Private Passions

Many Private Passions guests over the years have revealed their passion for Bach. But for some, the great composer has really transformed their lives. The great primatologist Jane Goodall, for instance, describes how she reached such a dark time in her life that she considered giving up altogether. Four of her workers had been kidnapped in Africa, in the chimpanzee sanctuary she'd established. The money for her research had come to an end. At crisis point, she went into Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and heard Bach's famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor being played on the organ. Bach gave her hope, and transformed her vision of the world so that she could carry on. "It helped me to understand that I was a small person in a big world. And the world was very beautiful. It caused me to think about the meaning of our lives, and what am amazing thing it is that this little creature can encompass so much. So I came out a different person.""Bach deals with death, but also with transcendence..." - so says architect D

Jane Birkin came to fame in the swinging 60s, thanks to her wild beauty and daring appearances in avant-garde films such as Blow-up, and thanks also to her tempestuous relationship with Serge Gainsbourg. In 1969 their song "Je t'aime" was banned by the BBC and the rest is history; it became the biggest-selling foreign language record ever. Since then, Jane Birkin has appeared in more than fifty films, been awarded the OBE for services to Anglo-French relations and released thirteen albums. In Private Passions, she remembers Paris in the 1960s, and above all, her beloved Serge Gainsbourg; she describes the night they met in vivid cinematic detail. She talks too about her marriage to the film composer John Barry and chooses music he wrote for the funeral of her daughter. She talks perceptively about getting older, and the strange freedom age brings.Music choices include Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring; Allegri's Miserere; John Barry's music for The Lion in Winter; Mahler's 10th Symphony, and Bernstein's West Si

The playwright and novelist Michael Frayn shares his musical passions with Michael Berkeley.Michael Frayn is an acute observer of the absurdities and pain of the human condition, and his writing career has spanned journalism, novels, philosophy, Russian translation, and plays both philosophical and farcical. Noises Off, his 1982 farce about a farce, has become one of the twentieth century's best loved and most successful plays and is frequently described as the funniest farce ever written. Equally praised have been his philosophical plays such as Copenhagen and Democracy.He tells Michael about his childhood in Surrey, which partly inspired his award-winning novel Spies, his time in the army learning Russian, and the pain and pleasure of farce - the most technically demanding of all literary forms.And he shares his lifelong love of classical music, choosing pieces by Beethoven, Prokofiev, Mozart, Mahler, and Brahms - and a piece by his late mother-in-law Muriel Herbert. Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus produc

Susan Richards, writer and commentator on contemporary Russia, talks to Michael Berkeley about her fascination with the country and her passion for 20th-century Russian music. Susan's first book, Epics of Everyday Life, was about the euphoric period after the collapse of communism. She travelled all over Russia to try to find out how ordinary people were coping with the discovery that they'd been so comprehensively lied to for so long. Her second book, sixteen years in the writing, was Lost and Found in Russia, and it described the collective nervous breakdown that took place after that. Both books are a testimony to her fascination with the lives of ordinary Russians - and a celebration of friendship. They also include hair-raising encounters with the KGB and the Mafia. A Founding Editor of OpenDemocracy, set up in 2001 to encourage democratic debate around the world, Susan is also the co-founder, with her husband the television producer Roger Graef, of Bookaid, which has sent more than a million books to Ru

As part of Radio 3's coverage of the London Jazz Festival, Michael Berkeley talks to the saxophonist and bass clarinettist John Surman, who over a career of dizzying versatility that spans more than fifty years, has shown us just how many different ways jazz can be made. Surman's hundreds of recordings include solos with synthesizers, saxophone trios, trios with voice and drums, with brass bands and big bands. He has made albums with church choirs, duos with church organs and with drums, as well as composing music for saxophone and string quartet.He has worked with most of the jazz greats of the last half century, including Ronnie Scott, Alexis Korner and Gil Evans, and more unusually for a jazz musician he's worked at the Paris Opera, with the Trans4mation Quartet, and on modern reinterpretations of the songs of John Dowland. He's been the recipient of numerous awards including the 2017 Ivor Novello Jazz Award.In Private Passions, John Surman tells Michael how his love for music began in his childhood in Dev

Simon Sebag Montefiore is a prizewinning writer whose books return again and again to Russia. His latest novel is Red Sky at Noon, the last of his Moscow Trilogy, following Sashenka and One Night in Winter. His most recent history, The Romanovs 1613-1918, tells the story of twenty tsars and tsarinas, some touched by genius, some by madness. It's a world of unlimited power and ruthless empire-building, overshadowed by palace conspiracy, family rivalries, sexual decadence and wild extravagance. Montefiore is also author of the epic history books Catherine the Great and Potemkin; Young Stalin; and Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. In Private Passions, Simon Sebag Montefiore tells the story of how his grandparents fled the Russian Revolution, buying tickets to New York. Instead, they were cheated, and landed in Ireland on the coast of Cork. In Ireland they had to flee persecution again - and relocated to Newcastle. He talks too about what he saw first-hand as a war correspondent during the fall of the Soviet Uni

Ronan Bennett is a novelist and screenwriter whose latest drama series on the BBC, "Gunpowder", dramatizes the story of Guy Fawkes from the point of view of the Catholics, who were persecuted in England at the time. All through his substantial body of work Ronan Bennett has explored the roots of violence and terrorism, something he knows about from personal experience, having grown up as a Catholic in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. He was imprisoned twice as a young man, accused of IRA terrorist offences, but was acquitted both times, not before spending a total of almost three years in prison, sometimes in solitary confinement.After he came out of prison for the second time, Ronan Bennett made the decision to study history at King's College London, and went on to do a PhD on crime and law enforcement in 17th-century England. In Private Passions he talks about how studying history is a way of trying to make sense of his own painful experience. He looks back on his childhood and chooses Berlioz's opera "The Tr

Thirty years ago, Vesna Goldsworthy fell in love with a young Englishman she met at a summer school in Bulgaria; she moved to England to be with him, much to the disapproval of her parents, arriving in London in 1986. Since then, she's established a reputation as a writer of great wit and originality: with her memoir, Chernobyl Strawberries; with her poetry; and in 2015 with her first novel, Gorsky, which became a best-seller and which was serialized on Radio 4. Vesna Goldsworthy is also a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. In Private Passions, Vesna Goldsworthy talks to Michael Berkeley about being brought up in Belgrade during the Communist regime. The popular idea is of an era which was grey and philistine - but in fact there was a huge amount of classical music around. And when she moved to England, her friends and family were horrified. They asked, "How could you move to a country where there is no music"? She reveals why she started writing a memoir of her Serbian childhood:

Allan Corduner is an astonishingly versatile actor, equally at home in the West End, on Broadway, in television series such as Homeland, or in films like Yentl, Florence Foster Jenkins, and Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy, in which he played the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, perfect casting for an actor who is also an accomplished pianist. He talks to Michael Berkeley about his favourite music, with pieces by Scriabin, Sibelius, and Bruch that reflect his Russian, Finnish and Jewish heritage. And Allan chooses piano music by Schubert, which he loved playing as a child, and his favourite recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations, with Glenn Gould.Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

As part of Radio 3's Why Music? The Key to Memory weekend, Michael Berkeley talks to the psychiatrist Sir Simon Wessely. Professor Sir Simon Wessely is one of our most eminent psychiatrists: until recently the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, he is the current president of the Royal Society of Medicine, and Regis Chair of Psychiatry at King's College London. An interest in unexplained symptoms and syndromes has led to many years of research in areas such as Chronic Fatigue and Gulf War Syndrome. Simon talks to Michael about the powerful relationship between music and memory, his decision to study medicine rather than history, and how playing the flute once got him out of a tricky situation at Tel Aviv airport. He chooses violin music by Brahms and Dvorak for his parents, shares his love of opera with music by Puccini and Mozart, and tells Michael about his other passion - musical theatre. Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

As part of the BBC's opera season, designer Hildegard Bechtler talks to Michael Berkeley about her favourite music and some of the twenty-seven operas she has worked on all over the world.Hildegard is one of our most prolific and successful theatre and opera designers. Born in Germany, she moved to Britain aged eighteen, and very quickly established herself first in film, then in theatre and opera. Her style combines wit and invention to deliver minimalist style with maximum impact. She has designed for every major theatre and opera company including the Royal Opera, ENO, Glyndebourne, and the Royal National Theatre. And the international nature of her work is typified by one of her most recent productions - Thomas Adès's new opera The Exterminating Angel - staged in Salzburg, Copenhagen, Covent Garden, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. 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 husb

Maurice Riordan is a poet much preoccupied with time - how time suddenly stands still, or speeds up, or loops you back in dreams to childhood - in his case, to the countryside of County Cork where he grew up. It's a theme he's explored in four prize-winning collections of verse, alongside translations and a series of anthologies - including an anthology of very early Irish poetry, scribbled by Irish monks in the margins of Latin texts. In his day job, he's professor of poetry at Sheffield Hallam University and was until recently editor of Poetry Review. In Private Passions, Maurice Riordan talks to Michael Berkeley about his childhood in the "horse-drawn, candle-lit" Irish countryside and the music which inspires him, beginning with the Gregorian Chant he heard as a young altar boy. We hear the haunting unaccompanied voice of the traditional Irish singer Darach Ó Cathain, and of the Traveller and banjo player Margaret Barry. Other choices include Debussy, Piazzola and Samuel Barber. Ian Bostridge sings an ari

Stephen Poliakoff made his mark as a playwright very early; he began writing plays as a schoolboy and got first review in The Times when he was only seventeen. At the age of twenty-four he became writer in residence at the National Theatre and he's also written for the RSC. But it's as a television scriptwriter and director that Poliakoff is now best-known, with series such as "Shooting the Past", "Dancing on the Edge" and recently, "Close to the Enemy". Some of our very greatest actors - Maggie Smith, Lindsey Duncan, Timothy Spall - have queued up to work with him time and again. There have been nineteen television dramas and films to date, broadcast over the last forty years, and though they all have different settings, there's a strong atmosphere in common. Filmed in strange dream-like locations - old train carriages, empty country houses, abandoned ballrooms - they explore how the past haunts the present. And in particular, family secrets. Poliakoff claims that every family has at least three good stories

Sebastian Barry's great-grand-father was a traditional Irish musician, who played on the wooden flute and piccolo. His mother was an actress at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin; his aunt Mary O'Hara had a huge career as a singer and harpist with her own series on the BBC. Little surprise then that Sebastian Barry's writing is musical in the widest sense; full of the rich music of everyday speech. It's an impressive body of work: fourteen plays, two volumes of poetry, and nine novels. Two of his novels, "The Secret Scripture" and the latest, "Days Without End", have won the coveted Costa Book of the Year prize. When he thanked the judges earlier this year, Barry declared: "You have made me crazy happy from the top of my head to my toes in a way that is a little bit improper at sixty-one."In Private Passions, Sebastian Barry talks to Michael Berkeley about the "gaps" in Irish history he has explored in his books: areas which are touchy, taboo, and perhaps deliberately forgotten now, such as the fate of those who wer

Michael Craig-Martin is one of our most influential artists, celebrated for his huge black and white wall drawings and intensely coloured paintings of everyday objects, as well as his installations, sculpture, and computer-generated works. A pioneering conceptualist, he's always provoking questions about what we understand to be art.Born in Dublin in 1941, Michael Craig-Martin grew up in the United States but returned to Britain in the 1960s where he's lived and worked ever since. He's had numerous solo exhibitions and his work is in national collections worldwide. He is Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths, having taught there for over four decades, and he's been nicknamed 'the godfather of the Young British Artists', who include Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and Sarah Lucas.He received a CBE in 2001 and was knighted in 2016.Michael Craig-Martin talks to Michael Berkeley about the parallels between his art and the music he loves, including Satie, Bach, the Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt, and he reveals his

Dame Vivien Duffield is one of our leading philanthropists, and her passion for the arts - and particularly opera - is reflected in her giving. Her Foundation, the Clore Duffield Foundation, has supported the Royal Opera House, the Tate, the Royal Ballet, the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Southbank Centre and The National Children's Museum. It all amounts to more than 200 million pounds over the last fifty years. In 2008 the Prince of Wales presented her with one of the first medals for arts philanthropy.In Private Passions Dame Vivien talks to Michael Berkeley about why it's important to give money to the arts in this country, and about the legacy of her extraordinary family. Her father, the businessman Sir Charles Clore, was brought up poor in East London - but ended up a millionaire property developer and owner of Selfridges. Despite his own success, he was determined that his daughter should never go into the business, a job not at all suitable for a woman. But h

Nick Davies is an expert in the art of deception - as practised by the cuckoo. He has spent his career studying that deceiving, murderous bird, and living in woods and wild gardens, even up in a mountain hut in the Pyrenees. He's a hugely influential scientist: since the late 1970s he's really helped define the field in behavioural ecology, and he's Professor of Behavioural Ecology at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Pembroke College. But really, as he tells Michael Berkeley, he's happier not sitting in a library, but roaming the fens. In Private Passions, Nick Davies reveals what he's learned about bird behaviour, and how birds use song to compete and, sometimes, collaborate to sing duets. He explains how some birds sing in poetry, some in prose; and why the blackbird in your back garden is a better songster than the nightingale. Music choices reflect his passion for the beauty of the natural world: Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, for instance, Vaughan Williams's Lark Ascending, and songs by Herber

A chance to hear a programme recorded in 2017 with Michael Berkeley talking to the children's author Shirley Hughes, who died in February this year. On her ninetieth birthday, Shirley Hughes, the creator of many of our best-loved and most enduring children's books, talked to Michael Berkeley about her musical passions. In a career spanning nearly 70 years, Shirley wrote as many books and illustrated nearly two hundred. She was the first winner of the Book Trust Lifetime Achievement Award, twice won the Kate Greenaway Medal, and was awarded a CBE for services to literature. Her picture books have an enduring appeal with their sympathetic but unsentimental depiction of the small dramas and joys of family life. Shirley Hughes chose music by Scriabin, Mozart, Beethoven and The Beatles - who reminded her of her roots in Liverpool and share her love of storytelling.Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Dan Pearson discovered his passion for gardens very young, building landscapes for his toy trolls out of stones. He's now one of our most influential landscape designers, with work ranging from private gardens around the world - including Chatsworth - to the 600-acre Tokachi Forest Garden in northern Japan, and gardens in Manchester and London for the Cancer charity Maggie's. He's written five books, presented several television series, and exhibited at Chelsea six times, winning awards each time - last time, for Best in Show. He's known for his painterly naturalistic planting, or to put it more simply, he likes to create landscapes which look wild, and ancient. He says, "the way I garden is to let things go almost to the brink of being lost".In Private Passions, Dan Pearson talks to Michael Berkeley about his love of wild plants, and the influence of a very neglected garden of a house he lived in as a child. He reveals how his gardens for cancer patients and his encounters with the people he's met there have

Lindsey Davis is best known for her series of historical crime stories about a laid-back amateur sleuth called Marcus Didius Falco. Set against the turmoil of the 1st-century Roman Empire, the books are witty, gritty and hugely entertaining. She's also written stand-alone novels about Ancient Rome, and about the English Civil War.The recipient of many awards, including the Crime Writers' Association Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement, Lindsey writes a book a year, but has still found time to be the Chair of the Society of Authors and Honorary President of the Classical Association. Lindsey talks to Michael Berkeley about her introduction to music as a schoolgirl in Birmingham, her passion for symphonic music and her decision to introduce a new, feisty female protagonist to succeed her beloved Falco.Her music includes works by Schubert, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak and - appropriately - Berlioz's Roman Carnival Overture.Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.