After the obligatory writer questions (does any writer actually enjoy being called a Writer Just For Children?; the structure of TV vs page narrative) the interesting stuff starts around the music.
(I wish they'd skip that first part. I wouldn't care if it made the beginning abrupt or weird. I had a conversation with someone the other day about the paucity of imagination in interviews with musicians in particular - how the wrong tools - words - are too often used. Private Passions at its best bucks that tendency in using music as a tool to bring about better words about other things).
Anthony Horowitz's first choice was an easy win for these ears. Chopin's Prelude in E Minor. Which always makes me think of this incredible scene from Five Easy Pieces (one of Jack Nicholson's finest films) which I've posted before here.
It's still my favourite performance, despite ferocious competition, by a clean mile. Especially the restrained rubato - throughout, but most beautifully 1.03 minutes in where most people get carried away. There's something rigid, trenchant and stoic about the playing here that makes the whole thing infinitely more beautiful and dramatic.
Anthony Horowitz talks about how this piece of music directly provoked 6 months of writing, from the unbidden imagining of horrific accompanying scenes.
This filmic property of music is something I've found interesting for a while. I'm sure this has a lot to do with the osmosis of years of film watching. It's the same thing that can make a simple bus journey feel epic with the right song feeding something romantic in your mind's ear; or allows you to cloak with beautiful and/epic context anyone - anyone, even the most obnoxious people - on the tube.
But I disagree with Horowitz that the piece is tranquil. To me it's always been disturbing, in the best possible way.
I liked how he talked about a certain access we can gain to great composers by knowing some of their language. With even a rudimentary knowledge of notation you can achieve a closeness by way of 'crotchets, quavers and staves'.
His second pick, Act 1 of Don Giovanni proved again just how strong his link between aural and visual imagery is. That's something I used to resist when I played properly. The idea of imagining a story, people, or even an environment felt like an unfaithful distraction to a more truthful meditative or abstract state.
His third choice, Britten's Turn of the Screw, was where he lost me. Jesus what a hideous waste of time that is. It's also where I lost my internet connection, so that was the end of that.
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