Lady Natasha Spender

Desert Island Discs: Archive 2005-2010

BBC

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 804 Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2007

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the musician Lady Natasha Spender. She was born at the end of the First World War and has spent her life immersed in the arts. Gifted with perfect pitch, she studied under Clifford Curzon and enjoyed a highly successful career as a concert pianist. In the months after the end of the Second World War she gave a concert at Belsen to inmates who were recovering in its hospital wing and, a couple of years later, she was chosen to be the soloist in the world's first ever televised concert for the BBC. She was also one half of a cultural 'it' couple - for more than 50 years she was married to the poet Sir Stephen Spender. They had met at a literary lunch he was hosting and became friends after Natasha stayed behind to help him with the washing up. They were friends with many of the greats of the past century, including T S Eliot, Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein. She is now the executor to Sir Stephen's very considerable estate and is writing her own memoirs.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: 1st movement of String Quintet in G Minor by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Book: Desert Islands: An Anthology by Walter de la Mare Luxury: Her grand piano.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast, but this is about something else you might enjoy.
0:05.4	My name's Katie Lecky and I'm an assistant commissioner for on demand music on BBC Sounds.
0:10.7	The BBC has an incredible musical heritage and culture and as a music lover, I love being part of that.
0:17.4	With music on sounds, we offer collections and mixes for everything, from workouts to
0:22.4	helping you nod off, boogie in your kitchen, or even just a moment of calm. And they're
0:27.7	all put together by people who know their stuff. So if you want some expertly curated music in your
0:34.1	life, check out BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Krista Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.
0:41.8	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:44.9	The program was originally broadcast in 2007.
1:09.8	Music My castaway this week is Natasha Spender. Her life has been a remarkable one,
1:12.2	not least because where most of us hope to be capable of doing justice to one profession, she has succeeded in three, as a highly accomplished
1:17.8	concert pianist, an academic specialising in the cognitive psychology of music, and as the
1:23.1	executor of the considerable estate of her late husband, the renowned poet Stephen Spender.
1:28.3	Hers has been a life rich with experience, from her beginnings being brought up by a working-class foster mother,
1:34.8	to her place at the very heart of a vigorous and highly creative community, embodying many of the 20th century's greatest writers, musicians, composers and thinkers.
1:46.5	Despite her own undoubted accomplishments and insights, she is steadfastly self-effacing, saying, I think there's one's
1:52.4	inner life and one's outer life. One's inner life is not to be talked about because it's so
1:57.6	largely music. Well, hopefully through the music that you've chosen Lady Spender,
2:02.1	we'll understand and maybe even talk a little about your inner life today.
2:05.5	Do you have any sense yourself that to date you have lived a remarkable,
2:10.4	an untypically eventful life?
2:12.8	Oh, yes.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.