On our Desert Island this week is one of the great actors of our time, Sir John Gielgood.

Sir John, I know that music means a lot to you because you produced opera and I've seen you in several plays in which you've played the piano

excellently. Well I don't play the piano at all really. My father played very

charmingly. He improvised on quite ambitious classical themes sometimes and when I was

a boy he used to play all the big motifs from the

ring and give me the Shaw book the perfect Wagner right to read and took me when I

was very young to see I think Valquere and Rheingold under Beecham I think probably at

Drury Lane or somewhere. But anyhow he sort of inculcated quite a taste for music and I

was able to copy his skill in improvising a little bit though I a and began to buy records for myself.

And the first record that I bought and fell in love with

was this record of Chrysler and Zimbabweist jogging to hear.

And I'd seen Fritz Chrysler give a recital also with my father taking me at the Albert Hall and he made an

enormous impression upon me, he had such charm and he took his call on the

most wonderfully gracious and dignified way and the tone of his violin as he put it to his shoulder was

absolutely extraordinary I thought and I bought this record and played it continually and my

mother who was not very musical was not at all ashamed of owning it came into

the nursery and said oh I like that thing you're playing all the time but I own it

do so wish they'd catch each other up? The The The The The The The The The The The opening of the Bach concerto for two violins in D minor, Fritz Chrysler and

Ephra M. Zimb-Zimb-Zimb-Zimb a recording I see made as long ago as

1915. Now you have sung more than once in a production

haven't you? Well only once really. Michael Redgrave who was playing

Mcheath in a revival of the Beggas Opera at the beginning of the war

...