Hello I'm Kirsty 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 1995, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a

singer physically he's a big man but in contrast his voice is unusually high

he's a leading member of that increasingly important band of musical specialists

the countertenors

after Oxford where he won a scholarship he auditioned for

Benjamin Britain who immediately offered him the part of Oberon in his opera

a midsummer night's dream. Since then he's hardly been out of work, establishing himself as this country's most distinguished

countertenor and overseeing a renaissance in Baroque music.

He himself remains modest about these achievements.

My greatest claims to fame, he said, are that I knew

Benjamin Britain and Peter Peers and that I once had lunch with Maria Callis. He is James Bowman.

Did you really have lunch with Maria Callis? I certainly did in a hotel in Turin, yes. I remember very clearly.

Was it an impressive occasion?

It was rather sad in a way. She was sitting there on her own having lunch and the people, I was with Raymond Leibald at the time,

and Cisto Bruce Cantini, Italian Baritone and they knew her of course and they said

come on and join us for lunch and she was sitting there rather sadly with her dark glasses

on. It was like something out of separate tables.

Well now tell me about this voice because you have a critic has written the physical

stature of a rugby forward. Well I used to pay rugby, yes. Oh, did you?

Very badly at school, yes.

...