Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My cast away this week is the violinist George Palk. His aptitude in music was

first spotted when he was three years old. He used to tell his mother off when she played a duff note on the piano.

That was in Hungary, a country already fiercely anti-Semitic, which ended up a battleground for German and Soviet troops.

More than half a million Hungarian Jews

died during the war and it was a miracle says George that he and his grandmother

survived in the Budapest ghetto. His prodigious talent allowed him to travel to the west and

eventually that was where he fled, first to France, then Holland, and finally to Britain,

where he has lived for nearly 50 years.

He became the violin professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London

and Professor Emeritus of the List Academy in Budapest.

Now, aged 73, he continues to give master classes around the world. He says there were

times when you were punished if you were listening to the radio. That's when it

started to get to me, realizing that I am not free.

Music is international. It has to be worldwide.

So much to talk about, but first of all, we should get your name straight.

I called you George Pough what should I have called

you in Hungarian it's called George but I have had a lot of problems how to pronounce my name but finally I'm resigned to.

To us all getting it wrong.

Didn't you once encourage people just if they couldn't get it right to call you

...