Professor David Phillips

Kirsty Young's castaway is the President of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Professor David Phillips.

His love of science has taken him on an extraordinary journey. At the height of the Cold War, he swapped a post in America for a place at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, where he partied with the Bolshoi and was interrogated by the KGB. He is also Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at Imperial College, but, despite his eminence, he admits his students had a 'professor button' fitted onto their hi-tech lasers. It was, he explains, a knob he could twiddle while showing visitors around the lab, but it wasn't connected to the machinery and meant he didn't ruin his students' experiments.

Choices

1.

Franz Schubert

String Quintet in C major - 1st movement

Artist: Isaac Stern, Cho-Liang Lin, Jaime Laredo, Yo-Yo Ma & Sharon Robinson

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2.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

The opening of Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

Artist: The Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields conducted by Neville Marriner

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3.

Red McKenzie and the Mound City Blue Blowers

Georgia on My Mind

Composer: Johnny Mercer/ Hoagy Carmichael

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4.

Tom Lehrer

The Elements

Composer: Tom Lehrer – music by Sir Arthur Sullivan

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5.

Yuri Shaporin

The Soldier’s Chorus

Artist: The Red Army Chorus conducted by Vladimir Alexandrov

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6.

Giacomo Puccini

Viene la Sera (Evening is coming). Love duet from the end of Act 1 of Madam Butterfly.

Artist: Luciano Pavarotti & Mirella Freni with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Herbert Von Karajan

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7.

Francisco Tárrega

Recuerdos de la Alhambra

Artist: John Williams

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8.

Castaway's favourite

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The Marriage of Figaro Finale

Artist: Ingvar Wizell & Jessye Norman with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

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Book

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

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Luxury item

Piano with music

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