Private Passions

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Private Passions

1antimuzak
aug 18, 2019, 1:44 am

Sunday 18th August 2019
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Hannah Sullivan.

Earlier this year, when Hannah Sullivan won the biggest prize in the poetry world, the TS Eliot Prize, the chair of the judges announced: `A star is born. Where has she come from?" Such a prestigious prize is a rare honour, as the book, Three Poems, was Hannah Sullivan's first published collection. Up till then, she'd established a successful academic career, studying at Cambridge, teaching at Harvard and for the last seven years at New College Oxford, where she's an Associate Professor of English. In Private Passions, Hannah Sullivan talks to Michael Berkeley about the time in New York which inspired her prize-winning poems, and why she wanted to capture what it's like to be alone and vulnerable in a strange city. She reads from a new poem about Grenfell Tower, which will be published next year. And she reveals a passion for Nina Simone. Other music choices include Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, the Dvorak Cello Concerto, the Schubert String Quintet, and a setting of a poem by Thomas Campion so perfect she wishes she'd written it: `What is love but mourning?".

2antimuzak
sep 8, 2019, 1:49 am

Sunday 8th September 2019
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

David Cannadine.

David Cannadine describes himself as `staggeringly lucky" - he found what he wanted to do early in life, and it has rewarded him richly. He is one of our most distinguished historians; his period is the 19th and early 20th century, and he's written more than 20 books, on Churchill, on class, on the aristocracy - among many others. He's the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, the President of the British Academy, and a frequent broadcaster on Radio 4. He was knighted for services to scholarship in 2009. But perhaps the most surprising thing about David Cannadine is that although he was born in Birmingham and his historical research focuses on Britain, he himself lives in America; he's spent 10 years at Columbia University and is currently Professor of History at Princeton. In Private Passions, he reflects on how his transatlantic life changes his perspective, and enables him to see both Britain and the US as foreign countries. Although he's now at the heart of the British establishment, he confesses that he's always felt an outsider. His childhood in Birmingham was far from privileged, although the grand 19th-century buildings that surrounded him gave him a sense of Victorian grandeur, and his schoolteachers inspired him to aim high. They also inspired his passion for classical music, and many of the choices relate to his childhood and to his years at Cambridge and Yale. David's music includes Haydn's Creation, Purcell's King Arthur, Walton's First Symphony, and Sullivan's Iolanthe, in a performance of which, somewhat improbably, Sir David sang in the girls' chorus.

3antimuzak
okt 6, 2019, 1:45 am

Sunday 6th October 2019 (starting in 5 hours and 15 minutes)
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Deborah Levy.

Deborah Levy was born in South Africa; when she was five, her father was arrested as a member of the ANC and spent four years in jail. The family left for England, arriving when Deborah was nine, in 1968. Unsurprisingly her work as a writer is concerned with themes of identity, exile, dislocation. Beginning as a poet and a playwright - her plays were staged by the RSC - she then turned to novels, and there are now seven in all, of which the last three have been nominated for the Booker Prize. The latest is The Man Who Saw Everything. Deborah talks with Michael Berkeley about the music that means most to her. Many of the pieces she loves are to do with saying farewell: Lotte Lenya saying goodbye in Brecht and Weill's Alabama Song, Orpheus pining for Euridice in Kathleen Ferrier's legendary recording of Gluck's Che Faro?, and sisters wishing their lovers safe travel as, purportedly, they depart for war, in the trio from Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte. Deborah talks openly about her memories of her father's imprisonment and of his return home; about the enormous transition in her life when, aged 50, her marriage ended; and about how she found a room of her own in which to write, renting a friend's garden shed and working to the noise of apples dropping onto the roof. Also among her music is Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata (`the silences are as important as the notes."); a song by Leonard Cohen; and a translucent setting of a Verlaine poem, La Lune Blanche, composed by Billy Cowie and sung by identical twins.

4antimuzak
nov 3, 2019, 1:47 am

Sunday 3rd November 2019
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Philippa Perry.

Psychotherapist and author Philippa Perry talks to Michael Berkeley about the power of music to shape our emotions and tell the stories of our lives. Philippa left school at 15 and did all sorts of jobs, including a stint in McDonalds before training as a psychotherapist and becoming a best-selling author, agony-aunt and broadcaster. Her graphic novel about the process of psychotherapy, Couch Fiction, was published in 2010, and since then she's written How to Stay Sane and The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read - and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did. Philippa talks to Michael Berkeley about her 30-year marriage to the artist Grayson Perry, and how a song from La Traviata broke through her father's dementia; she emphasises the importance of learning new things throughout our lives, choosing music by Shostakovich that surprised and delighted her at this year's Proms. We hear music played by the violinist Min-Jim Kym; a supremely joyful moment from Beethoven; and Philippa is moved to tears hearing a piece of Chopin that her aunt played when she was a child.

5antimuzak
nov 10, 2019, 1:49 am

Sunday 10th November 2019
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Ken Loach.

The film director Ken Loach talks to Michael Berkeley about the classical music he's loved throughout his life and the dangerous power of music in film. Ken Loach began his career directing Z Cars - but very soon entered the national consciousness in the late 1960s with films such as Cathy Come Home, Poor Cow and Kes. He's kept up this prolific pace in the subsequent 50 years, making more than 50 award-winning films for cinema and television, and achieving a level of realism rarely captured by other directors. His latest film, Sorry We Missed You, is about the impact on families of the gig economy. Ken talks to Michael about the music of his childhood growing up in Nuneaton after the war - he chooses Brahms' Academic Festival Overture to recall music lessons at school - and he we hear a piece by Schubert which reminds him of his own children growing up. Ken picks recordings which bring back particular moments in his life: the sheer energy and excitement of Carlos Kleiber's 1974 recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; the 1968 recording of Dvorak's Cello Concerto by Mstislav Rostropovich and Herbert von Karajan, which brings back memories of making Kes; and Geza Anda's recording of Mozart's Piano Concerto Number 21, which was used in the film Elvira Madigan. Every one of Ken's films has a cause at its heart such as homelessness, unemployment and civil rights. We hear the music of resistance that reflects the struggle of ordinary people for justice and dignity that has driven his career.

6antimuzak
mrt 15, 2020, 2:42 am

Sunday 15th March 2020
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Isabel Allende.

Isabel Allende's first novel, The House of the Spirits, catapulted her to literary stardom, and was acclaimed as a classic of Latin American magic realism. That was nearly forty years ago and she's not stopped writing since: with 20 novels and four volumes of memoir, she's been translated all over the world and has sold some 74 million books. They're vivid family sagas, with eccentric characters, dramatic reversals, discoveries of lost children, violent death, disease and revolution, and sudden consuming love affairs. But Isabel Allende's own life is as extraordinary as any of her novels. Abandoned by her father as a small child, she spent her early years travelling across South America with her stepfather, who was a diplomat. He was the cousin of Salvador Allende, Chile's socialist leader, who became Isabel's godfather. But when Allende was deposed by the right-wing government of General Pinochet in 1973, Isabel, by then married, with children, became caught up in the violent revolution and had to flee the country. She now lives with her third husband in California. In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Isabel Allende reflects on her extraordinary life, and reveals how she has found happiness now in her seventies. Music choices include Vivaldi, Mozart's Flute Concerto No 1, Albinoni, the Chilean singer Victor Jara, a moving song from the Spanish Civil War, and a Mexican love song from the 1940s, Kiss me a Lot.

7antimuzak
mei 10, 2020, 1:44 am

Sunday 10th May 2020
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Andrew O'Hagan.

In a moving and personal interview the novelist and journalist Andrew O'Hagan talks to Michael Berkeley about his family and the music that inspires his writing. Andrew O'Hagan grew up on a tough housing estate in north Ayrshire, the son of a cleaner and a carpenter, and the youngest of four boys. He has gone on to become one of our most prolific, vivid and meticulous writers - an essayist and investigative journalist whose subjects have included Julian Assange; the invention of Bitcoin; and the Grenfell fire. And he has published five multi-award-winning novels, ranging from a fictionalised life of Lena Zavaroni to the tragedy of a Catholic priest in a small Scottish town - and the memoirs of Marilyn Monroe's dog. Andrew tells Michael Berkeley that his childhood ambition was to be not a writer but a ballet dancer, which did not go down well in his tough home and school environment. We hear the ballet music by Massenet that first transfixed him. Despite living in England for many years Andrew returns to Scotland constantly in his novels. He chooses a setting of a poem collected by Robert Burns, which always takes him back to his homeland. And we hear music by John Field and by Beethoven, two composers who provide him with creative inspiration. Andrew talks movingly about his love for his family and chooses music by June Christy that accompanied the birth of his daughter, and a poem by Shelley set by Frank Bridge which was played at his wedding.

8antimuzak
jun 21, 2020, 1:46 am

Sunday 21st June 2020
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Philippa Perry.

Psychotherapist and author Philippa Perry talks to Michael Berkeley about the power of music to shape our emotions and tell the stories of our lives. Philippa left school at 15 and did all sorts of jobs, including a stint in McDonalds before training as a psychotherapist and becoming a best-selling author, agony-aunt and broadcaster. Her graphic novel about the process of psychotherapy, Couch Fiction, was published in 2010, and since then she's written How to Stay Sane and The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read - and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did. Philippa talks to Michael Berkeley about her 30-year marriage to the artist Grayson Perry, and how a song from La Traviata broke through her father's dementia; she emphasises the importance of learning new things throughout our lives, choosing music by Shostakovich that surprised and delighted her at this year's Proms. We hear music played by the violinist Min-Jim Kym; a supremely joyful moment from Beethoven; and Philippa is moved to tears hearing a piece of Chopin that her aunt played when she was a child.

9antimuzak
Bewerkt: jun 28, 2020, 1:50 am

Sunday 28th June 2020
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Helen Macdonald.

Michael Berkeley's guest is the writer Helen Macdonald, whose book H is for Hawk shot to the top of the bestseller lists, not just here but around the world. It's perhaps no surprise that there's a certain amount of birdlife in her playlist, from Stravinsky's The Firebird to a piece inspired by a song thrush by the Finnish-English singer Hanna Tuulikki. She chooses music from A Carol Symphony by Victor Hely-Hutchinson, full of glittering ice, which consoled her when she was living in the desert of the UAE. We hear Britten's Second String Quartet, Lully's The Triumph of Love, Sibelius's 7th symphony, and a song by Henry VIII. Helen Macdonald talks about why writing about nature can be a way of holding the world to account, and about how she finds joy in the fields and lanes around her in Suffolk, during this difficult time. She reveals too what it's like living with her grumpy parrot Birdoole, who steals the keys from her computer keyboard.

10antimuzak
nov 1, 2020, 1:45 am

Sunday 1st November 2020
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Sarah Perry.

Sarah Perry's novels are like extraordinary highly-coloured dreams - or nightmares. Her best-seller The Essex Serpent features a mythical sea-creature that roams the Blackwater marshes, and the novel that followed, Melmoth, is a terrifying Gothic tale with a female ghost who always seems to be just behind you, almost out of sight. In Private Passions, Sarah Perry talks to Michael Berkeley about ghosts and Gothic nightmares, and admits that the ghost in Melmoth haunted her too. She wrote the book high on painkillers amidst the torment of spinal collapse, an experience of pain which thankfully she recovered from, but which has changed her view of life. She looks back on her upbringing in the Strict Baptist Chapel, in which popular culture was banned - but classical music was played on speakers so large they reached her shoulders, and Beethoven blasted her out of bed at night. She talks too about Essex, and trying to live down the social shame of being an "Essex Girl" - before realising that Essex girls have a proud tradition, and being an Essex girl was something to aspire to: loud, pleasure-loving, refusing to fit in. Sarah Perry was a viola player as a child, and her music choices include one of Hindemith's sonatas for viola - which she describes as "the Essex girl of instruments". She also loves late Beethoven quartets, and Dvorak, and Bach, and the contemporary composer Stephen Crowe, whose setting of fragments from Sappho is one of her choices. She hates jazz - well, almost all jazz. She invites us to hear the one track that completely seduced her.

11antimuzak
nov 15, 2020, 1:51 am

Sunday 15th November 2020
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Mike Brearley.

Mike Brearley, the former England cricket captain, talks to Michael Berkeley about the wide range of classical music that inspires him. Mike is one of the most successful cricket captains of all time, winning 17 tests for England and losing only four. No one who follows the game will forget the so-called miracle of the 1981 Ashes - recalled as captain, Mike galvanised the demoralised team in one of the greatest-ever feats of sporting psychology and led England to an astonishing 3-1 series victory. The Australian fast bowler Rodney Hogg famously described Mike as having `a degree in people", and that's particularly appropriate as he's gone on to have a long and successful second career as a psychoanalyst, as well as writing a series of books and working as a cricket journalist. Mike talks to Michael Berkeley about the close engagement he has with music - he listens with the same intensity and concentration he brought to test cricket and that he brings to his work as a psychoanalyst. He chooses music by Bach, Monteverdi, and Tchaikovsky, and a Mozart sonata which reminds him of his father, also a first-class cricketer. Mike is drawn to the complexity and darkness of music written by Beethoven and by Schubert at the very end of their lives and to an opera by Harrison Birtwistle that he finds challenging and difficult but ultimately enlightening.

12antimuzak
nov 29, 2020, 1:45 am

Sunday 29th November 2020
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Alexandra Harris.

Michael Berkeley talks to Alexandra Harris, one of the very first Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers, about her passions for landscape, weather and music. As the evenings draw in and the weather gets colder, Alexandra Harris could not be happier. There's no greater fan of English weather - even the miserable cold, wet variety - so much so that she's written a book about it - Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies. Alexandra is a Professor of Literature at the University of Birmingham, is this year's chair of the Forward Prizes for Poetry, and among her other highly praised books are a biography of Virginia Woolf, and Romantic Moderns, about the complex relationship between modernism and tradition in English art and literature, which won the Guardian First Book Award. Alexandra tells Michael about her love of weather, winter and Schubert's Winterreise, and about the music that conjures up the English landscapes which mean so much to her: we hear pieces by Britten, by the violinist Laura Cannell and by the Norfolk composer Simon Rowland-Jones. Alexandra's twin passions, for early church music and for the quiet of the evening, are brought together in music by Tallis written for the monastic service of Compline - and she acknowledges how lucky she is to be able to listen to it in the warmth and comfort of her home rather than in a freezing medieval monastery.

13antimuzak
dec 20, 2020, 1:43 am

Sunday 20th December 2020 (starting in 5 hours and 17 minutes)
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason.

Anyone who saw Sheku Kanneh-Mason play the cello at the Royal Wedding, or win BBC Young Musician of the Year at the age of only 17, will realise that he comes from the most extraordinary family. Two of his siblings are also Young Musician finalists, and his older sister, Isata, is a professional pianist. Collectively the seven Kanneh-Mason children make music wherever they are. During lockdown, that was the family home in Nottingham, from which they performed live on Facebook. Michael Berkeley's guest is their mother, Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason: the woman who inspires them, who gets up before dawn to drive them to lessons and trains, who organises their practice schedules, who dances with them in the kitchen. She tells Michael Berkeley about how she does it - and why. She looks back on her childhood in Sierra Leone, and the huge transition of coming to live with her grandparents in Wales after her father died. She reveals her own musical ambition - to play the violin - and discusses how she manages to get the children to practise. She explores with Michael the question of prejudice in the classical music world. And she plays the reggae song the family will be dancing to at Christmas. Other choices include Verdi's Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, Shostakovich's Second Piano Trio, Mozart's Requiem, Schubert's Trout Quintet and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Deep River.

14antimuzak
feb 21, 2021, 1:45 am

Sunday 21st February 2021
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Caroline Bird.

Caroline Bird was only fifteen when she had her first collection of poems published; she's been writing since she was eight, hiding in the corner behind her bunk beds at home. This was in Leeds, where Caroline was brought up, the daughter of playwright Michael Birch and theatre director Jude Kelly. She's now published six collections of poetry, along with a clutch of plays for theatre and radio. Her latest poetry sequence "The Air Year" was awarded the prestigious Forward Prize for the best collection of poetry published this last year. In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Caroline Bird talks about the impact of being published as a teenager, and about the depression that led her to drug addiction by the time she was a student. She confesses she finds classical music without words almost unbearably emotional - as a child, it made her deeply sad. Understanding that sadness and coming to terms with it, she returns now to music she heard when she was young, going as far back as the music her mother played to her in the womb. Music choices include Rachmaninov's Sonata for Cello and Piano; Janet Baker singing Elgar's Sea Pictures; Billie Holiday; and Lionel Bart's Oliver!

15antimuzak
mei 9, 2021, 1:52 am

Sunday 9th May 2021
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

George Szirtes.

Michael Berkeley is joined by poet George Szirtes, who arrived in Britain at the age of eight wearing only one shoe after fleeing from Hungary after the invasion of the country by the Soviet Union in 1956. He discusses his memories of leaving Hungary, walking across the border and about how he then went further back, reconstructing his mother's incarceration in concentration camps during the Second World War. He explains too the project of writing a poem every day on Twitter, which has enlivened this strange period of lockdown. His playlist includes Tallis, Bartok, Bach, Ravel and Berlioz, as well as an early blues recording from 1931, whch each opened a door for him into a new world.

16antimuzak
mei 16, 2021, 1:45 am

Sunday 16th May 2021
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Helen Macdonald.

Michael Berkeley's guest is the writer Helen Macdonald, whose book H is for Hawk shot to the top of the bestseller lists, not just here but around the world. It's perhaps no surprise that there's a certain amount of birdlife in her playlist, from Stravinsky's The Firebird to a piece inspired by a song thrush by the Finnish-English singer Hanna Tuulikki. She chooses music from A Carol Symphony by Victor Hely-Hutchinson, full of glittering ice, which consoled her when she was living in the desert of the UAE. We hear Britten's Second String Quartet, Lully's The Triumph of Love, Sibelius's 7th symphony, and a song by Henry VIII. Helen Macdonald talks about why writing about nature can be a way of holding the world to account, and about how she finds joy in the fields and lanes around her in Suffolk, during this difficult time. She reveals too what it's like living with her grumpy parrot Birdoole, who steals the keys from her computer keyboard.

17antimuzak
aug 29, 2021, 1:50 am

Sunday 29th August 2021
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Mike Brearley.

Mike Brearley, the former England cricket captain, talks to Michael Berkeley about the wide range of classical music that inspires him. Mike is one of the most successful cricket captains of all time, winning 17 tests for England and losing only four. No one who follows the game will forget the so-called miracle of the 1981 Ashes - recalled as captain, Mike galvanised the demoralised team in one of the greatest-ever feats of sporting psychology and led England to an astonishing 3-1 series victory. The Australian fast bowler Rodney Hogg famously described Mike as having `a degree in people", and that's particularly appropriate as he's gone on to have a long and successful second career as a psychoanalyst, as well as writing a series of books and working as a cricket journalist. Mike talks to Michael Berkeley about the close engagement he has with music - he listens with the same intensity and concentration he brought to test cricket and that he brings to his work as a psychoanalyst. He chooses music by Bach, Monteverdi, and Tchaikovsky, and a Mozart sonata which reminds him of his father, also a first-class cricketer. Mike is drawn to the complexity and darkness of music written by Beethoven and by Schubert at the very end of their lives and to an opera by Harrison Birtwistle that he finds challenging and difficult but ultimately enlightening.

18antimuzak
nov 7, 2021, 1:52 am

Sunday 7th November 2021
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Tamsin Edwards.

In a special edition of Private Passions for COP26, Michael Berkeley talks to Dr Tamsin Edwards about her career as a climate scientist and her lifelong passion for music. As a child Tamsin wanted to be a concert pianist and she went on to play the clarinet, saxophone and double bass, and to sing in choirs. Music is still a vital part of her life but now she is one of our leading climate scientists, at King's College London, studying the uncertainties of climate model predictors, particularly in relation to rising sea levels. In 2018 she joined the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body responsible for assessing the science related to climate change. Instantly recognizable with her trademark cropped blue hair, she is a passionate science communicator, blogging, writing for newspapers and frequently appearing on radio and television. Tamsin tells Michael how performing music helped her to develop the confidence to speak about science to governments, corporations and the public. We hear part of a Beethoven sonata that brings back memories of the terror she felt playing it for her Grade 8 Piano exam. She chooses music by Liszt for her mother, a concert pianist, and we hear her late father playing the trumpet with his New Orleans jazz band. And Tamsin talks movingly about her debilitating treatment for bowel cancer, paying tribute to the love and support of her partner, the television presenter Dallas Campbell, with piano music by Philip Glass.

19antimuzak
jan 9, 2022, 1:48 am

Sunday 9th January 2022
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

David Nutt.

Michael Berkeley is joined by neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt, who looks back on a childhood that gave him the confidence to challenge established opinion. He also describes new research into treating depression using the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, and reveals which music he plays to his patients during these experiments. His music choices include Faure, Nielsen, Grieg, and Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, which David persuaded the crowd to dance to at a New Year's Eve party.

20antimuzak
jan 16, 2022, 1:53 am

Sunday 16th January 2022
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Stephanie Shirley.

Michael Berkeley is joined by information technology pioneer, businesswoman and philanthropist Stephanie Shirley, who talks about her extraordinary life and career. She arrived in Britain from Vienna in 1939 as a five-year-old, without her parents, one of 10,000 Jewish children brought by train on the Kindertransport to escape the Nazis. She went on to become one of the most successful businesswomen of the 20th-century, founding software company, Freelance in 1962, which was ultimately valued at almost $3. Since retiring, her work has been in philanthropy, with a particular focus on IT, and autism, in memory of her son. She talks to Michael Berkeley about her extraordinary life and career, while her music choices include Bach, Britten's Ceremony of Carols, Dido's Lament and the Cat Duet attributed to Rossini.

21antimuzak
feb 6, 2022, 1:48 am

Sunday 6th February 2022
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Barbara Taylor Bradford.

Michael Berkeley is joined by author Barbara Taylor Bradford, who reflects on her childhood in Leeds, where her mother Freda introduced her to Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Bizet and Puccini, the composers she still loves today. She talks about her long and happy marriage and how her determination to keep writing has sustained her since her husband's death, describes the ambition and determination that drove her in the male-dominated world of journalism in the 1950s, and her pride in the success of her novels.

22antimuzak
jul 10, 2022, 1:51 am

Sunday 10th July 2022
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Katherine Rundell.

Michael Berkeley is joined by writer Katherine Rundell, who talks about her life and reveals that her books set out to explain to children that life does contain loss, pain and darkness, but that it is always possible to discover joy. She discusses her love of tightrope-walking and roof-climbing, and about her passion for John Donne, choosing two settings of his work, as well as music by Bach, Strauss, Miles Davis, Fauré and Mozart.

23antimuzak
jul 17, 2022, 1:49 am

Sunday 17th July 2022
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Christopher de Bellaigue.

Michael Berkeley is joined by journalist and author Christopher de Bellaigue, who shares music reflecting the decades he spent reporting in Turkey, the Middle East and South Asia. He chooses a setting of the poetry of the great Sufi mystic Rumi, music from Philip Glass's opera about Gandhi, and a Venetian madrigal that relates to his new book, about the Ottoman Emperor Suleyman the Magnificent. Christopher tells Michael about the joy he has found becoming part of his wife's family in Tehran and about the way Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto helped him to engage with his grief and start to come to terms with his mother's depression, 30 years after her death.

24antimuzak
Bewerkt: sep 25, 2022, 1:44 am

Sunday 25th September 2022
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Gwen Adshead.

Michael Berkeley is joined by psychiatrist and psychotherapist Gwen Adshead, who talks about her work at Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital, where she encourages offenders to understand what drove them to violence, to face up to what they have done, and to try to find a future free of such behaviour. She also shares her love for choral music with pieces by Tallis, Gibbons, Lauridsen and Verdi, as well as a Maori song that conjures up her early childhood in New Zealand.

25antimuzak
feb 12, 2023, 1:37 am

Sunday 12th February 2023
Time: 12:00 to 13:00 (1 hour long)

Simon Thurley.

Architectural historian Simon Thurley tells Michael Berkeley about his passion for ancient buildings and the music associated with them. He chooses music by Holst, which reminds him of his religious childhood, an opera by Bellini which conjures up the English Civil War, and music by Purcell, which reminds him of Hampton Court, one of the buildings he loves most and which he helped to restore after a devastating fire.

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