Donald Macleod discusses Alexander Goehr's inheritance of Schoenberg, Boogie-woogie and Monteverdi from his parents.

All this week, Donald Macleod is in conversation with Alexander Goehr at the composer's cottage in a village outside Cambridge. Sandy (as he's universally known) was born in Berlin in 1932, the son of the conductor Walter Goehr and pianist and photographer Laelia Goehr. The family moved to England in 1933. In his early twenties, Sandy became a central figure in the Manchester School of post-war British composers. By the early sixties he was considered a leader of the avant-garde in the UK, but he never committed himself to any movement or school in particular and throughout his life, Sandy has continued to look over his shoulder at the past as much as he has sought new musical horizons of his own. In 1975 he was appointed Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge, where he remains Emeritus Professor today.

In this first programme, Sandy discusses his early life. His father, the conductor Walter Goehr had been a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg and become an all-round musician in Berlin when he was headhunted in 1933 by the Gramophone Company (later EMI). The family moved to Buckinghamshire in England where they lived throughout the War. Sandy remembers escaping to the bomb shelter in the garden during air raids; visits to the family home by Michael Tippett; attending the first modern performance of Monteverdi's Vespers, which his father had resurrected; and listening to his father's wide-ranging record collection. When Sandy eventually admitted that he wanted to be a composer, his father actively discouraged him. But it was Walter who was to conduct Sandy's first major work: The Deluge. And it was as a memorial to his father that Sandy was to go on to write his pivotal work, his Little Symphony.

Cities and Thrones and Powers (2011)
BBC Singers, Stephen Cleobury (director), Stephen Disley (organ)

The Deluge, Op 7 (1957)
Claire Booth (soprano), Hilary Summers (contralto), Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG), Oliver Knussen (conductor)

Little Symphony, Op 15 (1963)
London Symphony Orchestra, Norman del Mar (conductor). Show less