Private Passions
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412 episodes
John Krebs is a zoologist who has specialised in the behaviour of birds. Although he was the son of a Nobel prize-winning chemist, ornithology was a very early passion: he hand-reared birds as a child and allowed them to fly freely around at family mealtimes. In his later research, he discovered that birds that store seeds for the winter have remarkable spatial memory and an enlarged hippocampus – the part of the brain essential for remembering. Alongside his academic career, he’s taken on high-profile public roles: he was the first chairman of the Food Standards Agency, where he faced the outbreak of foot and mouth disease. He’s also a cross-bench peer and was principal of Jesus College, Oxford, for a decade. His musical choices include Haydn, Schubert, Schumann and Corelli.
Helena Newman has many strings to her bow, She is the Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and the Worldwide Head of Impressionist & Modern Art. She is one of only a handful of female auctioneers and presided over the bidding of the most valuable painting ever sold at auction in Europe – Gustav Klimt’s Lady with a Fan – which went for $108 million in June 2023. Helena also plays the violin and the piano and her musical background has come in handy when standing on the auction block. She also loves the cross-over between music and art and how one can inspire the other. Her musical choices include Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart and Bach.
Michael Berkeley’s guest is the film-maker, producer and writer Mark Cousins. His documentary work includes The Story of Film, an epic 900-minute journey through the history of cinema, from the earliest moving images in the late 19th century to the digital innovations of our own times. Mark has interviewed many of the most significant directors and actors of the past half century, and with Tilda Swinton he created the Screen Machine, a large portable cinema which they and their supporters sometimes pulled by hand through the Scottish Highlands. Mark’s choices of film music range from Doris Day and Henry Mancini to a score by Alfred Schnittke and a song from Neneh Cherry.
Michael Winterbottom is one of Britain’s most prolific and eclectic film directors: his work encompasses political thrillers and pop culture, reworkings of classic novels and retelling real events. He’s made three films based on the novels of Thomas Hardy, including a version of Jude the Obscure with Christopher Eccleston and Kate Winslet. He’s worked extensively with Steve Coogan, starting in 2001 with 24 Hour Party People, in which Coogan played the Manchester music impresario Tony Wilson. More recently they’ve made four series of the BAFTA award-winning series The Trip, in which Coogan and Rob Brydon tour restaurants in England, Italy, Spain and Greece. Many of his films react to real-world events, including Welcome to Sarajevo and The Road to Guantánamo. In 2022 he co-wrote and co-directed This England, a TV series about Boris Johnson’s leadership during the Covid crisis, with Kenneth Branagh playing the former Prime Minister. Michael’s most recent film, Shoshana, is a political thriller set in the 1930s in what was then British Mandatory Palestine. His music choices include Schumann, Bach and Philip Glass.
The percussionist Ray Cooper is often referred to as the ‘father of rock and roll percussion’. He is renowned for his exuberant stage presence and for incorporating unusual instruments, including cowbells, glockenspiels, timpani and tubular bells to name but a few. He has worked with many of the world’s leading musicians including Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Billy Joel, Carly Simon, Eric Clapton, Sting, Art Garfunkel, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison. His most enduring collaboration has been with Elton John. Ray is on more than 90 of Elton’s recordings, and has performed over 1000 concerts with him, most recently on the Farewell Tour. In 1979, Ray was asked by George Harrison to help run Handmade Films and he remained at the helm for just over a decade, overseeing the production of seminal British films such as Withnail and I, Time Bandits and The Long Good Friday. Ray's musical choices include Bach, Shostakovich, John Tavener and Elton John. Producer: Clare Walker
Raymond Blanc is one of the finest chefs in the world and he is completely self-taught. He grew up in post-war France in Besancon in the Comte region of eastern France between Burgundy and the Jura Mountains with his four brothers and sisters. Raymond’s mother – Maman Blanc - was his culinary inspiration. She would whip up delicious fresh, seasonal, local dishes, which became his guiding principal when he opened his first restaurant in Oxford, Les Quat’ Saisons, in September 1977. Within two years it had been awarded a Michelin star and Restaurant of the Year by food critic Egon Ronay. Often working 18 hour days, he launched a bakery chain Maison Blanc in 1981 and then renovated and opened Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons a country house hotel which was awarded two Michelin stars and is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. He’s also appeared on numerous TV shows including The Restaurant on BBC and the cookery series Simply Raymond on ITV. Raymond's musical choices include Vivaldi, Verdi, Beethoven and Leonard Cohen.
Louise Welsh worked in a second-hand bookshop in Glasgow before she took the plunge to become a writer, bursting onto the scene in 2002 with her prize-winning crime novel, The Cutting Room. As the author of seven novels and the Plague Times Trilogy, she doesn’t shy away from difficult subjects and unpalatable truths in her fiction, exploring issues of identity, sexuality, class, immigration, viral pandemics and shady economics. Her latest book, To the Dogs, is a thriller centred around a university professor who finds himself dragged into his former life of violence and danger when his son is arrested on drugs charges. But despite these serious themes, Louise’s work is punctuated by a playful, dry sense of humour, highlighting the absurdity of certain situations - and a vivid vocabulary. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Glasgow University and she loves to collaborate. She has written short stories and plays, edited collections of poetry and has a long-standing working relationship with the composer Stuart MacRae, with whom she’s written four opera librettos. Her musical choices include works by Debussy, Purcell and Verdi.
Neil Hannon is a singer, songwriter and the driving force behind the band The Divine Comedy, which he founded in 1989. Along with hit singles such as National Express, and 12 albums with the band, his music appears in an impressively varied range of settings – including original songs for the recent film Wonka, a chamber opera inspired by Tolstoy for Covent Garden, and the theme tune for the sitcom Father Ted. Neil talks to Michael Berkeley about growing up in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland with a bishop for a father, writing his first pop song when he was 14, and how, as a self-described "pathetic twerp", he managed to make it in the pop world. His typically wide-ranging musical passions include works by Puccini, Stravinsky, Chopin and Ravel, alongside tracks by Michael Nyman, Kate Bush and Scott Walker. Producer: Graham Rogers
Professor Lorna Dawson is one of the UK’s leading forensic scientists. She examines soil in order to solve crimes. For over thirty years her pioneering techniques, using soil evidence on shoes, clothing and vehicles, have led to numerous high-profile convictions. Her work has received global recognition and now inspires crime writers such as Ian Rankin and Ann Cleeves. Lorna is head of the centre for soil forensics at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, which conducts research into land, crops, water and the environment. She also works with SEFARI, the Scottish Environment, Food and Agriculture Research Institutions, delivering farming systems that benefit the environment and nature. Lorna's choices include music by Elgar, Mozart and Ravel.
Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and writer with a mission: to make us look at and understand fungi. While we’re familiar with mushrooms, truffles and toadstools, there are millions of varieties of fungi all around us; in the soil, in our bodies, in the air we breathe - and only 6% of them have been identified. Merlin’s book “Entangled Life: how fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures”, was an international best-seller. It caught the eye of the Icelandic singer and musician Bjork, who recently released an IMAX film with Merlin, which she narrates. It’s called Fungi: the web of life, and follows Merlin to the Tarkine rainforest in Tasmania, on a quest to find an incredibly precious blue mushroom. Merlin's choices include works by Chopin, Tallis, Bach and Purcell.
Nina Stibbe was fifty when she first became a published writer with Love Nina, a collection of letters she wrote to her sister in the 1980s about her time working as a very inexperienced young nanny for Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of books. She found herself running a home where Alan Bennett often appeared at suppertime and other famous neighbours and people would pop round - though Nina had often no idea who they were. Her affectionate, witty memoir won non-fiction Book of the Year in 2014 and was adapted by Nick Hornby into a BBC TV series. After nannying, Nina worked in publishing and then moved to Cornwall where she lived with her partner and children. Since the success of Love Nina, she has written six more books, four of them novels. Her latest, Went to London, Took the Dog, charts her first return to the capital for twenty years. It’s a break from domestic life back in Cornwall, or perhaps a fresh start altogether. Nina's musical choices include music by Handel, Mozart, Brahms and Benjamin Clementine.
Johnny Flynn is a polymath – as comfortable as an actor on stage and screen as he is writing and performing songs. You have perhaps seen him as Mr Knightley in the film Emma or as Ian Fleming in Operation Mincemeat. In his latest film, One Life, he stars alongside Anthony Hopkins, as the young Nicholas Winton, who helped Jewish children flee from the Nazis in what became known as the Kindertransport. He’s currently starring as Richard Burton in the play The Motive and the Cue, the story of how Burton and Sir John Gielgud clashed as they staged Hamlet on Broadway in 1964. Johnny has also released four albums with his band Johnny Flynn & The Sussex Wit. He composed the theme song for the acclaimed TV series Detectorists, and more recently he’s collaborated with the nature writer Robert MacFarlane on two folk albums: Lost in the Cedarwood and The Moon Also Rises. His musical choices include Paul Robeson, Sondheim and Bizet.
Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser first realised plants are extraordinary and astonishing at school, when introduced to the round and wrinkled peas of Gregor Mendel. She is fascinated by plant genetics and as Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge her particular focus has been on a hormone called auxin which controls the growth of plants. In 2020, she was appointed the chief executive of UK Research and Innovation whose mission is to work in partnership with research organisations, universities, businesses, charities and government to “push the frontiers of human knowledge and understanding" and deliver economic, social and cultural impact, with a budget of more than £8 billion each year. Dame Ottoline is a fellow of the Royal Society and in 2017 she was appointed DBE for services to plant science, science in society and equality and diversity in science. Her music choices include Mozart, Vaughan Williams and Debussy.
Walter Murch is a Hollywood legend. He’s won three Oscars for his sound and editing work on Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, and his credits include some of the most acclaimed and discussed films of the past half century – The Godfather trilogy, The Conversation, The Talented Mr Ripley. He co-wrote the first movie George Lucas ever directed – the dystopian science fiction drama THX 1138. In 1985 he made his own directorial debut with Return to Oz – an unofficial sequel to The Wizard of Oz. As an editor and sound mixer - and the only person to win Academy Awards in both categories - he’s thought deeply about the craft of cinema and all its possibilities, ideas which he shared in his book In the Blink of an Eye. Walter's musical choices include Wagner, Beethoven, Pergolesi and Chopin.
Kevin O’Hare is the director of the Royal Ballet and he probably finds it hard to remember a time when dance wasn’t part of his life. He started young, and joined the Royal Ballet School at the age of eleven. He went on to dance with Sadler’s Wells and Birmingham Royal Ballet, taking on roles such as Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake, Albrecht in Giselle and Romeo in Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet. He retired from the stage in 2000, at the age of 35, but before long he was back in the world of dance – this time behind the scenes. By 2009, he was Administrative Director of the Royal Ballet and oversaw their first tour to Cuba. Three years later he became overall director. He has since worked with a wide range of dancers, choreographers and composers, and helped steer the company through the Covid crisis. Kevin's choices include music by Tchaikovsky, Thomas Ades, Rachmaninov and Anna Clyne.
The best-selling American writer Daniel Handler is perhaps better known by his pen name, Lemony Snicket. Lemony is the cynical narrator of a thirteen book saga called A Series of Unfortunate Events. It’s the tale of three unlucky orphans, Violet, Klaus and Sonny Baudelaire, who are hounded by their guardian, the sinister Count Olaf. The books are a phenomenon, selling more than 70 million copies around the world, along with a film starring Jim Carrey and a series on Netflix. Lemony has published many more books for children, and Daniel has also written seven novels for adults under his own name, as well as a screenplay inspired by Verdi’s Rigoletto. He’s also a keen accordion player and has performed with bands including Death Cab for Cutie, the Decemberists and the Magnetic Fields. Daniel has described himself as an ‘unrepentant classical zealot’ and his musical choices include Dvořák, Scriabin and Berlioz.
The abstract painter Mali Morris is fascinated by colour and light, and has been exploring their possibilities in her work for more than 50 years. She was born in Wales and studied at the University of Newcastle, where the Pop Art pioneer Richard Hamilton was one of her teachers. He brought her and fellow students news of New York which she says “seemed as far away to me as the moon”. Mali herself taught at a number of art schools including Chelsea, the Slade School and the Royal College of Art. She was elected a Royal Academician in 2010, and last year, flags made from her work hung above Bond Street, not far from the Academy, in a riot of joyous colour. She currently has a major exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. Her musical choices include Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi and some blues singing and whistling by Professor Longhair.
Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, honouring a career in which he’s written ten novels, and many short stories and essays. He’s an Emeritus Professor at the University of Kent. He was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar off the coast of East Africa, and first came to Britain as a refugee at the age of 18, in the aftermath of the Zanzibar Revolution. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he recalled how, even as a young schoolboy, he loved writing stories. He also reflected on how his move to England changed everything: "there", he said, "in my homesickness and amidst the anguish of a stranger’s life… I began to do a different kind of writing. There was a task to be done." Abdulrazak's musical choices include Shostakovich, Mendelssohn, Miles Davis and the Malian kora player, Toumani Diabaté.
Chris Addison has built his career on laughter, as a stand-up comedian, a panellist on shows such as Mock the Week, and as an actor and director. You perhaps saw him as Ollie, the hapless junior Whitehall adviser in The Thick of It, the political satire created by Armando Iannucci. He’s worked as a director on another highly-acclaimed comedy in the corridors of power: the Emmy Award-winning Veep, set in and around the White House. He has also co-created and directed Breeders, a brutally honest sitcom about parenthood, starring Martin Freeman. Chris has also performed in opera on the stage at Covent Garden – though in a speaking role. He is an opera fan, so his musical choices include Mozart and Rossini but also folk music by Eliza Carthy and a Swedish Christmas song.
A special edition for Black History Month celebrating the lives and music of black women. Michael Berkeley revisits some of the many inspiring guests from the last few years who chose music written or performed by black women, and who have made their own important contributions to black history: artists Helen Cammock and Theaster Gates, writers Kit de Waal, Nadifa Mohamed and Isabel Wilkerson, jazz saxophonist YolanDa Brown, broadcaster Johny Pitts, and Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason, mother of seven brilliant young musicians including 2023 BBC Proms stars cellist Sheku and pianist Isata. Their choices range from music by Florence Price to performances by Nina Simone and soprano Jessye Norman. Producer: Graham Rogers
Brian Cox has enjoyed a prolific career in theatre, film and television over the last sixty years, working with the most esteemed theatre companies and renowned Hollywood and TV directors. Born in Dundee, he was obsessed by film from an early age and after seeing Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning decided he could make a go of it too. Over the years he’s never been afraid to take on difficult, unlikeable characters, including Hannibal Lector in Manhunter, Hermann Göring in Nuremberg and most recently the terrifying media tycoon and patriarch Logan Roy in the TV series Succession, for which he won a Golden Globe. His vast number of roles are testament to his versatility: starring in comedies Super Troopers and Rushmore, period dramas Troy and Braveheart, the Bourne action thrillers and the superhero film X2. A classically trained Shakespearean actor, Brian has also played King Lear at the National and won Olivier awards for his performances in Titus Andronicus and Rat in the Skull. He is currently appearing as Johann Sebastian Bach in a play called The Score at the Theatre Royal, Bath. His musical choices include Bach, Mahler, Verdi and Joni Mitchell.
Professor Fay Dowker is a theoretical physicist fascinated by space and time. She was obsessed with maths from a young age and went on to study at Cambridge University. There Professor Stephen Hawking became her mentor and a very close friend. She is currently Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London where she researches “quantum gravity” – how the force of gravity works on the universe's tiniest particles. Fay's musical choices include John Coltrane, Shostakovich, Bach and Handel.
Olivia Harrison is a prizewinning film producer and charity director. Last year she published Came the Lightening, a poignant collection of twenty poems dedicated to her late husband George Harrison of the Beatles. George died in November 2001, at the age of just 58, and Olivia describes her poems as ‘thoughts, feelings and words about life and death, but mostly love and our journey to the end’. Olivia grew up in Los Angeles, and in her early 20s she joined A&M Records. She first met George in 1974 through her work, and went on to help run his Dark Horse record label. They married four years later. Olivia has protected George’s musical legacy since his death and continued the work of the Material World Foundation, the charity he founded 50 years ago. She also worked with Martin Scorsese to create an acclaimed, Emmy-winning documentary about George. Olivia's musical choices include Bach, Mozart and Ravi Shankar, as well as recordings from Mexico and Bulgaria.
Peter Frankopan is a historian who likes to take on big ideas, sweeping across many centuries and national boundaries. In his acclaimed book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, published in 2015, he argued that the Persian empire gave rise to the West and he explored the importance of the trading routes that linked Arabia and Asia to Europe, and how they spread ideas, culture and religion. The book was a bestseller in the UK, China and India and even inspired a musical collaboration between singer Katie Melua and students at Oxford, where Peter is professor of global history. His follow-up, The New Silk Roads: the Future and Present of the World investigated how economic power is shifting eastwards. More recently Peter has turned his attention to climate change. In The Earth Transformed he examined how it has dramatically shaped the development - and the demise - of civilisations across time. Peter's musical choices include works by Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Edward Naylor.
Rhiannon Giddens has won two Grammy awards for her folk music albums, and a Pulitzer Prize for her opera, Omar, proving that she’s a musician who can’t be quickly categorised. She grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, and as a singer, fiddle and banjo player, she’s been fired by a desire to chart and reclaim the stories of people whose contributions to American music have been overlooked or erased. Her musical journey originally had a rather different destination: she trained as a classical soprano at the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. Now she draws on all these musical traditions as a composer for ballet, opera and film. She also finds time for acting – appearing in the TV series Nashville about the tangled lives of country music stars – she presents podcasts and has even written children’s books. Her music choices include Bach, Dvorak, Duke Ellington and Stephen Sondheim.
Jeremy Deller is a difficult artist to pin down. He’s won the Turner Prize and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, but you’re just as likely to find his work on our streets as in a gallery. In 2016, marking the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, thousands of young men in World War One uniforms appeared unannounced in stations, shopping centres and towns across the UK. Each participant represented a soldier who died on 1 July 1916. Jeremy called this work We’re Here Because We’re Here. 15 years earlier, he recreated the clash between striking miners and police officers in the Battle of Orgreave. He’s toured a rusting car from a street bombing in Iraq around the USA, and in 2012 he created a life-sized inflatable version of Stonehenge which you could bounce on. His musical choices are suitably wide-ranging and sometimes unexpected: taking us on a journey with sounds from across the world, but including Beethoven, Monteverdi and Vaughan Williams.
Raynor Winn is a writer whose first book, The Salt Path, followed the remarkable 630-mile journey she and her husband Moth made around the South West Coastal Path. It was a story of endurance as they had lost their home, had little money and Moth had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. But they found solace in nature and kept putting one foot in front of the other, living for the now: a message that obviously chimed with readers, as the book became a bestseller and is currently being made into a film. Raynor has since written a sequel called The Wild Silence, about readjusting to four walls and normal life after that seminal walk, and Landlines where she and Moth again embark on a thousand-mile journey from Scotland back to the familiar shores of the South West Coast Path. Raynor's musical choices include works by Britten, Schubert and Vaughan Williams.
2023 marks the centenary of the composer György Ligeti's birth, and in this programme, first broadcast in 1997, he joined Michael Berkeley to share some of his musical passions. They include piano music by Beethoven, player piano music by Conlon Nancarrow, a thinking song by the Gbaya people of central Africa and gamelan music from Java. A Classic Arts production for BBC Radio 3 (revised repeat)
Isabella Tree is an author and travel writer. Her award-winning book Wilding: the Return of Nature to a British Farm, describes how she and her conservationist husband Charlie decided after many generations of intensive dairy and arable farming to undertake a pioneering experiment. They would rewild their 3,500 acre estate, Knepp in West Sussex – returning it to nature. Using herds of free-roaming animals to create new habitats, their rewilded land is now – more than 20 years later - a haven for wildlife and rare species like turtle-doves, nightingales and purple emperor butterflies. The estate has become central to the debate about how we look after and regenerate the land. Isabella is also a travel journalist and has written books about her journeys to Nepal, Mexico and Papua New Guinea. Her music choices include works by Schubert, Handel, Bach but also compositions made in response to the Knepp estate.
Alexander Polzin is a German sculptor, painter, costume and set designer. He began his career as a stonemason, but is now well known for his collaborations with writers, composers, choreographers and scientists. He has created sets, often drawing on his work in sculpture, for operas including Verdi’s Falstaff and Rigoletto, and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, for which he created huge illuminated stalactites, suspended above the stage. For a 2022 production of Mozart’s opera Mitridate in Copenhagen, the centrepiece was an enormous layered ochre-coloured rock formation, with which bodies merged or slid across. As a painter and sculptor, he’s enjoyed exhibitions in galleries around the world, and has collaborated with the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk, in 2016 and 2023. His work also appears in prominent public spaces, including his statue of Giordano Bruno in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin.
