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 1990, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a man of the arts, A determined apostle of all things new. He founded

the University Opera Society when he was at Cambridge and the London

Sinfonietta when he left. In Paris where he went next he became a close friend of the conductor and composer Pierre Boules and was appointed artistic director of the Pompeo Centre.

His latest post has brought him back to these shores where his advocacy of the avant-garde has recently

run him into controversy. His concert programs this season have been described as seriously

unattractive by some. He has, however, succeeded where others have failed

and has established a resident orchestra in Britain's largest arts centre. He is the

general director of the South Bank Nicholas

Nicholas music is your life has it always been the case since you're very

small I've always been very fascinated by music my parents don't play, but I was always encouraged to go to concerts

and exhibitions and music was very much part of our life.

So you were really very young when you went to your first opera?

I was 12, I think.

It was in a little cinema in a tiny town in Italy where as with my mother and my

grandmother who I think were therefore for mud baths or some such treatment and a place called Abano and I saw a performance of Laboem and I found

it very upsetting actually Laboem as I think it always is when one sees the end of Mimi and the tears at the end and I remember

that very vividly. But you were brought up in London, you went to school in London it

meant you had access to to great musical events I presume. Yes I'm very, very fortunate in that not only coming from a, I suppose what you'll call a

culture at home, but also being near the South Bank, the opera houses and being a day boy at school meant that I could dream during boring lessons at school of the concert that was to come that evening.

So you sat in the Royal Festival Hall as a boy? Yes, yes. Little dreaming that you would ever be in charge of it?

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