I grew up with radio – I listened to everything as a child, Dick Barton, Children’s Hour and all those wonderful plays, and along with that came a lot of incidental music. The plays on Children’s Hour would use wonderful classical pieces which as a youngster I didn’t know. But when I was about 10 years old the BBC was transmitting a serial called The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff, and the music was so thrilling – so I telephoned the BBC, and they said it was by someone called William Walton. It was his First Symphony – trumpets and drums and exciting moments. And when I started learning the piano and came across Façade I thought, ‘Oh goodness, it’s the same man!’ I then started to phone the BBC for all the music that caught my ear. They also did a dramatised version of Great Expectations, and I loved the music in that, which they said was The Mayor of Casterbridge by Vaughan Williams. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it since, but it was my first entry into that wonderful pastoral area of English music.

‘We had a very echoey kitchen at the back of the house with a stone floor and stone walls, and so I used to stand in there and sing’

There was a lot of music at my convent prep school – aged five we were all playing percussion, and in the school choir we entered all the local competitions and we always won. We had a wonderful teacher who was ex-D’Oyly Carte, who went around looking rather like the Queen Mother. After an aural test she immediately wrote to my mother and said, ‘I think your daughter might have perfect pitch and I want to give her lessons.’ But my mother said, ‘she’s already having piano lessons, the 11-plus isn’t far away, there isn’t money for both and she’s going to have too much on her plate and not achieve anything.’ So I carried on with the piano, but the singing was always there. We had a very echoey kitchen at the back of the house with a stone floor and stone walls, and so I used to stand in there and sing. I knew some of the tunes from operatic arias, but of course I didn’t know the words as they were in Italian, so I used to make it up. The lady next door used to say to my mother, ‘Carole’s got this wonderful voice, when is she going on the stage?’ and my mother said, ‘never!’ But little did they know!

A lot of the time, recording Façade was absolutely terrifying. I’d done two or three of the numbers with a piano duo, the Bibby Sisters, because it’s also arranged for four hands. But when it came to doing ‘the real thing’, as it were, and working with the producer Andrew Keener, who knows about these things, we came to realise how much more detailed work was required than we’d thought. We were no longer actors, we were no longer voices, we were actually instruments. We all have our own instrument, which is our voice, but suddenly we’re having to play it with musicians, as members of an orchestra, and it was a huge leap.

There’s so much in this music. Every time I found something new, and I found in Edith Sitwell’s imagination, her character, the depths and the layers, so much more than I had previously realised. It’s from an incredible period of history – the upheaval in the world, in Europe particularly, and the upheaval in art and music and so on and so forth, is all reflected in Façade, under this apparently sweet, frivolous, rather shallow piece of music. But it’s not really shallow at all, it’s very clever and listening just to the musicians playing their bits when we weren’t speaking, just listening to the orchestration, it is so fabulous, so delicate.

Some years ago Humphrey Carpenter was playing something on Listeners’ Choice someone had requested. All I knew was that it was Schubert, and it was one of his Lieder. I didn’t know much about Schubert Lieder and couldn’t see quite what all the fuss was about until I heard this: ‘Du bist die Ruh’. And then of course I couldn’t get enough Lieder, and that’s been going on until today.

And do you know a poem by Walter de la Mare called Music? It’s just very short, and the line that I would have to take to my desert island, as I’m a words and music person, would have to be: ‘When music sounds, all that I was, I am / Ere to this haunt of brooding dust I came’.

This article originally appeared in the May 2017 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today