Rick Wakeman The progressive rock keyboardist and composer on his passion for Prokofiev

My Music

M

y father had an old radiogram and quite a large collection of 78s,

including The Barber of Seville,

which I thought was absolutely brilliant. Donkey’s years later I did some concerts with the tenor Ramon Remedios of a fun thing

that I called The Barber of Wigan,

which was a pastiche of the clichéd themes and orchestral arrangements of light opera. I was stunned that people would come up to us afterwards saying “we never thought we’d like opera, but we’re going to go and see one now!” We’d have to explain that we hadn’t really done proper operatic music, but it was great that it prompted people to try the real thing. My father was a good player of

all sorts of instruments, so he played the piano in the house, and there was classical music in my bones from day one. I owe my father an awful lot: he encouraged me to listen to and play as many different kinds of music as I could, and said to me, “Classical tuition is the equivalent of learning to read properly, and it will teach you every technique you need to do what you want. An author can have a vivid imagination, but if he only knows 100 words then that will limit how much he can portray his imagination. If you have a thorough classical training, and also take the time and trouble to listen to and absorb other kinds of music – even if you don’t like it – then that will let your imagination run riot.” I studied at the Royal College

of Music in the late ’60s, a time when popular music of all sorts was stigmatised; but one of the saving graces was composition classes with Philip Cannon, who would give me a chunk of music by one composer and tell me to go

22 GRAMOPHONE MAY 2010

idea where this is going”; just as you’re about to give up and walk back to the house, he opens the gate into a beautiful garden. I’ve always been drawn towards

20th-century eastern European composers, and I adore English composers such as Walton, but there are also some weird things that I enjoy listening to. It’s interesting to imagine what avant- garde composers such as Cornelius Cardew were trying to say. Whether I “like” it or not isn’t always the point – it gets me thinking that you’ve got to know the rules properly in order to break them successfully. The Mellotron was an appalling

‘Prokofiev was the true

inventor of the progressive rock concept album’

away and rewrite it in the style of somebody else. That was tremendous fun, and it has stayed with me. In some of my concerts I play Beatles songs in classical styles: “Help!” in the manner of Saint-Saëns, and “Eleanor Rigby” in the style of Prokofiev – my greatest musical hero.

When I was about eight years

old my father took me to see Peter

and the Wolf, which changed my

life. I like to tell people that Prokofiev was the true inventor of the progressive rock concept album. I love the way his music can lead you down the path, and you’ll be thinking, “I’ve got no

THE MUSIC I COULDN’T LIVE WITHOUT…

Stravinsky – The Firebird

Boston Symphony Orchestra / Seiji Ozawa

I imagine it was a perfect day for everybody involved when they recorded that – it must have felt absolutely spot-on.

instrument, often violently out of tune, but it was an innovation back in the early ’70s, and it had a choir- type sound. Just for a bit of tongue- in-cheek fun during a sound-check for a Yes gig, I played a burst of the “Hallelujah” chorus on one, and the band all said that I should put it into the show. On the first night that we did it, in front of about 20,000 people, I realised how astonishing it is that every single person knows that particular theme, even if they’ve never listened to Messiah. It’s also heartwarming that thousands of Yes fans were turned on to Stravinsky because we used the finale from the The Firebird as the introduction music to our shows. In fact, there were phenomenal complaints when we stopped using it for a short while, and it had to be reinstated! Jon Anderson and I sat through about 20 different recordings before we found one by Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra that pulls out all of the different emotions and dramatic colours in the music. I’ve got about 12 versions on CD now, but that is certainly still the one for me.G

Rick Wakeman was talking to David Vickers

www.gramophone.co.uk

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