We had a show called Too Marvellous for Words. One review said: “It’s not”
For David Pickard (Corpus 1979), director of the BBC Proms, Cambridge was about discovering new music, converting people to opera… and performing terrible shows in Edinburgh.
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Peter Grimes
Benjamin Britten
I had caught the opera bug at age 16 – I loved music and theatre, and now I found them perfectly fused in opera. When I got to Cambridge, I didn’t sense much excitement for it among my friends so I set about trying to convert people. Still now, I meet contemporaries who say: “Oh David, you introduced me to opera!” For me, the masters are Britten and Monteverdi – they show such an understanding of how music and drama work together.
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Anthems from King’s
This wonderful collection by composers like Stanford, Wood and Parry was the music of my life as a choral scholar – just gorgeous pieces. At Corpus, we sang two services on a Sunday and midweek evensong. We may not have been the best singers compared to King’s, but we loved singing. And you did get a better room in those days if you were a choral scholar – close to the chapel, so you could slope in sheepishly after the choir stalls were full if you’d overslept.
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King Arthur
Henry Purcell
I was introduced to Purcell’s viol fantasias on my first day at Cambridge – I had never heard these extraordinary, magical pieces by one of Britain’s greatest composers. A fellow student, played it to a few of us in his room in the early hours after a lot of wine. By the end of the night, we were firm friends and I had been introduced to music that would later allow me to run the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
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Symphony No 2
Rachmaninoff
One of my frustrations in my first two years, despite how much I loved studying music, was rarely getting past Mozart and Haydn to the late 19th century onwards. It was a time when the early music movement was taking off, and people could be rather pious about Bach and Handel and how baroque music should be played. I longed for something more emotional and so, after hours of dry academic work, I would escape to this Russian romantic – a great release.
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Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Harold Arlen Song Book
Some of these songs were among those Michael Law carefully transcribed for jazz arrangements to accompany a show we took to the Edinburgh Fringe in the early 80s. The music was fantastic, but the script was terrible. The cast was strangely distinguished – actor Simon Russell Beale (Caius 1979) played Churchill, baritone Simon Keenlyside (St John’s 1980) played Hitler and I played Neville Chamberlain… so you can see where it might have been going. We were supposed to run for three weeks – we did 10 days. The show was called Too Marvellous for Words and one review simply said: “It’s not.”
David Pickard is stepping down as director of the BBC Proms.
