Sir Keir’s first choice on Private Passions is a moment from Tchaikovsky’s 1877 ballet, Swan Lake. “I grew up with music all around us,” he says. “My mum loved Tchaikovsky, and she loved ballet and Swan Lake in particular.”
Sir Keir’s mother suffered from a rare and aggressive form of arthritis. Despite benefiting from pioneering steroid treatment, she was unable to walk by her 30s, when Keir was a teenager. “But there was something about her: the more difficult it was for her to do something like ballet, the more fascinated she was by this sort of brilliant art form – the physical element as well as the music,” he remembers. “It took her to a sort of special place and allowed her, through somebody else, to enjoy all the things that she couldn’t do.”
Meanwhile, his father listened almost exclusively to classical music. “He was an incredible man: totally, totally devoted to my mum in every way,” Sir Keir says. “But he didn’t have much emotional space left for his children and therefore there weren’t long discussions with my dad.”
Sir Keir’s father loved Beethoven – and his sixth symphony, “Pastoral” above all. “I probably got to know this piece of music better than any other piece of music because he played it so often when I was growing up,” he says. “It’s a beautiful symphony, you know, with all the mixture of seasons and moods, but it has a lightness to it as well towards the end. And through that, I sort of tried to reach my dad’s emotion. What would he be thinking when he was listening to this?”