Priscilla Laing

Priscilla Laing presents Midday Concert on Thursdays as well as being involved with various other classical programmes on FMR, including alternate Tuesday Matinees, Great Interpreters and Composer of the Week.

A true child of Africa, Priscilla grew up on a farm in Kenya and began her schooling in Nairobi. When the troubles in Kenya began in the early 60s, the family left for Brisbane, Australia, where they lived for two years. As a young girl, Priscilla took piano lessons at school in Kenya and went on taking lessons in Australia, at the Brisbane Conservatoire. But Brisbane didn’t hold much appeal for the family, and they packed up again, this time for South Africa, where they settled in Durban, and where Priscilla matriculated.

She recalls doing an early piano exam in Kenya, at which the set pieces had to be performed from memory. She was playing Brahms’s Waltz in A flat when a sudden noise resulted in a total memory lapse. So she repeated the phrase she was playing a few times and neatly rounded it off. Afterwards, the kindly examiner gently told the young student: “Only Brahms and I know that was not the way Brahms ended the piece.”

After school she did a commercial course and married a marine engineer who worked for BP, and she spent the next four years travelling the world on oil tankers before ending up in Aberdeen, Scotland, where Priscilla joined BP herself and worked for them for the next 20 years of her life. During that time she honed her skills in IT and the implementation of IT systems.

Eventually her yearning for Africa (“If you’re born in Africa, it’s in your bones”, she says) brought her back here – she was offered a job with an accounting firm and settled in Cape Town. But in 1998, she was off again, for another firm, first to Singapore and then for four years to Sydney. In Sydney she lived across the water from the famous opera house, and revelled in the concerts and operas staged there and in the city’s rich cultural life.

Throughout her travels, Priscilla says her two passions she could always return to were music and books, and wherever she was she would always try to tune in to the local classical music station. In 2006, through her friend, FMR presenter Lorraine Braid, Priscilla decided to audition for FMR. She was successful and “allocated to David Hicks”, who trained her in the finer points of radio presentation. She admits she has learnt a lot, and her knowledge of the classical repertoire has steadily increased. Even when not presenting, Priscilla is involved as a listener – she has eclectic taste, which includes jazz and most music played on the station.

Priscilla compiles mainly from her own collection, which numbers around 700 CDs, and prefers to play music she likes personally – Chopin piano music, and the mainstream orchestral composers including the Russians, such as Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Glazunov and even some Shostakovich, who only recently has begun to appeal to her.

She says she loves getting feedback from listeners during her programmes, especially when she plays an interesting new piece and gets a positive response.