Culture That Made Me: Gabriel Crouch on Schubert, Cillian Murphy, and Radiohead

Baritone and choral conductor Gabriel Crouch tells Richard Fitzpatrick about his cultural touchstones, including how Cillian Murphy got him and his wife through the pandemic

Gabriel Crouch: 'Cillian Murphy got my wife and I through the pandemic.'

Gabriel Crouch, 52, was born in London, but largely grew up in Bristol. Aged eight, he joined the Westminster Abbey choir. As a baritone and choral conductor, he has performed in the world’s major concert venues. He’s also a Grammy-nominated record producer. He was appointed artistic director of Chamber Choir Ireland in 2025. Servant of Servants, Patron of the Arts will take place at Cork’s North Cathedral, 7.30pm, May 1, as part of this year's Cork International Choral Festival. See: chamberchoirireland.com.

Paganini’s 24 Caprices 

My mother's a professional violinist. I was surrounded by violin playing. I had this cassette of Itzhak Perlman playing the 24 Caprices by Niccolò Paganini. It's the ultimate virtuosic vehicle for a violinist. Having just started to learn the violin, I listened to that and thought, how is it possible that one person can reach a stage of technical mastery that they can play this?

Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major 

I first grew up in a little town called Harlow in northeast London. The town had a strong connection with a string quartet called the Alberni Quartet. They had a recording of Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major. It's a favourite for a lot of people. The first time I fell in love with melody was listening to that piece. I remember being five or six years old and feeling the emotional effect of that music, feeling tears in my eyes and not really understanding why.

Radiohead 

The Smile are an English rock band comprising the Radiohead members Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, with Tom Skinner

I've watched Radiohead and The Smile live more times than I could possibly tell you, including way back in 1992 when they didn't have much going on except one slightly mediocre album. I became obsessed with Radiohead when The Bends came out. When the next album came out, OK Computer, I distinctly remember thinking, I could die a happy man if I'd written this album. I developed a strong fascination with the process of Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke. I loved watching them play. I loved watching them on stage together. There’s a nice full-circle moment to this because my sister Rebecca, who's a viola player, played on the most recent Radiohead album A Moon Shaped Pool.

PJ Harvey 

I've been strongly fascinated with PJ Harvey all my life. When I was an impressionable 18-year-old, and first starting to see the world like an adult sees the world, Dry came out; of everything she's released, I still love her first album the most by miles. Lyrically, it’s searingly honest. Here’s an artist standing up and talking about — back in 1992 — the chaos of her life and the muck and filth of relationships. It's so rhythmically complex. I'm a classical musician and I'm sitting there listening to it, going, is this in five? What's going on there? She really grabbed me.

Japanese taiko 

I went to the Edinburgh Festival in 1994. I saw a Japanese taiko group — ritualised, choreographed drums, large and small — called Wadaiko Ichiro. It's a culture that has its home on Sado, one of Japan’s coastal islands. Everyone was talking about this show at the festival that year. I went with my girlfriend. This is the only time this ever happened in my life — at the end of the show, I leapt to my feet to cheer, but I strongly felt like this wasn't a big enough show of how excited I was by this performance I'd seen so I stood on my chair. I was out of my mind excited by this performance.

The Valkyrie 

Around 1997, I was on the road in Stuttgart, Germany. I got offered tickets to the opera. I grew up in a family that doesn't love opera, and with a sense that politically Wagner is not OK, and this opera was Wagner’s Die Walküre. I could hear my mom's voice in my head going, “This isn't good music.” Also the opera is about five hours long, and I'd been out the night before; I was tired. Reluctantly, I went to this performance. It took about 45 minutes before the tears started rolling down my face. They never stopped. I was almost resentful, feeling my emotions were manipulated by this master craftsman, this great composer whose music I wanted to hate. I was angry with myself for responding so viscerally. It was such an extraordinary, emotionally complicated four hours.

Planxty 

I remember hearing a Planxty album, After the Break, when I was young. I learnt all the tunes on that album from memory and played them on my fiddle. I've always loved the sound of the pipe player Liam O’Flynn. He played like a god — he made my heart break when he played. As an English guy, I loved the fact that Andy Irvine is English. It made me feel like there's something beautifully universal about their music. I've always found Christy Moore's singing, his storytelling to be supreme. And Paul Brady, who was part of Planxty for a while, has a voice like an angel. We're talking about supreme exponents of music.

Ian McEwan 

Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time is an early novel of his. There's an element of it being about sexuality, but it’s really about communication within relationships, dealing with trauma. I love Ian McEwan. I think this was his best book. I read it when I was an emerging human being, starting to see the world like an adult. It was formative for me on how to live in a relationship and how not to.

Narcissus and Goldmund 

Around the same time, I got obsessed with Hermann Hesse, the German late romantic writer. He has a book called Narcissus and Goldmund. I couldn't put it down. It's sort of autobiographical — he split his own personality into two different characters. He calls one Narcissus and one Goldmund. He creates a relationship between these two people who are savagely contrasting human beings and tries to find a commonality between them, trying to unite the conflicting forces within his soul as a writer. It's full of drama and adventure, but it’s also very deep. It's riveting.

Dysfunctional men 

My favourite movies are The Big Lebowski and Withnail and I. Two of the movies I've been most obsessed with in my life are almost exclusively male movies. I don't know why. The Big Lebowski has virtually no women in it. Withnail and I depicts a universe miserably devoid of women. It’s about men falling apart and eating themselves. What both of those movies have in common are dysfunctional men, unable to exist properly by themselves. I find both movies very touching and very funny.

Cillian Murphy’s Limited Edition 

During the pandemic, Cillian Murphy had a BBC radio show called Limited Edition.

Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders is superb. The music in Peaky Blinders is amazing — from Nick Cave to PJ Harvey to Sinead O'Connor. Cillian Murphy got my wife and I through the pandemic. He had a radio show on the BBC called Limited Edition. We put him on every single morning of the pandemic for a year and a half, living a full day in our home with Cillian Murphy's voice. He kept us happy during the pandemic.

You Must Remember This 

There's a podcast called You Must Remember This. It has hundreds of episodes about the golden age of Hollywood, about the personalities — such as Joan Crawford and Tippi Hedren — the scandals, the political struggles, all these legends that you've heard of, but you don't know that much about, like the Black Dahlia. It had me completely absorbed.