Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For Wright's reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1983 and the presenter was Roy Plumley. This week our cast away as the choreographer and ballet director Kenneth Macmillan.

Kenneth you play records a lot for pleasure.

Well music is in my life for the whole time. I'm surrounded by music. Every day I go into work, I hear somebody playing a piano.

I tend not to play records at home because I hear so much at work.

You must find discs very useful at work when you're visualizing a ballet.

You can play a piece of recorded music over and over.

Oh, yes, that's wonderful.

I mean at one time when I was starting to be a choreographer I used to haunt the gramophone

shops and going and play something just to hear it and then not buy the record.

Have you started music? Do you play an instrument? No, I don't at all. Can you read a score?

No, I don't. And I'm glad I don't. Because I don't want to know the mathematics of the music. I want to hear the emotion.

Did you find it a difficult task to choose just eight discs that may have to last a long, long time?

I did because I fell into the trap of being a director and thought I must choose a well balanced program.

And then I really thought about being cast away and then I came to my final choice. It was difficult.

And I find most of the things I've chosen a vocal, which surprises me.

What's the first one?

Well, the first one is a sort of fun record.

I remember seeing Joan Sutherland make her debut in Lucia

de Lammermore at Covent Garden. Then I heard this record and it's the student's chorus from the student prince and I think she has such

a frontry and cheek to come in the way she does I think it would make me laugh. The Oh, boy, boy, the boy, and boy is going to get boy,

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