Sir David Willcocks
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 17 May 1998
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is 'England's choir master', Sir David Willcocks. For some 38 years he trained the Bach Choir - the most popular amateur choir in Britain. His retirement in 1998 he describes as ""like the end of an affair"". As the Director of Music at Kings College Cambridge, he tranformed small boys with dirty knees into an angelic choir. His gift is a mix of natural talent and experience. At the age of eight he joined the choir school at Westminster Abbey, where he was conducted by Elgar. Later, he worked closely with Vaughan Williams whose humility and humour he remembers, produced some masterful performances.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Oh Sacred Head by Johann Sebastian Bach Book: Book on astronomy Luxury: King's College Chapel
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:06.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:09.1 | The program was originally broadcast in 1998 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cast away this week is a musician, a chorister at Westminster Abbey from the age of eight and later on an organ scholar at King's College, Cambridge, |
| 0:39.0 | he was almost bound to enjoy a career in the art in which he so accomplished and that apart from his |
| 0:44.8 | time as a soldier in the last war when he was awarded the military cross is |
| 0:48.1 | exactly what he's done. He's held three important posts, Director of Music at King's College, Director of the Royal College of Music, and conductor of the Bach Choir. |
| 0:58.0 | He is, in a sense, England's Choir Master, loved and listened to by all those who love listening to and singing in Christmas |
| 1:06.0 | Carol Services and the great choral works of Bach, Handel, Elgar and the rest. |
| 1:11.8 | He is Sir David Wilcox. Your career, Sir David, does sound like a kind of |
| 1:16.5 | lifetime's labour of love. Is that how you feel about it? |
| 1:20.0 | Well looking back on it, I feel how lucky I've been to be doing just what I love and being paid for it as well. |
| 1:27.0 | Which is what is making music with people you get to know with friends. |
| 1:31.0 | It's just that whole coming together it is it's something you |
| 1:34.3 | share with others and I think that if somebody is occupied in their life doing |
| 1:39.9 | things which they really enjoy in the company of other people they can't ask for |
| 1:44.3 | anything more. And what what are the prerequisites of the job what do you need what kind |
| 1:48.7 | of character what kind of personality do you need to be to be a good choir master as it were? |
| 1:53.4 | I think first of all you must have natural talent, you have got to have a good air for music, |
| 1:58.9 | and you've got to love music and try and convey that love to others and I think your task is to extract from other people |
| 2:06.8 | the very best that they can give. |
| 2:09.5 | And have you modeled yourself on anybody because I know when you were very small choir boy you were |
| 2:13.9 | conducted by Elgar himself weren't you? That was just on one occasion in St |
... |
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