Raymond Gubbay

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2006

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the music impresario Raymond Gubbay. For 40 years he has brought popular classics and opera to the masses. His name has become synonymous with glittering evenings based on classical favourites with concerts often topped off with lasers, fireworks and light displays. He's worked with everyone from Pavarotti to Ray Charles and, while snooty critics dismiss it as 'middle-brow music for Middle England', it attracts audiences in their droves; two million people have now attended his 'Classical Spectacular' evenings.

It's a long way from his early days, when he toured the country with a small troupe of singers and a pianist. Then, venues would pay him 84 guineas to put on a Viennese evening or a Gilbert and Sullivan night and he had to pay the musicians and cover the cost of transport and hotels before he earned a penny. He says he gives people what they want, "tunes they can hum" and more often than not, he gets it right. But in 2004, for once, he misjudged his audience: he wanted to open a third opera house in London offering cheaper seats to a wider audience, but even before the curtain rose for the first time he knew they weren't selling enough tickets to stay open. He says it's been the biggest disappointment of his career, but he doesn't rule out another attempt to bring opera to the West End.

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

Favourite track: Final movement of Emperor piano concerto by Ludwig van Beethoven Book: Unabridged Collins/Robert/ English /French dictionary Luxury: An espresso coffee machine with coffee

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2006. My castaway this week is the music impresario Raymond Gubbay. For the last 40 years he's organized opera, ballet and classical
0:35.7	music concerts and has worked with everyone from Pavarotti to Ray Charles, proclaiming
0:41.1	that audiences want tunes they can hum, and that's what I give them.
0:45.0	While his own musical talents are limited, he failed his grade one piano, he's been described as a maestro to Middle England.
0:52.0	But his marketing pizzas and straight talking
0:54.9	have often seen him at loggerheads with the musical establishment. He started his own
0:59.2	business with 50 quid from his dad and 50 quid from the bank and fumes at the subsidies doled out by the
1:04.9	Arts Council. I don't think the people at Covent Garden have the first clue as to what it's like
1:09.4	to sink your own money into a project and then nervously study the ticket sales to see if you're
1:14.1	going to survive he says well you have more than survive to Riem and Govey without
1:18.8	any of that arts council money what's your formula I've always believed in putting on what people want to hear, what they want to go and see, and things that I kind of like, things that I know myself.
1:29.3	So that's been the way I followed things from the word going it's always seemed to work.
1:34.2	What is it that you think people want to come and see?
1:37.4	Basically people want to go out to be entertained to, in my case with my sort of events, to hear music that they know and love and that's what I hope I give them.
1:45.6	It's very significant that in what you do not only you good at balancing the books and making concerts a huge success
1:52.4	You have to deal with the talent.
1:54.4	And the talent in your business can often be notoriously tricky.
1:58.1	You must be skilled at that at handling these huge overblown egos.
2:01.6	Well, I've always found with artists if you treat them with respect.
2:04.5	Generally speaking, you get the best out of them.
	...

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