Starting her career as a producer on BBC Three Counties Radio and later Radio 4’s Front Row, Georgia Mann now presents and produces some of the BBC’s flagship music programmes, including Essential Classics, Words and Music and In Tune.
Georgia was a regular presenter at the 2023 BBC Proms, including the prestigious Last Night of the Proms in September. She also blogs about parenting for Huffington Post.
Here, Georgia discusses five key pieces of music that have shaped her.
Georgia Mann’s musical choices
Ennio Morricone: The Mission original soundtrack
One of my best and earliest musical memories was being driven through France from Calais to the Pyrenees in my dad’s VW Golf with the roof down and ‘River’ from Ennio Morricone‘s soundtrack to The Mission on the car stereo all the way.
I was about six and it was the first time my dad and I had spent much time alone – my mum flew separately with my baby brother. I associate it with fields full of sunflowers and France whizzing past the car window. But also as the first piece of music which really had my pulse racing.
Bizet: Carmen
I’m a sucker for a melody and, as melodists go, it’s hard to beat Bizet. As an eight-year-old I listened over and over again to a cassette of Carmen’s ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle’ and tried to record myself on my ghetto-blaster using the same sort of voice I heard on the recording. I had big, curly dark hair and my grandmother used to call me a ‘little Carmen’!
At nine I had an unusually overdeveloped voice, big and quite vibrato-laden, and I remember singing the ‘Pie Jesu’ in Fauré’s Requiem with the choir and orchestra at my primary school, Woodside Park in Finchley. It’s very exposed, especially the first note you come in on; I remember being absolutely terrified, but just loving the feeling of singing.
I thought I might do it professionally, but by my late teens I was partying pretty hard and not looking after my voice. Later, I sang a bit at Cambridge, but Iestyn Davies was in my year and I saw the sort of dedication you would need to be a professional soloist. I was far too lazy to give my whole life over to it!
Loesser: Guys and Dolls
My grandma was a very glam Irishwoman with a lovely voice, and she loved musicals. When she babysat me on Saturday nights, she’d sing me Shirley Temple songs or ‘A Bushel and a Peck’ from Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls. I played Miss Adelaide in a school production and that song stayed with me.
Years later my grandma had dementia and on the last day of her life I sat with her and sang this song, and it has had a bit of a sacred feel for me ever since. I don’t think I had ever appreciated the sheer power of music in human terms – if ever there was confirmation that music occupies a special place in our brains and souls that was it.
Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 ‘Choral’
Relatively early in my BBC Radio 3 career I produced the BBC Proms performance of Beethoven‘s Symphony No. 9 by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, National Youth Choir of GB and Daniel Barenboim. It was 27 July 2012, the opening of the London Olympics, and it’s a night ingrained in my memory.
The music, that particular moment in London, that particular orchestra, everything felt full of hope and promise. The Proms have become a huge part of my life and I think I really fell in love with them that night. I couldn’t live without them now.
Serge Gainsbourg: ‘Le Poinçonneur des Lilas’
When I first started presenting Radio 3 Breakfast, a listener requested ‘Le Poinçonneur des Lilas’ by Serge Gainsbourg. I’d never heard it before and it was an absolute revelation to me. My grandfather was French, and there’s always been a strong connection to France throughout my upbringing.
That song captured something so essentially Gallic for me, and I adored the collisions with classical music – in his songs I can hear Liszt, Chopin, Dvořák – I now have a bit of a Serge obsession and loved Jeremy Allen’s Relax Baby Be Cool biography of him.
I’m heading to Paris soon and will be dragging my friend on a pilgrimage to 5 bis rue Verneuil, Serge’s home. I love that I acquired a new passion via one of our listeners. That says it all about my job really – I’m forever discovering music through people I meet over the airwaves.
Georgia Mann favourite music
Ennio Morricone The Mission original soundtrack
London Philharmonic Orchestra/Morricone
Virgin V2402
Bizet Carmen
Agnes Baltsa, José Carreras, Berlin Philharmonic/Karajan
Deutsche Grammophon 4100882
Loesser Guys & Dolls
Original Broadway Cast, Chorus & Orchestra (1950)
Naxos 8120786
Beethoven Symphony No. 9, ‘Choral’
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra/Barenboim
Serge Gainsbourg Le poinçonneur des Lilas (1959)