Interview: Donald Macleod
Donald Macleod is one of the best known voices in classical music, but he isn't a singer, he is a Radio 3 broadcaster and for the last 20 years has presented ‘Composer of the Week’ at midday on Radio 3. I first met Donald some years ago at the pub opposite the Usher Hall having a chat before a concert. I said, "you seem to know a bit about music ", “yes”, he said, "I do a bit of work for Radio 3 including ‘Composer of the Week’!" I interviewed him recently for the EMR for an article and thought we might chat for half an hour, but we ended up talking about music for one- and three-quarter hours!
Donald is from Kirkintilloch and went to university in St Andrews, where he studied psychology and art; the former no doubt came in useful for dealing with BBC management, the latter has helped him in his work outside the BBC when he does commentaries for galleries and exhibitions. Art is Donald's second passion after music, and he loves visiting Edinburgh's galleries during the festival. Donald never studied music at university and although he had some piano lessons and later in life some flute lessons when he just about learned to read music, though he says he soon forgot when the lessons ended. As he says, "I often feel a fraud when I'm presenting these learned programmes on composers and I'm surrounded by experts". What Donald is though is firstly a music lover (who admits to still shedding tears at particular works); he is also a consummate journalist and broadcaster who can convey the essence of a composer’s work in an introductory chat and the links to the music choices in the programme. This takes about 10-12 minutes of the hour, or about an hour of the five hours of the typical ‘Composer of the Week’. Of course, he is aided by experts and by his production team based in BBC Cardiff, but the scripts and the words are his and he delivers them superbly in that lovely Scottish voice.
Donald doesn't think he sounds Scottish and, ironically, he got the job on ‘Composer of the Week’ because the other person considered was judged to sound ‘too Scottish’! Donald had started in the BBC as a trainee producer and only later was his voice recognised as ‘a good radio voice’. Although he lives in North London, Donald retains his love of Scotland and Scottish traditional music, as of course did Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Haydn. In Donald's monumental study of Beethoven this year he manages to include one Burns song arranged by Beethoven. Donald refreshes his love of Scotland with regular visits including usually a two-week stint at the Edinburgh Festival introducing the morning concerts at the Queens Hall, where he is a familiar figure perched in his little makeshift studio by the door at the top of the Queens Hall.
The Beethoven 250 anniversary programmes (25 weeks over the year) have been a great achievement so far and have taught us much new about the great composer in his 250th anniversary year. They have also been a major technical triumph during lockdown, when the experts were contributing from their own homes rather than the studio. ‘Composer of the Week’ is produced by a BBC team in Cardiff. In pre-Covid times one of them would travel up to London to record with Donald on Monday lunchtimes in Studio 80A, the home of In Tune, in Broadcasting House, or occasionally produce down the line from Cardiff. During lockdown all the team have been working from home, and Donald records in his home in North London.
Donald has been hosting ‘Composer of the Week’ for 20 years and each year there are 40 composers chosen - that's over 200 hours of broadcasting a year and well over 3000 broadcasts over the 20 years. ‘Composer of the Week’ goes back to the 1940s and is the longest running programme on BBC Radio, after’ Desert Island Discs’ and Choral Evensong. Donald has never been on ‘Desert Island Discs’, clearly a remiss by the producers, and hopefully Donald will be a guest when he retires, his love and knowledge of music not to mention his radio voice would make him the perfect guest. However, I decided to give him a taster by asking him about his favourite musical experiences. He began at the beginning of classical music talking about Monteverdi and his visit to the choir loft in St Mark's Basilica in Venice where you could experience the home atmosphere of the composer. He said Don Carlos was his favourite Verdi opera and I delighted him with the story of how I took my father to hear the farewell concert of the great Bulgarian bass Boris Christoff at Covent Garden. I took my father round to the stage door to meet Christoff after the concert and he told the great singer that he had loved the concert but wished he had sung the great aria from Don Carlos ‘Ella Giammai m'amo’ (She never loved me). Christoff looked at my father and sung him the first few lines of this great aria!
Donald also mentioned many of the great concerts at the Edinburgh Festival and picked as his recent highlight the concert performance of Wagner's ‘Die Walkürie’ in 2017 with a great cast including Bryn Terfel in his last performance as Wotan and Scotland's Karen Cargill as Fricka, Mathew Rose as Hunding and Christina Goerke as Brunnhilde. Donald in particular mentioned the end of the of the first act after Amber Wagner as Sieglinde and Simon O'Neill as Siegmund brought the normally staid Usher Hall audience to its feet in a roar of applause that shook the Hall. Sadly, Radio 3 didn’t record this concert performance, so, for once, Donald was down in the stalls, as I was.....reviewing it, and can testify to this unique moment in festival history.
Donald like all of us at present is worried about the future of live music after the lockdown; we discussed the live transmissions from the Wigmore Hall and the City Halls in Glasgow as a good thing, but agreed they are very different without an audience. Donald did report that he is attending a drive-in concert given by English National Opera at Alexandra Palace, but again that will be a very different experience even from an open-air concert with a big closely packed audience. He was rather envious when I said I would be reviewing Placido Domingo singing in Simon Boccanegra in Vienna in September but as I said, "it hasn't happened yet"!
Donald has no plans for immediate retirement and still loves doing ' the best job in the world', but he is very pleased to have been joined by another Scot, Kate Molleson, on Radio 3. I suggested she would be a great successor to him on ‘Composer of the Week’ and I hope to interview Kate in a future issue of the EMR. In the meantime, we can go on enjoying Donald's lovely voice, learning, as I have done, so much more about music and looking forward to his annual visit to the Festival next year.
