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 customers My castaway this week is the opera singer Yunas Kaufman regarded as one of the

world's foremost tenors. It's not just the outstanding beauty of his voice, but the authenticity of his characterizations

and megawatt charisma that have critics and audiences around the world united in rapture.

We should be thankful. He could have been working in

insurance. Mathematics was his other great early skill and indeed his father was

keen for his only son to pursue the certainty of numbers rather than the unknown variables of life as a professional singer.

He saw his first opera aged just seven and throughout his childhood loved being in choirs surrounded by the music.

He says, I had professional singing lessons and played the piano,

but never with the intention of making it my profession. That was never the idea. It was just for joy. Do you still

feel the joy? I do, absolutely and that was actually one of the key ingredients why I

struggled at the beginning to choose the music path as my profession because I was afraid that

yeah the moment it's my duty I have to do it I could lose all that passion and joy and just see it as a burden.

And that's why I didn't want to do it, but in the end it just struck me so much that I couldn't get rid of.

I wonder about the burden of expectation now.

When you're standing in the wings,

just before you go on stage, what's the feeling?

Describe it to me.

Well, it's for me not very spectacular.

I'm actually chatting with some friends in the wings and making fun and when it's time I just walk out.

...