Desert island discs with our conductor, Martin Everett
We hope to be able to return to singing soon, but in the meantime we have asked our conductor Martin Everett about his musical life and his favourite pieces of music.
Hello Martin and thank you for sharing your Desert Island Discs with us.
Hello – I’m happy to have the opportunity to do this. I’ve often wondered what I would choose if I were ever put on the spot, so now’s my chance!
Firstly, how long have you been associated with the SWLCS and what are your earliest memories of your involvement with the choir?
I’ve been professionally involved with the SWLCS since 1969, but both my parents sang in the choir back in the 1950s, when Charles Farncombe was the conductor. My earliest real musical memory is from a dress rehearsal of Britten’s St Nicolas in the old Tooting Central Hall, when I desperately wanted to be the boy who sang ‘God be glorified.’ I must have been about 7 or 8, I think. I suspect it was this experience that eventually led me to become a musician.
Are you a Londoner, born and bred?
Bred, yes, but not born. I was born in Manchester – Didsbury, to be more precise – because my father had moved up there for work. But we moved back when I was 3 and I grew up in New Malden.
Where did you go to school?
In Bath. I went to Kingswood, the Methodist public school, mainly because my grandparents were Methodists and it was a school the family knew about.
And were they the “happiest days of your life”?
Not one bit! I was a complete square peg in a round hole. I wasn’t remotely sporty, so I was well and truly outside the ‘in’ crowd. But the teaching – in French and Music especially – was absolutely brilliant, so I have a lot to be thankful for, even though I hated most of my time there.
Where did you first start playing the organ?
As a child I used to set up my parents’ canteen of cutlery on the dining table, because the knives looked a bit like organ pipes, and I could pretend to be playing! I started organ lessons properly when I passed my Grade V piano, and through a friend of Charles Farncombe I eventually found a teacher in Bristol – a completely mad, Northern Irish Anglo-Catholic (of all things!) – who had studied with André Marchal in Paris.
And what is your first disc and why have you chosen it?
The Northumbrian folk song Blow the Wind Southerly, sung by Kathleen Ferrier. It was one of the very first pieces I ever got to know, from an old 78rpm record my parents had. The way Ferrier sings it is a bit dated, perhaps, but her diction is absolutely impeccable! And it’s rather poignant, because it came up in the very last conversation I had with Judith Crompton, after the final South West rehearsal before the lockdown. There are lots of memories tucked away in this piece, ion other words.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLaaoHuHgmc
And then off to Cambridge to Magdalen College, pronounced how?
MagdalenE (with an E) in Cambridge! Without the final E it’s in the Other Place!! It’s pronounced ‘Maudlin’ whether it’s the Cambridge one or the other one. In Cambridge, the College was re-founded in 1542 by Lord Audley of Audley End in Essex, and dedicated to St Mary Magdalene. The name, however, was often spelled ‘Maudleyn’ at the time, because that spelling incorporated the name of the founder.
What are the duties of an organ scholar?
Essentially, playing the organ for services in the College Chapel. Sometimes it also involves conducting the choir (not at the same time!) and planning a programme of music for services throughout each term. In the larger, more famous chapels (King’s or St John’s, for example) it’s much like being Assistant Organist at a Cathedral. In the smaller chapels, like ours, it often carries much more responsibility, especially if there is no Fellow of the College (i.e. a member of the teaching staff) whose subject is Music.
On to your second disc which is?
I was at school in the 60s, when the first Beatles tracks came out, but I was far too perverse to get drawn into that craze! I found an LP of songs by Françoise Hardy instead (I’ve no idea where it came from) and the song that I used to listen to over & over again was this one, Tous les garçons et les filles de mon age. There was something about her voice that I loved, and it was French, of course – so it had everything! I still love it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSNtL3uuXQA
And after Cambridge you went on to the Royal Academy and had the chance to study in Paris – that must have been quite exciting and you met some interesting people.
I went to the Academy to study conducting and composition. My composition professor was John Gardner, who was also Director of Music at St Paul’s Girls’ School and Morley College (he led a very busy life!) I decided to enter for the Academy’s History of Music Prize, and to write about late 19th and early 20th century French organ music. That was why I went to Paris in the first place. I remember my grandparents being really worried as I set out on my own for what they thought were the fleshpots of Europe!
On that first visit, going round churches trying to get a chance to play any organs I could, I met Guy Morançon, the Director of Music at Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. I asked him to teach me, he agreed, and I spent the next four years going backwards and forwards between London and Paris.
The other person I met on my first visit to Paris was Marie-Madeleine Duruflé, the wife of Maurice Duruflé, the composer of the famous Duruflé Requiem. She introduced me to Alice Tournemire, the really scary, formidable widow of the composer Charles Tournemire, whose music is a kind of missing link between the late 19th century composers and those of the early 2oth, Messiaen in particular. And I met an American academic, Robert Lord, in a café on the left bank; he was studying with Jean Langlais, the successor to both César Franck and Tournemire as organist of Sainte-Clothilde. So I got into the habit of going to Sainte-Clothilde on Sunday mornings, part of a little group of us who were invited up to the organ loft with Langlais, who played me a lot of the repertoire I was researching. He was a simply astonishing improviser – an essential skill if you’re a French church organist. One day he asked me – just 30 seconds before the end of the Mass – to give him a theme for his improvisation. So I did, and he produced a Fantasia and Double Fugue on my theme, then and there, with no possible preparation! Amazing! I really wish I had that skill, but so far it’s been eluding me for about 50 years!
Was that when you turned into a Francophile? What do you especially love about France?
No, not at all – I think I’d been a Francophile ever since I started learning the language at prep school: I simply loved it. I can remember the very first sentence in the first chapter of our French textbook: ‘Monsieur Vendtout vend tout, ou presque tout,’ it said. Then, just before I took my A Levels, I spent the whole summer holiday with a family who lived in Toulouse, with a country house in a tiny fortified village near a place called Revel. It was a real case of total immersion, because none of them spoke even half decent English! But in the next village, Saint-Félix-Lauragais, the church had a superb 18th-century organ. So I went to see the Curé and got permission to go and practice there, and I borrowed a bike so that I could go there as often as possible.
Back in the 1920s the composer Déodat se Séverac had been organist there – we have sung his Tantum Ergo quite often. In 2016 we were in that part of France during the summer and we stayed at Saint-Félix so that I could go and play the organ again – a wonderful trip down memory lane for me (and Harriet is very indulgent when there’s a French organ involved, I’m glad to say!) I think the whole experience of that summer back in the 1960s is what really confirmed my love of France and all things French. What do I love in particular? The language, I suppose, first & foremost; the food, the wine, the music, the architecture, the art, the poetry – it’s really hard to choose! And I adore the accent du Midi, the thick, nasal accent of SW France, which I picked up to such an extent during that fateful summer that one of my teachers couldn’t understand me when I went back to school!
What is your third disc and why have you chosen it?
I couldn’t bear to be without Bach’s St Matthew Passion. The problem is to find a short extract that sums up why I love it so much. In many ways it’s the last chorus that has always spoken most directly to me, especially when I’ve conducted it. It comes partly from a sense of relief to have reached the end of such a long work, partly from a feeling of physical and emotional exhaustion – and then Bach provides this sublimely beautiful chorus which in context is almost too much to cope with.
You had a long period teaching at St Mary’s at Twickenham and Surrey University. And I guess have seen some huge changes in Education during your career. What has been the most exciting and productive change?
I was at St Mary’s for 20 years, working in and around Horace Walpole’s wonderful Gothick house at Strawberry Hill. When I went there it was my absolute dream of a job, so it was a terrible wrench when they decided that the Music Department was too expensive to maintain at a time when cuts in education spending were just beginning. For a few years my time was split between St Mary’s and Surrey University, and it was the Professor of Music at Surrey who first asked me to take on some of his responsibilities with Cambridge A Level Music. I served on the Music Committee of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority for a long time, approving exam syllabuses from all the A Level and GCSE examining Boards and scrutinising their implementation, overseeing the introduction of the National Curriculum – we had a very wide-ranging remit. I think some of the innovations in public exams in Music during the 1990s were very productive, expecting every candidate to perform, for a start (before 1990 they could do A Level Music without necessarily touching a musical instrument at all!), and especially expecting them all to compose, to use their music as a vehicle for their own creativity.
And the worst?
Ooh, that’s far more controversial! I think the way in which A Level Music in the UK has changed in the last few years has been very worrying. The traditional disciplines of the subject are gradually being eroded, almost to the point of de-skilling a whole generation of students. There’s only one syllabus currently that caters properly for the needs of students of moderate to high ability, and I don’t expect that to survive much longer. It’s very sad to see the things I’ve fought for over decades being thrown away without sufficient thought.
So on to your fourth disc.
The next recording is Wagner, a composer I didn’t discover until I was in my mid-20s. I saw Parsifal first, at Covent Garden and was bowled over by the power of the music; then through the 1970s there was the marvellous ENO production of the Ring with Rita Hunter and Alberto Remedios – still one of the best I’ve ever seen. But it was always Parsifal that drew me back, both in my academic work and in practice. I worked on the Wagner Society’s production of it in 1978; I coached some of the soloists and conducted one of the performances. A few members of the South West came to sing in the chorus, which included singers from all over the place (one of my jobs was to try to mould them into something that sounded like a cohesive chorus!) Again, this is a long work, so finding a short extract is difficult, but I’ve chosen the Transformation (scene change) Music from Act I, which gives a good sense of the almost overwhelming intensity of Wagner’s music. Turn the volume up for this one!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igvxxJ_qrRo
You still seem pretty busy, especially with your examining work. That seems to take you all over the UK and abroad.
I still do a lot of examining work for Cambridge International Examinations, setting papers, training teachers and examiners, marking scripts, advising on syllabus revisions – there’s a lot of variety. I’ve trained examiners in Singapore and Botswana, and I’ve been to Northern Ireland, Gibraltar and Jersey quite a lot, as well as to Scotland and all over England.
Disc number five – which is?
I can’t be marooned without Handel’s Messiah – a work I’ve lived with for years. It was Charles Farncombe who first sparked my interest in finding out about the early versions of it, and eventually that led me to reconstruct and perform what Handel first put down on paper in the summer of 1741 – a version that he never performed himself, of course, because he started to change and adapt it even before it was first heard. But the process he went through has always fascinated me, creating this huge work in the space of just 3 weeks – it’s extraordinary. Here is one of my favourite sections – the series of three choruses from Part II (Surely, And with his stripes and All we like sheep), not quite performed as I like it, but pretty close…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEGympB8Tx4
We are going to stretch a point and allow you one organ on your desert island. Which would it be and why?
No hesitation at all: the Grand Organ of Saint-Omer Cathedral – of course, you’d have to include the Cathedral as well, because the organ can’t be left out in the open! It has all the most up-to-date technology of the 1850s, so it’s a brute of an instrument to play by modern standards, but the sound is just wonderful: the great French organ builder Cavaillé-Coll, early in his career, restored and rebuilt it in 1855, but using a lot of pipes from the earlier instrument of 1719. I think it’s my favourite instrument in the entire world!
For many of us, music is our relaxation, but given that music seems to be such a large chunk of your working life, is there something else you do for relaxation?
You’re right, of course: music has always taken up a lot of my time. When I was applying to University I could have chosen to read Modern Languages, and I sometimes think it might have been nicer to have kept music as a hobby. But it turned out the other way round! So my favourite spare-time activity is keeping up my French. I’m a keen amateur photographer, too, especially when I’m away from home. I love travel, experiencing new places and trying to understand their culture. Harriet and I had our honeymoon in Bali, for example: it was marvellously exotic, the people were really friendly and it made a huge impression. I’d love to go back, if I had the opportunity.
Suppose money and size of choir and orchestra were no object, what would be the one piece you would like to conduct which you have not so far been able to?
There are so many pieces that it’s hard to choose! There are still lots of Michael Haydn pieces to explore – his Mass settings especially; there are the big works like the Verdi Requiem (the only Verdi piece I really like – I’ve got a real blind spot when it comes to his operas!); there’s Berlioz, the Grand’messe des morts or the Damnation of Faust, neither of which I’ve done. But I think I would actually choose Beethoven – the 9th Symphony. It’s the only Beethoven symphony that I’ve never conducted: the nearest I got was training a choir to do the last movement (all those top As for the sopranos!!) for a concert that was conducted by Maxim Shostakovich. It was a case of “Nearly, but not quite…!”
And your sixth disc?
This is a brief extract from another opera, this time by a composer of the mid-19th century who never receives anything like the recognition he deserves. This comes from Le Prophète, one of the four French Grand Operas by Giacomo Meyerbeer. He was German by birth but worked in Italy for several years (and started calling himself by the Italian version of his first name while he was there), and then went to Paris, where he became the most successful composer of vast, five-act operas that were the equivalent of the Hollywood spectaculars of a century later. So here is the American Mezzo-Soprano Marlyn Horne, a singer with a quite extraordinary voice and a simply enormous range, singing one of Meyerbeer’s most demanding arias. This is virtuoso singing at its very finest.
Are you going to be able to feed yourself on this desert island?
I can cook reasonably well, if that’s what you mean! But catching the food – hunting or fishing – would be a major challenge. Of course, if you could provide a fully-stocked supermarket just around that headland over there, I’d be fine…
We are stretching another point here – what one food would you like us to arrange a limitless supply of?
Singapore Noodles – oddly enough, in my favourite Chinese restaurant in Singapore they always used to call them Hong Kong Noodles, but that has changed recently. Spicy, but not too hot, pieces of pork & chicken, a bit of omelette, some prawns and thin rice noodles: perfection! And there’s so much variety in it that I think it would take a long time before I got tired of it.
On to disc number seven, which is?
This is Poulenc, a composer I’ve always loved for his strange mixture of joy and melancholy, the profound and the flippant. This is his Organ Concerto, recorded in 1961 by Maurice Duruflé on the organ of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont in Paris (which coincidentally was where I met Madame Duruflé a few years later). This piece has lots of memories for me: it was one of the pieces on the first set of CDs I gave to Harriet when we were first together; and I recall playing it myself a long time ago in Sutton, when the timpani were in competition with a dramatic thunder storm that broke out when we were about half way through!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF0e9CSQNXQ
And which wine shall we ship over to you?
It has to be white; reds give me a sore head these days (unless they’re so good that I can’t afford them!). French or Italian, moderately dry; a cold Chablis, perhaps, or a Macon Villages, or something from the Loire, I’m not that fussy – but definitely not from the New World!
And now you and Harriet are settled in Cambridgeshire and clearly from the amount of produce you arrive with in the Autumn, you must have quite a big garden. Who does the gardening?
We’ve got a bit under a quarter of an acre – far too much to look after on our own! We have some help from a friend in the village; I deal with the roses (strictly old-fashioned ones!), Harriet grows tomatoes in the greenhouse. So it’s a joint effort. We have a lot of trees, including a big oak, a horse chestnut, a maple, a walnut and lots of apples and plums. We had our big Bramley cooker pruned this year, though, so there won’t be much on that for a season or two!
Our house is right at one end of a village, at the top of what counts as a hill in Cambridgeshire (all of 150 feet above sea level!) so we have some fabulous views. We can see a good 15–20 miles from the front windows upstairs and at the back we look out onto the fields, so it feels as if we’ve got a lot more space than just the garden. It’s quite a contrast from Balham!
And village life suits you both?
We’re very lucky to have found a really lovely, small village where we’ve made a lot of friends. There’s an amazing sense of community, which has been a huge advantage during the lockdown. We love it, and we’re planning to stay put!
Eighth and final disc, which is?
Some of my choices have been a bit melancholy, perhaps, so I’ll need something to cheer me up when I feel a bit low. There’s no composer better than Haydn for that, and I’m going to choose Symphony No. 60. It was originally written as incidental music for a play about an elderly, absent-minded gentleman, and Haydn responded by playing around with all the usual expectations of what a symphony ought to be. It goes into the wrong keys at the wrong times and he plays around with the form, but he saves up one of the best jokes until the very last movement – just listen to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG2yzH1kxt8
The whole symphony is a delight – well worth getting to know if you don’t already. It’s such gentle humour, but done with consummate skill – I love it!!
If you could only have one disc, which would it be and why?
It would have to be Parsifal – that has been top of my list for decades. I know Wagner is a highly controversial figure, and a lot of things about him are absolutely abhorrent, but wicked people sometimes are very great artists. For me, Parsifal is one of the pinnacles of Western civilisation. It’s one of those pieces where you notice something new every time you hear it, often some tiny little detail that helps you to understand it better. So, if I could have only one piece of music for the rest of my time on the island, that would be it.
And as well as the Bible and Shakespeare which one book would you choose to be marooned with? And given that we’ve already been pretty generous and given you an organ to play and limitless amounts of your favourite food, what would be your luxury item on this desert island?
I think I would probably choose an anthology of my favourite poetry. If I’m allowed to be more specific, I’d like it to include the complete Psalms in the Grail translation, together with all of Yeats and Housman and a comprehensive selection of English lyric poetry of all periods. Then I would have a lot to read and to think about, and I’d have a ready supply of texts to set to music as well.
For my Luxury – well, I need a good 6 hours of solid sleep if I’m to function properly – a bit more if I can get it. I’m a night owl rather than a sparrow, so I do go to bed quite late, but then I like to be sure that I can go off to sleep as easily as possible. So I’d like a really comfortable bed, please, to make that possible even in my isolation.