KEY POINTS:
Marshall Walker makes words sing through his soft Scottish burr. For 25 years, he was a charismatic English professor at the University of Waikato but Radio New Zealand Concert broadcasts have ensured that Walker is not the sole property of Hamilton and its environs.
Walker has the rare ability to catch the soul of music through his words and, for more than 10 years, he has been using this gift in the services of the great Finnish composer Jean Sibelius.
In 1997, Walker's first Letter to Sibelius, expertly produced by RNZ's Tim Dodd, was a prize-winner at the NZ Radio Awards; tonight you can catch the completion of the project with its fifth and final episode, North and South.
The following evening sees the launching of his newly-published Dear Sibelius: Letter from a Junky which offers a unique perspective on the culture hero he hails as "the Big Man".
In print and on radio, Walker charts his own life to the music of Sibelius, from his Glasgow schooldays with glass lenses as "thick as milk-bottle bottoms" to his years teaching in South Africa and New Zealand.
"Sibelius became my reference point," he says, describing the Finn's music as "passionate without being sensual - the passion of stoicism. Sibelius is not flinching from the possibility that there is no hereafter. People who hear the last chords of the Fifth Symphony as triumphant are missing the point. They are absolutely ambiguous."
Many will have followed Walker's on-air saga with fascination, including his moving childhood reminiscences in 2005's The Fog and the Island, one being when the bruised and bullied youngster relaxes in a hot bath, listening to Paul Robeson.
The book is rich in incident and references, and committed in its politics. One minute he might play Bogie, Clifton Webb or Jack Palance opposite their screen heroines; later he has a near-epiphany when a Hamilton bugbuster recognises a photograph of the Big Man in Walker's lounge.
Literary allusions sparkle. An acknowledged expert on Robert Penn Warren, Walker points to unexpected parallels between the American writer and the Finnish composer.
"You may have a dream and an idea but, in order to make it solid and enduring, you have to risk it and expose it."
There is no shortage of mots justes when he tackles the music. Tonight, you will hear some of his most evocative wordplay as he follows a Viking Ship around the northern Scottish isles, while producer Dodd wraps En Saga so deftly around it that you'd swear the Big Man himself had been there in the studio.
When I ask for favourites, Walker singles out the Allegretto of the Third Symphony. "It broke my heart as a wee boy; I was ill when I lost it from my mind and had to go to school and get the teacher to play it."
As for the Pastorale from Pelleas and Melisande, "there is nothing more softly or unhistrionically beguiling."
And, bringing us firmly to the Southern Hemisphere, Walker, ever the devil's advocate, asks: "Where would Lilburn be without the palette of Sibelius' Sixth Symphony?"
Walker and Dodd are the perfect team ("the happiest professional relationship of my life," says Walker); on paper, you can relax and savour the dancing and jousting of words and images. One particularly scrumptious moment has the great figures of English lit presented as staff members in a clinic that promises to free the young Marshall of his musical addiction. How, one wonders, would Shakespeare feel about his noble Duke from Twelfth Night turning up as "Dr Orsino, a cruisy locum".
Walker illuminates Sibelius but never passes by the chance to reveal the sorrows and joys of being Scottish or the inequalities of South Africa's apartheid years; but, even at his most hilarious, there is a respect for humanity that the Big Man himself would acknowledge and appreciate.
BOOK + RADIO
What: Marshall Walker, Dear Sibelius: Letter from a Junky, by Marshall Walker (Kennedy & Boyd, Glasgow 2008, RRP $65)
On air: North & South, RNZ Concert, tonight 7pm.
