Hello I'm Krestey 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 2008. My castaway this week is the tenor Ian Bostrich. Regarded as one of the great leader singers of our time, he has delighted audiences in opera houses and concert halls the world over.

But it wasn't a straightforward career choice.

He started out as a historian and for years led two parallel

lives spending term time at Oxford writing about witchcraft and magic whilst in the

holidays throwing himself into operatic productions.

Magic appeals to people in a way that is both mysterious and irrational and so it is

he says not so different to music.

Ian Bostridge, it is a very curious combination.

You're someone whose approach to work, obviously your academic work

had to be very thorough, very studied. And yet your approach to music, I suppose, has to be

emotional. It has to be an emotional response that's not necessarily intellectualized and

thought through.

Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, music is a sort of release for me, I think.

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 at the time that you were running these two lives in

parallel then did you feel that when you went to sing in a way it was a wonderful

escape from what you had to do every day way it was a wonderful escape from what you had to do every day.

...