Podcast of the Week: Joanna Lumley

Exciting news for Joanna Lumley fans – she has a new weekly podcast!

In Joanna and The Maestro she chats with her conductor husband Stephen Barlowaka The Maestro all things classical music.

Joanna describes herself as an ‘enthusiastic amateur’ while Stephen is a famed conductor, composer and musician. She asks all the questions she’s always wanted to ask and her husband of 37 years provides the answers.

The second episode sees them debate who’s better out of Mozart and Beethoven while the following week is a discussion about the role of the conductor. But for the first week, and by way of introduction, they head to the music room for a tour through the music which shaped both of their childhoods.

Joanna says she was surrounded by music while she lived in Malaya, and describes growing up with Beethoven’s pastoral symphony, No. 6 in F Major.
‘There is so much vitality in this piece of music,’ she says.

Another family favourite played on the wind up gramophone  was Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik – her mother particularly loving Serenade No. 13. ‘It surely has to be one of Mozart’s most recognisable pieces of music but it is still just absolutely exquisite in its delicacy,’ Joanna says.

She says she ‘adored’ the music played at the dance classes in Malaya. ‘You can imagine a ceiling fan whipping round, and outside dark jungles, and a house propped up on stilts  and wooden boards, and all of us little girls with our dancing shoes and a basket which had salted water to drink because it was so hot and sweaty.

‘And someone playing Offenbach’s Barcarolle, that lovely rocking boat song and dancing to that. I can hear it to this day.’

When her family moved to the UK when Joanna was about eight, so her dad could take up a job in the War Office, they lived in a rented house in Epsom, Surrey, which had a piano.

She enjoyed picking out the tunes and started having pianos lessons – but was unable to read music in the same way that she struggled with numbers, later being found to have number dyslexia.

‘I tried and tried because I really wanted to know how to do music but I realised I couldn’t do it through my eyes, I could only do it through what I heard and watching other people’s fingers,’ she says.

As a child, Stephen was fascinated by the pedal harmonium in his grandparents’ front room.

‘How did they get a harmonium in the house? All I can say is, probably they thought at some stage they should have.’

Stephen started learning piano at the age of five. ‘When I was six or seven I couldn’t stay off it to the huge annoyance of my brother and sister,’ he says. ‘The cry would always go up within about 10 seconds of my putting my hands on the keyboard.’

As a teenager Stephen remembers falling in love with Wagner’s Das Rheingold when one of his music teachers handed him the full orchestral score. It was unlike anything he had heard before.

‘It was the scale of it, the beauty of it, the imagination,’ he says.

They talk with passion and you also get a glimpse of Joanna and Stevie as a couple.