Tama Matheson

speaker

770 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Tama Matheson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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Rosebud with Gyles Brandreth · More Rosebud - Tchaikovsky · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

I must become a musician.

And within weeks, I had enrolled in the conservatoire.

That's when I began.

Indeed, at first I thought, oh, I'd better keep my secure job.

And so I did the conservatoire in my off times and evenings.

And eventually I decided I must transition out.

I did not want to be a civil servant.

There was a, I learned from Zaremba first, who was a lovely teacher, and there was then the conservatoire's director, the Olympian Anton Rubinstein, the world's preeminent pianist, saw something in me and took me under his wing.

And under his mentorship, things really, really took off.

There was one other very curious character, I could just paint you a picture of him before that, is an Italian singing teacher by the name of Luigi Piccioli, and he was a peculiar character.

Ha!

For a start.

We could never tell how old he was.

His age seemed to hover somewhere between about 30 and 75 because he had a peculiar habit of...

of rouging his cheeks to a gleaming rubescence, dyeing his hair to an improbable black, and taking the skin of his face and pulling it tight, stretching it, gathering it at the back of his neck, and clipping it with a sort of glorified clothes peg to keep his face taut.

I've started doing that.

And despite this, he had a slew of young men coming up to visit him in his apartments.

And I always thought to myself, what happened when things got amorous and he finally took the peg off the back of his neck?

I do know.

I imagine both their faces fell.

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