It’s often true that one’s strongest remembrance of departed family and friends is through the music they loved to hear. It is, indeed, their musical loves which more clearly define their personality in our mind’s eye. That’s why from time to time I like to listen to BBC Radio 4’s ‘Desert Island Discs’ or, at least, get a listing of what a well-known person has chosen for their favourite titles to take on that mythical desert island.

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It’s also correct to say that for much of the last two years most of us have been living on an internalised, virtual desert island. In the restriction of our social intercourse and in the absence of live concerts we have taken to listening to music on the radio, by streaming, by playing it in varying degrees of non-virtuosity on what instruments we are able to massacre or by going through our CD (and for some of us vinyl) collections.

In this last respect I’ve still got some shellac 78 rpm records which belonged to my parents. Like so many courting couples it was music, the food of love, that brought them together. After all, how could one possibly plan a future life with someone whose musical tastes are complete anathema?

Of the records my parents had in common were such classical repertoire warhorses as Beethoven’s Fifth (my father particular enjoyed the finale of Haydn’s symphony no 88, used to fill in side 12) and Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto no 1 with Horovitz (which – after years of disparagement – I, at last, discovered what a miraculous work it is – especially played live by Beatrice Rana.).

Of my mother’s particular tastes I have her shellac discs of Chopin’s Ballades played by Alfred Cortot. As a graduate of Milan conservatoire before giving up a prospective concert career, become involved in social work and eventually end up as a Freudian psychoanalyst my mother had great respect for Cortot; she said that his interpretations more than compensated for the ‘stecche’ (clangers) he made. Vera had a particular love for Chopin and she would play his preludes commenting ‘yes I understand what this one is about but that one I can’t make out at all.’ My mother’s upright piano , which her father had bought at a bargain price during the depression that also hit Italy in the early 1930’s, found its way to our house in London, then to Wales and now who knows where?

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What would my mother have chosen as her eight desert island discs? I think I have a pretty fair idea of at least some of them.

• Brahms’s violin concerto, especially its final gipsy rondo movement which always used to send my mum in raptures. Brahms remained her greatest. She would comment ‘his music releases my rebellious nature.’ At one concert we attended at the Royal Festival Hall the great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau played both of Brahms piano concerti. My mother expressed a preference for the demonically dramatic first one written shortly after the tragedy of his friend Schumann’s death in a lunatic asylum. I tend to agree with her. And, of course, it was Brahms who Karajan conducted on one of his visits to the same hall (one of two of his concerts which I attended comprising Brahms’ first and third ‘rackets’ c.f. ‘Fawlty Towers’).
• J. S. Bach’s (if it was by him at all…) Organ Toccata and Fugue in D minor. My mother regretted that most of Bach’s organ works were not of this intensity at all!
• Bruch’s violin concerto no 1. Well …if anyone is not melted by this penetratingly heartfelt work they must be soul-dead.
• Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’. As a lover of Russian literature and much else to do with Russia my mother found this work very evocative, especially the Great Gate of Kiev, a gorgeous city which my wife and I visited in 2004.
•  Dukas’ ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’. This was one piece which came into the ‘listen with mother’ category. My mum would point out to me salient points in the tale of the hapless apprentice which I have always associated with Mickey Mouse (the film ‘Fantasia’ of course).
• The song ‘Ma l’Amore No’ which was sung by that great actress Alida Valli in the film ’Stasera Niente di Nuovo’ directed by Mario Mattoli and dating from 1942.  My mum would often sing it while doing the housework and told me it came from a popular war-time film. I always find it amazing how such a well-made movie could have been produced (in Rome) at perhaps one of the most critical times for Italy during the Second World War. It clearly held memories for her as a Red Cross volunteer.
• I find it difficult to conclude with any certainty my mother’s list of desert island discs. However, for my last two items I think that something by Mozart, probably his Sonata in A minor, (she had the classic 10 inch vinyl disc of this tear-jerking work played by Dinu Lipatti) would have been selected. (It was a piece by Mozart, his E minor Violin Sonata, that I, as a teenager, performed with my mum accompanying me – or was it the other way round?).
• Lastly, Verdi’s awesome ‘Requiem’, especially his ‘Dies Irae’. My mother was born in Via San Marco, Milan, just a few yards away from the Church of San Marco which witnessed the premiere of this work on 22 May 1874, the first anniversary of the dedicatee Alessandro Manzoni’s death.

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Incidentally San Marco’s organ, dating from 1564, was played by Mozart aged 14 in 1770, used in the first performance of Verdi’s Requiem and inaugurated by Ponchielli (he of the ‘Dance of the Hours’) after its late nineteenth century restoration.

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This brings me to the opposite ‘desert island’ question. Which music would my mother have avoided bringing to the famous island? Certainly most of opera, especially Ponchielli’s ‘La Gioconda’ which she described to me as the most boring musical event she’d ever suffered when it was performed at Milan’s ‘La Scala’ theatre. Puccini’s ‘Un bel di’ vedremo’ from ‘Madama Butterfly’ and Isolde ‘Liebestod from Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’ were, however, rather different matters for her and tears began to flow.

Although my mother did not have much time for contemporary music she had a soft spot for Schoenberg when she discovered him later in life. Her friend, the first among concert audiences to appreciate Mahler back in the nineteen fifties, introduced  her to the late romantic Austrian composer and I remember my mum was disappointed when we hadn’t called in on ‘Max’s (Peter Maxwell Davies) cottage when my wife and I got somewhat lost in our misty ramblings on Hoy in that distant year of 1989, a non-meeting I describe at https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2016/03/15/farewell-to-max/

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(I should add that she raved about Bernstein and his Mass).

Another allergy was that towards English music (not Scottish, incidentally, my mum loved its folk songs). Elgar, Parry and their ilk were beyond her. However, the discovery of the eighteenth century English school and, in particular, William Boyce generated a growing affection for the music of the island to which she sometimes felt exiled to – her own ‘desert island’ in fact.

Anyway, I am sure my mother will continue to enjoy the full repertoire of celestial harmonies where she finds herself now.