Simon Callow CBE is one of Britain’s most popular and recognisable actors, but he is also a writer, broadcaster and theatre director.
His work in films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Shakespeare in Love made him a household name; his lifelong passion for classical music has seen him directing opera productions and appearing alongside various orchestras around the world as well as fronting documentaries and writing about composers and their work. He is one of the narrators in a modern passion by Francis Greer, Sword in the Soul, with words by Rowan Williams, out now on Orchid Classics.
Here is Simon on the classical music that has touched him the most deeply.
'My grandmother, who had a wonderful contralto voice, owned an enormous collection of rather battered 78s which I grew up listening to. I discovered Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra’s recording of Sibelius’s The Swan of Tuonela, a work of such mystery and enchantment that it cast a spell on me and I listened to it over and over again. The music transported me to another realm of experience and imagination, and once I discovered classical music I became what you might call a nerd, or trainspotter!
'My friend Billy lived next door to us in Streatham, and his father, Andrew Brown, played second violin in the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. They played at Glyndebourne and Andrew was fascinated by opera. He was a gruff man, but he would tell Billy and me riveting stories of the operas.
'In their house I came across a score of Rio Grande by Constant Lambert, with a personal message to Andrew. It felt exciting to be in touch directly with a recent composer. Another Lambert piece that knocked me sideways was the cantata Summer's Last Will and Testament, his setting of a poem about the plague with the line ‘Queens have died young and fair’. I heard it just around the time of AIDS, and it seemed like a terrible premonition of what became known as the gay plague, when friends were dying around us.
'At the age of 16 or 17 I was adventurous in my listening and Andrew Brown had played me the early Beethoven string quartets, but everyone had warned me that the late quartets were impossible. I listened to the Vlach Quartet on Supraphon and I never had any difficulty with them – yes, they were gnarled and going to strange places, but they were extremely expressive and I just got them.
'My family loved Italian opera and as a teenager I was lucky enough to see the legendary Tito Gobbi perform. My friends and I would wander around London on a Friday night smoking and drinking, and one day we passed the Royal Opera House and I saw Gobbi was singing in Puccini's Il Trittico (The Triptych). Somehow I persuaded them to spend three bob each on tickets in the gods.
'Though they disappeared during the same composer's Suor Angelica, I was riveted: first by Gobbi’s Michele in Tabarro, where he was dark, tragic and terrible, but then by his Gianni Schicchi, which was brilliantly funny. I realised that opera is theatre and that you can be a great actor in opera.
'When it is right, opera is the best thing in the world: the entire range of human expression is up there, with the design, the drama and the incomparable orchestral accompaniment and the singing. From then on I became an opera fanatic, and that has led to me directing operas all over the world.
'Janet Baker’s recording of Schumann's song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben opened up the whole world of Lieder and became incredibly important to me. I heard the recording in my mid-teens, but years later, in 1982, I went to the first night of Orfeo at Glyndebourne and queued humbly to meet her. She rushed over to me saying ‘You’re Mozart!’ because I had just been playing Mozart in Amadeus at the National Theatre. We’ve been good friends ever since and I admire her intensely. It’s 30 years since she stopped singing, but she’s alive and vital and intellectually searching even today.
'I adore the songs of Reynaldo Hahn, and one in particular is just the loveliest effusion of joy and pleasure: ‘Sopra l’acqua indormenzada’ from Six chansons en dialecte vénitien, sung by the late, great Antony Rolfe Johnson. Hahn was obviously singing about a gondolier he fancied, and as a gay man it’s nice when something is pretty explicit rather than hiding his light under a bushel. Anyone who has never heard these songs will fall in love with them immediately.'
Simon Callow's musical choices
Sibelius The Swan of Tuonela
Philadelphia Orchestra/Leopold Stokowski
Guild GHCD2428
Lambert Summer’s Last Will and Testament
Sally Burgess et al; English Northern Philharmonia/David Lloyd-Jones
Helios CDH55388
Puccini Il trittico
Tito Gobbi et al; Coro Del Teatro Dell’Opera Di Roma/Vincenzo Bellezza et al
Warner Classics 2127142
Schumann Frauenliebe und leben
Janet Baker (mezzo-soprano), Martin Isepp (piano)
Heritage HTGCD290-1
Hahn Souvenirs de Venise
Rolfe Johnson et al
Helios CDH55217
