:46.3	with those very deep and passionate feelings that you have?
1:50.0	Well, first of all I didn't choose to work in opera,
1:52.7	Oprah chose me, but I think Oprah made the right choice.
1:56.4	Yes, because with Oprah you're doing theatre which is also an act of musical interpretation and music is is in in many ways the art form which is the most
2:09.3	emotive and the hardest put in intellectual finger on. It really does unleash big, big emotions and people.
2:16.7	That can also be with opera why people find it difficult to get close to and difficult to connect with
	...

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