Private Passions

Sunday 19th April 2015
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Michael Berkeley presents an anthology of interviews to mark the programme's 20th anniversary. With excerpts featuring poet laureate Carol Anne Duffy and neurologist Oliver Sacks, plus John Peel, Dame Edna Everage, Maggi Hambling, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Anoushka Shankar, George Steiner, Marina Lewycka and Joan Armatrading. Music includes Bach, Chopin, Wagner, Bruch, Russian folk music, Tavener, Edith Piaf and the Coronation Street theme tune.

Archive Unlocked: Two Decades of Private Passions

Many of the complete interviews are available to listen to here and through the Private Passions podcast:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2g4vfcNn9rl7QW8581XFDR6/archive-unlocke...

Sunday 26th April 2015
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Michael Berkeley's guest is actress Phyllida Law. Her musical choices include Glenn Gould playing Bach, Schubert's Fantasia in F minor and a Malinese song.

Sunday 10th May 2015
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Michael Berkeley's guest is psychoanalyst and author Stephen Grosz. His musical choices include Scarlatti, Aaron Copland, Brahms, gospel singer Bessie Jones, Schubert, Bob Dylan and Alberta Hunter.

Sunday 9th August 2015
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Michael Berkeley's guest is historian of sex Faramerz Dabhoiwala. His musical choices include Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Bach's Double Violin Concerto and cantata Wachet Auf, Schubert's Piano Sonata in A, Philip Glass's music for Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, a protest song by Nina Simone and an interpretation of 16th-century plainsong by jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek.

Sunday 10th January 2016
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Michael Berkeley's guest for International Women's Day is composer Anna Meredith. Her musical choices include Sibelius and Holst, as well as more recent composers Emily Hall, Richard Ayres and Owen Pallett.

Sunday 28th February 2016
Time: 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM (1 hour long)

Michael Berkeley's guest is opera and theatre director Iqbal Khan. He selects his favourite operas, with excerpts from Verdi, Mozart, and Wagner, and chooses other works which inspires him, including Mahler's Second Symphony, Britten's War Requiem and a percussive piece by Nitin Sawhney. He also introduces a historic recording of actor Paul Scofield starring as King Lear.

Sunday 8th May 2016
Time: 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM (1 hour long)

Eva Schloss, Holocaust survivor and step-sister of Anne Frank, shares her extraordinary life story with Michael Berkeley and reveals the music that has brought her comfort, that conjures memories and that brings her joy. Eva's choices include works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Strauss and Mahler.

Sunday 15th May 2016
Time: 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM (1 hour long)

Michael Berkeley's guest is writer Rose Tremain. Her musical selections include Schubert, Beethoven and Mahler, as well as works she loved as a teenager and as a student in Paris.

Sunday 26th June 2016
Time: 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM (1 hour long)

Michael Berkeley's guest is actress and recently-retired MP Glenda Jackson. Her musical choices include Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams, John Adams, Steve Reich and Stevie Wonder.

Sunday 25th September 2016
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

As Radio 3 celebrates 70 years of pioneering music and culture, Michael Berkeley travels to Sussex to meet actress Dame Joan Plowright. She shares memories of her childhood in Scunthorpe, her work with people such as Franco Zeffirelli, and Sir Laurence Olivier, whom she married in 1961. Plowright's choices of music including Nimrod from Elgar's Enigma Variations, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and Walton's Cello Concerto.

Sunday 9th October 2016 (starting in 5 hours and 7 minutes)
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Michael Berkeley's guest is cultural historian Lara Feigel. Her selections include works by Mozart and Beethoven, as well as music which reflects preoccupations and personalities in post-war Germany: Wilhelm Furtwangler's recording of Tristan und Isolde, a song from Marlene Dietrich and music by Strauss.

Sunday 8th October 2017
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

As part of the BBC's opera season, designer Hildegard Bechtler talks to Michael Berkeley about her favourite music and some of the 27 operas she has worked on all over the world. Hildegard is one of the most prolific and successful theatre and opera designers. Born in Germany, she moved to Britain aged 18, and quickly established herself first in film, then in theatre and opera. She has designed for every major theatre and opera company including the Royal Opera, ENO, Glyndebourne, and the Royal National Theatre. Hildegard chooses music from two operas she has worked on, The Ring Cycle and The Damnation of Faust; a Burns song which reminds her of her love of Scotland and her husband, the actor Bill Paterson; and a piece by her namesake, Hildegard of Bingen.

Sunday 31st December 2017
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Michael Berkeley's guest is pianist Alfred Brendel. With Carmen, Beethoven and German cabaret music.

Sunday 11th February 2018
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Michael Berkeley talks to the popular historical fiction writer Bernard Cornwell. Cornwell is now one of the world's most popular writers of historical fiction, famous for his Sharpe series, about a British soldier during the Napoleonic wars, and for his Last Kingdom books, set in 9th-century Britain. The music he loves now is very much influenced by his lifelong rebellion against his ascetic religious upbringing: he loves Requiems and Catholic liturgical settings. Music choices include Faure's Requiem, Mozart's Requiem, Allegri's Miserere, and songs from Shakespeare.

Sunday 13th May 2018
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Michael Berkeley's guest is prize-winning Irish writer Sebastian Barry, whose musical choices include Bruch, Handel, Rodrigo, Bach's Cello Suites and Alfred Deller.

Sunday 3rd June 2018
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Michael Berkeley's guest is the actor and singer Jane Birkin. Birkin came to fame in the swinging 60s, thanks to appearances in avant-garde films such as Blow-up, and to her tempestuous relationship with Serge Gainsbourg. In 1969 their song 'Je t'aime' was banned by the BBC; it became the biggest-selling foreign language record ever. In Private Passions, she remembers Paris in the 1960s, and above all, Gainsbourg. Music choices include Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring, Allegri: Miserere, John Barry's music for The Lion in Winter, Mahler: 10th Symphony and Bernstein's West Side Story.

Sunday 1st July 2018
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Michael Frayn shares his musical passions with Michael Berkeley and talks about his career, which spans novels, philosophy, Russian translation, and his celebrated farces.

Sunday 2nd September 2018
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

At first glance chocolate brownies, puff pastry and Battenberg cake don't seem to have a great deal in common with theoretical maths, but Eugenia Cheng has harnessed her love of cooking in order to tackle the fear of maths so many of us share - and has published a book about it called How to Bake Pi. Her mission is to rid the world of "maths phobia", and to this end she gave up her secure job teaching at Sheffield University to open up the world of maths to students from other disciplines as Scientist in Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which also gives her the opportunity to pursue her own research in Category Theory - the purest form of maths. And she's a highly accomplished pianist, performing in concert halls around the world, as well as founding Liederstube - a popular venue for lieder and art song in Chicago which has hosted performers such as Gerald Finley and Richard Wiegold. Eugenia explains to Michael how chocolate brownies and pure maths are related; how she prefers to work in cafes and bars with pen and paper rather than on a computer, and how her intensely emotional response to music is a release from the intensely ordered world of pure mathematics. And they dismantle stereotypes about Chinese 'tiger mothers', girls and maths, and the idea that people who are good at maths are automatically good at music. Eugenia chooses music from Bach's Matthew Passion, Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto - which she herself has played - and from Mahler's Resurrection Symphony and Janacek's opera The Makropulos Case, which take her on an emotional and philosophical journey towards a reconciliation with mortality. Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Sunday 11th November 2018
Time: 12:00 to 12:57 (57 minutes long)

Michael Berkeley's guest on the centenary of Armistice Day is the historian Margaret MacMillan. In this year's Reith Lectures, Margaret Macmillan delivered a powerful series of lectures exploring war and society, and our complex feelings towards those who fight. She is Emeritus Professor of International History at the University of Oxford, and Professor of History at the University of Toronto in her native Canada. But she wasn't always as well known as she is now; her book Peacemakers, about the Paris Conference at the end of the First World War, was rejected by a string of publishers - before winning the 2002 Samuel Johnson Prize and catapulting her into the public eye in her late fifties. Many more best-selling and prize-winning books have followed, including Nixon in China, The Uses and Abuses of History, and The War That Ended Peace, about the long build-up to the First World War. In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Margaret Macmillan reflects on how our perception of the First World War has changed in the last hundred years, and sounds a note of warning as she perceives worrying parallels between the years leading up to that conflict and the state of the world today. Both her grandfathers fought in the First World War and she chooses music which reflects her Welsh and Scottish heritage, as she argues for the importance of personal stories within the big picture of history. She and Michael Berkeley explore the paradox that great works of literature, art, and music are created out of the horror of war, and she chooses music from both World Wars by Ravel, by Strauss and by Tippett; all of whom, in different ways, bring beauty out of appalling suffering and destruction.

Sunday 25th November 2018 (starting in 5 hours and 15 minutes)
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Rebecca Stott grew up in a community where the following things were forbidden: newspapers, television, cinema, radio, pets, universities, wristwatches, cameras, holidays - and music. Her family belonged to one of the most reclusive sects in Protestant History, the "Exclusive Brethren", which has 45,000 followers worldwide. How and why she left the Brethren is the gripping story told in her memoir, "In the Days of Rain", which won a Costa Prize in 2017. Before that there were two historical novels; two books about Darwin; and a body of academic work about 19th century writers. Rebecca Stott is currently Professor of literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia. It's a remarkable career for someone who grew up not being allowed to read freely, or even to enter a library. In Private Passions Rebecca Stott tells the story of how her family escaped from the sect, and how the outside world flooded in, in all its technicolour. The discovery of music was particularly exciting, and she has never forgotten the impact of Rachmaninov and of Mozart. She reveals that after she wrote about the sect, she gathered hundreds of thousands of pages of testimony from other former members, telling stories of scandal and suffering. And she reflects on the lifelong influence of growing up in a religious sect that believed the world would end any minute, and everyone on earth would literally disappear into the air. Music choices include Pergolesi's "Stabat Mater", Klezmer music, Mozart's Piano Concerto no 21, Rachmaninov, Paul Simon, and Leonard Cohen.

Sunday 2nd December 2018
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

David Rieff has admitted ruefully that he's made a career out of telling people what they don't want to hear: whether it's the politics of the global food crisis in his book "The Reproach of Hunger", or the failure of the West to prevent the terrible bloodbath of Bosnia in his provocatively titled "Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the failure of the West". As a war correspondent, Rieff has worked in the Balkans, in Rwanda and the Congo, in Israel-Palestine, in Afghanistan and Iraq. He's not afraid to tackle the big issues: immigration, exile, American imperialism. There are thirteen books in all, including a memoir about his mother, the American writer Susan Sontag. In Private Passions, David talks to Michael Berkeley about being "Susan Sontag's son", and whether that label has at times been a burden. He's her only child and Sontag was only 19 when he was born. He reflects on the privilege and yet strangeness of his New York upbringing, and how he has used that background "to make a living being a critic of everything. That's an immense privilege." David Rieff is a passionate fan of Early music, and his choices include the 16th-century composer Orlando di Lassus, and Alfred Deller singing Purcell. Other choices include Bach's moving cantata "Ich Habe Genug", Shostakovich, Beethoven, and Bluegrass.

Sunday 27th January 2019 (starting in 5 hours and 10 minutes)
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Memory, desire, madness: these are the themes that fascinate Lisa Appignanesi and that she's explored over the last forty years in novels, in memoirs, and in prize-winning books such as "Mad, Bad and Sad", a history of women and mind doctors. Lisa Appignanesi is the Chair of the Royal Society of Literature and a former President of English PEN, an organisation which campaigns for free speech. She's written about cabaret, about Proust and fin-de-siecle Paris, about Simone de Beauvoir, about Freud, and about her own troubled search for identity. In Private Passions she tells Michael Berkeley about her childhood in Poland, where she was born Elzbieta Borensztejn, and about the way identities in her family were always shifting, "always there for the making". She reflects on the power of the dead to haunt us, expressed by Monteverdi in his opera Orfeo, and admires the strength of singers Bessie Smith and Lotte Lenya, alongside music choices such as Mozart's 'The Marriage of Figaro', Laurie Anderson, and Prokofiev's 'Peter and the Wolf'.

Sunday 26th May 2019
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Alfred Brendel.

Alfred Brendel is one of the great musicians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He's renowned for his masterly interpretations of the works of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Liszt and Beethoven; in fact he was the first performer to record the complete solo piano works of Beethoven. Alfred Brendel gave his first public recital in Graz at the age of only 17, in 1948, and went on performing around the world for more than sixty years. Since his retirement in 2008 he has relished the chance to teach young musicians, and to spend more time going to exhibitions, reading and writing; he has published six volumes of essays and two collections of his own poetry. In Private Passions he talks to Michael Berkeley about the composers and musicians he admires, and looks back at his early life. It wasn't a musical childhood; the family had no record player, but his mother used to sing cabaret songs. And later, as a teenager, his father managed a hotel and he discovered a stack of LPs, all operettas. The War made an unforgettable impression. Alfred Brendel reveals too what drew him to live in Britain: the musical culture here, the Third Programme, the Proms, and the flourishing choral tradition. He chooses one of Gesualdo's madrigals, which for a long time was thought too difficult to sing. We also hear Liszt, Schubert, Bach, Zelenka, Beethoven, and Bizet's Carmen. At the end of the programme, he talks honestly about his recent deafness, and how it has affected his love of music. He gets no pleasure from playing the piano, he says, but still loves the violin; and he dreams of music all the time, and plays it continually in his head.

Sunday 9th June 2019
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Lucasta Miller.

Lucasta Miller is a writer fascinated by the Romantic, and the dark excesses of the Gothic. Her latest subject is a poet, Letitia Landon, whose life was scandalous and whose sudden death is like a scene from a detective novel. In her day, Landon was an icon, hailed as a "female Byron" and a favourite of the Brontë sisters, who were the subject of Lucasta Miller's previous book. Both biographies were years in the making, partly because they involved such meticulous research, partly because Lucasta Miller was at the same time writing journalism, editing books, teaching English to refugees, bringing up children and generally holding together a household, the other half of which is the singer Ian Bostridge. In Private Passions, Lucasta Miller talks to Michael Berkeley about her lasting obsession with the gothic, and about the dark secrets concealed in Letitia Landon's life. The theme of dark secrets takes her to the first German Romantic opera, Weber's Der Freischütz, and the terrifying Wolf's Glen. She discusses too what biographers can bring to our understanding of music and chooses a song by Clara Schumann, written just as she was on the point of marriage to Robert. And in relation to her own husband, Lucasta talks honestly about how difficult the life of a professional musician is, both for them and for their family at home. Does husband Ian Bostridge make it onto the playlist? As she says, she felt she was damned if she chose him, damned if she didn't. So she does include him in the end, singing a lyrical song by Hans-Werner Henze which was written for Bostridge. Other musical choices include Maria Callas singing from Bellini's Norma, and the Bach cello suites played by Stephen Isserlis.