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I’ll take your brain to another dimension … my classical DJ set at Glastonbury
Georgia Mann is usually to be found at BBC Broadcasting House presenting Radio 3’s Essential Classics. Why was she in a field in Glastonbury this weekend, and did she get the festival crowd moving?
Waterproof trousers, ear plugs and a self-inflating mattress aren’t usually in my presenting kitbag but I’ve just packed away my tent and dug the mud out of my wellies after one of the most surreal gigs of my life: playing a DJ set at Glastonbury. I wanted to get a balance between big popular hits and some rarities to whet people’s appetites, so the Intermezzo from Sibelius’s Karelia Suite and Jupiter from Holst’s The Planets were on the list; but so was the 36-part polyphonic explosion of a piece, Deo Gratias, by 15th-century visionary Johannes Ockeghem, and some Joe Hisaishi, the composer behind the score for many a Studio Ghibli classic. It was a joy to show that classical music has life and meaning outside the concert hall, and a place alongside drum’n’bass and indie rock; even if that involved having to sleep on a self-inflating mattress that kept sliding down the hill we’d pitched the tent on.
Or read this on The Guardian
