Hello, I'm Kirstie 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 2002, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a pianist, She has a special place in the history of English music and musicians,

not only because of her own talent, but also that of her late husband, Cyril Smith.

They were both hugely successful solo performers when Sir Henry Wood persuaded

them to play together for the first night of the proms in 1941. Their partnership became

an institution and composers such as Vaughan Williams and Gordon Jacob wrote pieces specially for them.

Then in 1956 Cyril had a stroke and lost the use of his left hand but a year later they were playing

together again it was a beginning of a new career as a couple who could perform many

of the great two-piano works with three hands a widow now for 27 years she still teaches and still plays.

I can't imagine life without music she says. It's a sort of world of its own.

She is Phyllis Selick. Phyllis I think a lot of people would imagine that playing

with another pianist, playing two piano works is simply a matter of practicing your part and then

sitting down and putting it together. But there's a bit more to it than that, isn't it?

It's the most difficult ensembles because it's percussive, you see.

If you're playing with a string player, it doesn't have to be spot on, but it does when it's in two pianists.

If it's not dead together, you hear, put on.

Whereas if you were playing with a string, cello or violin,

you wouldn't notice that it wasn't spot on together.

Exactly, it could kind of merge together slightly, a hundredth of a second after.

So it's total discipline, is it?

It is indeed.

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