Private Passions

Michael Horovitz is one of the last surviving Beatniks, 'the big daddy of the British Beat Movement'. In the 1950s, he founded a ground-breaking magazine which was the first to publish new work by Samuel Becket and William Burroughs, including passages from Naked Lunch which had been banned for obscenity in America. At 78 he's still performing his poems in pubs, and still playing his 'anglosaxophone', a kind of exuberant kazoo.In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Horovitz talks about the poetic revolution that began in the 50s, and about his friendship with Stan Tracey, who died recently. He tells the story of how his family were forced to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s, where his father was a lawyer.His music choices include Beethoven, Mendelsohn and Stan Tracey, as well as a rare Charlie Parker jazz improvisation from 1945 (which includes one of the few recordings of Charlie Parker's voice). He includes too a moving recording of his wife, the poet Frances Horovitz, reading a poem she wrote when she was dy

Michael Sheen is famous for playing real people on screen - from Tony Blair and Kenneth Williams to Brian Clough and David Frost. And it was playing another real person - but this time on stage - that formed a turning point in his relationship with classical music. This person was Mozart, in the play Amadeus, and Michael has chosen part of Mozart's Requiem, used in that production.His other choices include music by Lisa Gerrard and Arvo Pärt and Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds starring Richard Burton, who shares a home town with Michael. He tells Michael Berkeley about his recent return home to Port Talbot to work for three years on a marathon staging of The Passion, which lasted for 72 hours and involved a cast of 1000, mostly local, people.

Lewis Wolpert is a distinguished scientist -and a familiar lanky figure on his bicycle, cycling through the Bloomsbury traffic to University College London where he is Emeritus Professor of Biology.His scientific research has been into the early development of the embryo, but he's a man with many other interests ? he's written books about depression, and recently a book about getting old ? and he's currently bravely embarking on a book about the biological differences between the brains of men and women.He talks to Michael Berkeley about the happiness he feels in his eighties, and about his early life, and his decision to leave South Africa where he was brought up to be a 'nice Jewish boy'. His choices are wide-ranging: from Noel Coward and Frank Sinatra to a late Beethoven Quartet and Wagner.Producer: Elizabeth Burke.

Writer Pat Barker is fascinated by the First World War; for twenty years now, her award-winning novels have returned again and again to the trauma and grief and erotic intensity of wartime. Her novels draw on the experiences of real people: Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and in particular the army doctor W.H. Rivers, a pioneering psychiatrist who treated victims of shell shock. As this centenary year opens, with all its commemorations of the First World War, Pat Barker talks about why and how we should remember War - and about the power of fiction to tell historical truth.She reveals that her fascination with war began as a child; she was brought up by her grandparents, and her grandfather had a bayonet wound which she saw every time he washed at the kitchen sink. 'Through my grandfather and my stepfather, I have a direct link through to the world before the war - for me it's not simply reading history.' Pat Barker herself was a war baby - born in 1943 after her mother, a Wren, had a one-night stand with a

Hugh Masekela is a jazz legend. Brought up in South Africa during Apartheid, he left the country at 21, and spent the next 30 years in exile, releasing album after album - 43 to date - and performing alongside all the other great musicians of our era: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Stevie Wonder, The Who ... He's still making music and touring the world at 74, and Private Passions was lucky enough to catch him on a visit to London.He talks to Michael Berkeley about his passion for performing, which began when Bishop Trevor Huddleston gave him money to go to buy his first trumpet. Masekela describes vividly the musical culture he grew up in: the townships were awash with music, he says, and there was a competing cacophony of sound. As a child he began piano lessons at four, begging his father to play records before he had the strength to turn the handle of the gramophone. Music took over and he says he's been 'bewitched' ever since. He tells the moving story of how as a teenager he played truant from school and i

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, talks to Michael Berkeley about his favourite music and the meaning of Christmas. His choices include Christmas music from Bach and Britten, and music Justin Welby loves from the late medieval period.He talks to Michael about his career in the oil industry, his relatively late ordination, and his meteoric rise to the top of the Anglican Church, and the music that has accompanied him on that journey.Michael asks him how he finds time for prayer and contemplation amid the pressure of heading the Anglican community, and what role music plays in his relationship with God. And he asks how he plans to spend his first Christmas as Archbishop.

Somehow Tom Hooper has cracked the secret of making films which audiences really love. Whether you count Oscars and Baftas or box office takings he is, at 41, right up there as one of Britain's top film directors. The King's Speech won him four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and earlier this year his film of Les Miserables won three more Oscars. The box office takings for Les Mis stand at an eyewatering 441.8 million dollars - it's been a hit across the globe, with reports of audiences crying their eyes out in cinemas from Sydney to Japan.Tom Hooper doesn't often give personal interviews, but in Private Passions he talks to Michael Berkeley about his childhood, and about the anxieties and influences which have made him such a successful film director. He reveals that The King's Speech is in fact autobiographical: Tom's mother is Australian and his father is English, and growing up he was very aware that it was his mother's task - and his - to release his father from a particular kind of Eng

Laura Mvula is more than just a pop star; before she had a best-selling album and industry awards she studied composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire. In an in-depth interview in Private Passions, she reveals how she went from classical music student to chart-topping singer.In this warm and funny interview, Mvula talks to Michael Berkeley about her musical upbringing and about how church music, piano and violin lessons and performances for her aunt's a cappella group, Black Voices, initially went hand in hand with a crippling stage fright. At ten, she was so scared of performing that she howled on stage when the applause started and had to be rescued by her parents. She also talks about how as a student she began going to hear English choral music, but she had an ulterior motive: she fancied one of her fellow-students, a classical baritone, so she went to see him every time she could. It worked, they're now married; and she fell in love with choral composers like Eric Whitacre at the same time. And Laura

As part of Radio 3's Britten Centenary weekend, Michael Berkeley travels to Aldeburgh beach to meet the artist Maggi Hambling at her controversial memorial to Britten in the form of two giant interlocking scallop shells.Michael also visits her nearby studio to see her paintings inspired by the Suffolk sea and to talk about the effect of Britten's music on her painting and sculpture.She tells Michael about her fascination with drawing and painting people she's loved after they've died; the importance of drawing; and her love of feeling rooted in Suffolk.Maggi's music choices include music from Peter Grimes and the War Requiem, as well as Schubert, a song by her friend George Melly and some surprising music which sums up how she relaxes in the rare moments when she's not working.

Martin Gayford has a passion for painting and music, and has spent his career writing about artists - Constable, Van Gogh, David Hockney, Lucian Freud - and thinking about the connection between art and music. His new biography of Michelangelo is published in this month, and in this edition of Private Passions he explores the musical worlds of some of our greatest painters. He begins with the choir that Michelangelo heard as he lay high up on the scaffolding, painting the Sistine Ceiling - there were complaints he banged around too much, interfering with the music.Martin Gayford then moves on to talk about the painter Constable as a musician (he was a flautist) and to tell the story of Van Gogh's attempt to learn the piano - in order to experience synaesthesia, and paint the music he played in bright colours.Apart from his biographies of great artists, Martin Gayford is famous because his portrait was painted by Lucian Freud ('Man in a Blue Scarf'), a process that took 18 months. During that time they visited

It was a band called The Commitments that first brought Roddy Doyle fame 25 years ago - not a real group of musicians, but a comic novel about a group of Dublin teenagers who get together and form a soul band. The book and its sequels became successful films. Roddy Doyle gave up his job as a teacher and has gone on to write nine more novels set in Dublin, where he grew up and still lives.One of them, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, won the Booker Prize and is a memorable tour de force told entirely in the voice of a ten-year-old Dublin boy. Roddy Doyle has also written for children, for the theatre and the cinema, and now, after 25 years, he's back where he started - he's turned The Commitments into a musical which has just opened in London's West End.Roddy's music choices range from the richness of Pergolesi and Mozart to the sparse modernism of Steve Reich and Brian Eno, with a touching love song to end the programme.He talks to Michael Berkeley about music while you work, the pleasures of Dublin dialogue, and the j

Private Passions makes its first visit to Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival of ideas. Michael Berkeley talks to Chris Mullin, former MP, thriller writer and one of the sharpest political diarists of our age. He's certainly a free thinker: in three volumes of political diaries he's given us a devastating and very funny account of the workings of Westminster, from his vantage point as Labour MP for Sunderland South.Chris Mullin retired in 2010 after 23 years in Parliament; Michael asks him whether he was too free-thinking to get to the top â€" or perhaps his sense of humour was the problem. But there's more to Chris Mullin than his political career, as this programme reveals. He looks back to perhaps the greatest achievement of his life, when he campaigned successfully for the release of the Birmingham Six in the 1980s - innocent men imprisoned as a result of a miscarriage of justice. He talks too about his friendship with the Dalai Lama and how his travels in the Far East have given him a different perspective,

Michael Berkeley's guest is the actor Rory Kinnear.Rory Kinnear is in danger of becoming a national treasure. Audiences across the world know him thanks to two Bond movies, where he plays M15 officer Bill Tanner. He was the journalist in the TV thriller Southcliffe, he was Denis Thatcher in the Margaret Thatcher TV biopic, he's the straight man to Count Arthur Strong... And he's established a reputation as one of our finest Shakespearean actors - his performance as Hamlet at the National Theatre was screened across the UK as part of the National's 50th anniversary celebrations. This summer he played an unforgettably chilling Iago to Adrian Lester's Othello, again at the National. And he's just turned playwright - his first play, The Herd, directed by Howard Davies, has opened in London.He's a difficult actor to pin down. But in conversation with Michael Berkeley he reveals the man behind the theatrical mask. He talks movingly about his father, the actor Roy Kinnear, who was killed during a film stunt, and how

Greg Doran is one of those lucky people who seem to have found his perfect place in life. From the age of 13, when his mother first took him to the theatre in Stratford, Shakespeare's been his passion; as a boy he dedicated himself to seeing every single Shakespeare play - sometimes managing to watch three Macbeths in a day.So - what better job than Artistic Director of our great national Shakespeare company, a role he took on 18 months ago. His production of Richard II with David Tennant in the lead opens on 10 October, and he's directing Henry IV next year with his partner Anthony Sher playing Falstaff.Doran doesn't come from a theatrical background - his father ran a nuclear power station. But his passion for music began early, thanks to a concert in the local village hall in Lancashire. A friend of his mother's, Mrs Sidebottom, got up on stage and sang 'Blow the Wind Southerly'. And young Greg was hooked. That haunting folk song begins his choice of music - sung in this case by Kathleen Ferrier. Other cho

Beeban Kidron is a rare and very unpredictable film-maker. A woman in a man's world, she's made highly successful dramas such as the BAFTA-winning Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and the blockbusting rom-com Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. But she also makes documentaries which come straight from her heart: films about sex workers in New York, the women of Greenham Common, the sculptor Antony Gormley, and a highly-acclaimed film about girls sold into religious prostitution in India. And her latest film In Real Life is a documentary about teenagers and the internet.She talks to Michael Berkeley about the power of music in films, the pleasures of building relationships with composers, the joy of telling stories, and the sheer determination needed to make the films she feels so passionately about.Her choices include music from her film Swept from the Sea and her BAFTA-winning television series Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit; the music of her childhood; the piece which changed her ideas about love; and the sca

It's quite possible that Philip French has seen more films than anyone else on the planet. Obsessed with cinema since the age of four, he has been reviewing films for the Observer for the past fifty years, as well as writing for many other papers and publishing several critically acclaimed books about cinema.He talks to Michael Berkeley about the role of the composer in the cinema, his late flowering love of Beethoven string quartets, his lifelong delight in the singing of Ruth Etting; and his greatest film music memories.His music choices are all associated with film ? from Disney's Fantasia; through The Ride of the Valkyries used so memorably in Apocalypse Now; to Miles Davis and avant garde composer Harry Partch.Philip French sees at least nine films a week ? that's getting on for 20,000 over his career. Michael Berkeley asks him, how important is music in making a film stick in the mind?Producer: Jane Greenwood. A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Angie Hobbs is no ordinary philosopher. Her job takes her to places as varied as cathedrals, airforce bases and merchant banks, as well as frequently to our radio and TV screens. As our first ever Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy, based at Sheffield University, she's determined to ensure that philosophy doesn't remain exclusively in the hands of academics - she wants it to inspire us all to explore the big questions in our lives.Angie talks to Michael Berkeley about music in Greek philosophy, and about music as solace, as well as a celebration of life and the memory of people and places she has loved. Her choices include a Beethoven movement she considers to be the most beautiful music ever written, a Latin carol and an unusual arrangement of Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, as well as music by Bach, Vaughan Williams and Emmylou Harris.Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Gillian Lynne is best known as the choreographer of Cats and Phantom of the Opera, among other West End hits. She received a lifetime Olivier Award earlier this year. But her career began more than seven decades ago, when she was spotted as a dancer by Ninette de Valois. She danced during the War, with doodlebugs falling around her and just two pianos in the pit - no orchestras, as all the men were away fighting. She danced in the first night at Covent Garden after the War, when audiences dusted off their evening clothes. She then moved into movies, playing a gypsy temptress in The Master of Ballantrae opposite Errol Flynn. The sexual chemistry wasn't confined to the screen - she and Flynn had an affair, though his drink problem meant 'He wasn't a great lover. At the end of the day, he couldn't... But he was a beautiful man.'As she developed as a choreographer, Gillian Lynne worked with the leading composers of the day, including Sir Michael Tippett. In fact she asked him to make changes in his Ritual Dances

The Chief Medical Officer, Sally Davies, is on our TV screens almost every week as the authority we appeal to in every health scare: horsemeat in burgers, antibiotic resistance, three-parent babies. She is clearly a person of tremendous power and influence, in charge of the National Institute of Health Research with a budget of £1 billion ? voted by Woman's Hour recently one of the top ten most powerful women in the UK.Sally Davies talks to Michael Berkeley about her private life. She tells him about the death of her second husband from leukaemia less than a year after they were married, and how this has changed her as a doctor. (She scandalised her medical colleagues on a hospital ward round by putting her arms around a dying patient.) She discusses the breakdown of her first marriage, as well as the happiness she has found with her third husband and daughters.She also reveals that she believes drugs are a medical issue rather than a criminal one.Sally Davies is humorous, and fun ? she admits she loves wine,

Adam Nicolson has the privilege, and the burden, of an extraordinary inheritance: Sissinghurst, that quintessentially English house and garden created by his grandparents Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. In his own right, he's the author of a series of highly esteemed history books and television series, about the making of the King James Bible, about the English gentry, and most recently about 17th-century writers. But it's that Sissinghurst connection which fascinates us all: growing up with bohemian writers and artists, there must have been music going on there all the time? Not at all - Adam reveals that his family were musical philistines. His father hated music because it moved him, and made him emotional ? so for an Englishman of that generation and class it was deeply suspect. It's only in middle age that Adam is discovering music, and he admits cheerfully that his musical taste is 'dreadful'. He also talks about walking 6000 miles round Europe, about his love for the Hebrides, and about his d