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 1978, and the presenter was Roy Plumlee. Now this week our castaway is the concert pianist Sir Clifford Curson.

Sir Clifford, what's been the guiding principle in choosing your eight records?

Nostalgia, great music?

Well, first of all, I've tried to imagine myself on this island.

People tell me I've taken it much too seriously.

But of course, the island has never been described, has it?

I've listened to a number of these programs and I've thought

about the island I've even discussed it with my doctor but then I discuss everything more

or less with him more or less and he said well I think the trouble is you think of this island as a cartoon

island I thought was a wonderful description it's exactly what I do I think of

it when I if I think of it at all, as a very small patch of sand with probably a single palm tree and a skull or something or a discarded bikini and surrounded by an endless tropical ocean and I don't expect

to be rescued from it. It, I shall be planning my escape, but we'll deal with that at the end.

And so I try to imagine how it be, I would certainly be, think half unconscious really after a few hours and so I've

tried to choose the records that I would rather like to hear towards the end of my life and therefore

I should be in this semi comatose state and as when I fall asleep at night my mind

often goes back to my childhood it probably will go back to my

childhood and I think I would like to be reminded it's something to do with a sort of

adding a coda to something it would be complete I think if I was taken back to the very first

music that awakened my own musical responses and that was as a child in my

father's house my uncle was Albert W. Katell, a very famous composer of the kind of.

...