Hi, it's Nicola Cochlin. Young people have been making history for years, but we don't often hear about them. My brand new series on BBC Sounds sets out to put this right. In history's youngest heroes, I'll be revealing the fascinating stories of 12 young people who've played a major role in history and who've helped shape our world. Like Audrey Hepburn, Nelson Mandela, Louis Braille and Lady Jane Grey, history's youngest heroes with me, Nicola Cochlin.

Listen on BBC Sounds.

Hello, I'm Krista 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 2007. My Castaway this week is the conductor Vladimir Yorowski.

At 35, he's widely considered to be the best of his generation,

lauded for his technique, personality, panache and brains.

He speaks the language of music, say the critics, in a way that transcends period style.

A fact which may o something to his beginnings.

His father too was a conductor, his grandfather, a composer.

And although home was an unprepossessing Tower Block apartment in Moscow,

the three rooms he shared with his parents, sister, brother,

and two grandmothers were always full of music. Beyond that, was simply more of the same.

I was five or six when I saw my first opera, he says, I literally grew up in the wings of a theatre.

Vladimir, was there ever any chance that your life would be anything but music?

Well, I think the chance was always there,

and in a way I also got encouraged by my father not to take on music,

because he was once told by his father,

if you can do something else, then do something else,

because it must be like a disease.

So consciously, of course, there was a life beyond music that you may have been encouraged towards,

but emotionally then, was it simply that music was there somewhere?

...