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PODCAST

Private Passions

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical passions and talk about the influence music has had on their lives.

music personal journals

All Episodes

36:27

Andrew Solomon

Private Passions ·

2016/06/19

Andrew Solomon is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia Medical Centre in New York, and a writer with a wide-ranging interest in families. He spent ten years talking to parents who faced extraordinary challenges, because their children had turned out so very different from them: either through disabilities, or because they were musical prodigies - or because they had committed serious crimes. The resulting book, "Far From the Tree - Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity" has won many

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37:15

John Sutherland

Private Passions ·

2016/06/13

The scholar and critic John Sutherland talks to Michael Berkeley about his passions for film, music, and Victorian literature. An unsuccessful career at school and a backbreaking job laying railway tracks were an unlikely start in life for the future Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature at University College London.John Sutherland is hugely respected for his academic work on Victorian literature, but his infectious passion for books has led him to write for a popular

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28:36

Tanita Tikaram

Private Passions ·

2016/06/05

Tanita Tikaram became an overnight success when she was only a teenager; her debut album "Ancient Heart" sold four million copies in the late 80s and gave her hit singles like 'Twist in My Sobriety'. Since then she's gone on to release eight more albums, with some rather interesting silences in between - when she almost gave up on music altogether. In 2016 she toured Europe with her ninth album, 'Closer to the People'. In Private Passions, Tanita Tikaram talks to Michael Berkeley about the effect of

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32:31

Jane Goodall

Private Passions ·

2016/05/22

Jane Goodall was only twenty-four when in she went to live among the chimpanzees of Gombe National Park in Tanzania, and she went on to spend more than 55 years there. She has done more than anyone else to transform our understanding of chimpanzees - and beyond that, her work has raised questions about how we treat these highly intelligent primates, and indeed about the rights of all animals. Now in her early eighties, she's on an extraordinary mission travelling round the world to protect

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38:16

Rose Tremain

Private Passions ·

2016/05/15

Rose Tremain is one of our finest writers, and her bestselling books - both novels and short stories - are garlanded with prizes. She defies categorisation and is equally at home with historical and contemporary fiction: she has created characters as diverse as Merivel, the physician turned fool at the court of Charles II; a 19th-century gold miner in New Zealand; and a transsexual growing up in rural Suffolk. Rose talks to Michael Berkeley about her latest novel, The Gustav Sonata, the story of a

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31:35

Roger Allam

Private Passions ·

2016/05/01

Roger Allam is an actor equally at home with Shakespeare, musical theatre, detective shows, and comedy on both radio and television. From the Globe Theatre to Game of Thrones, through Endeavour, The Thick of It and Cabin Pressure, to the RSC and the West End, he refuses to be typecast.He talks to Michael Berkeley about his lifelong passion for music and why he became an actor rather than an opera singer. And he explains how he overcame his initial reservations about the Globe Theatre to play

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36:09

Jonathan Bate

Private Passions ·

2016/04/24

Sir Jonathan Bate is one of the leading Shakespeare scholars of our time. He's also a biographer, broadcaster and critic, and a passionate advocate of the importance of the humanities in education. Provost of Worcester College and Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, he is the author of many influential books on Shakespeare and the joint editor of the RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works. And he's turned playwright himself, with the one-man play Being Shakespeare, written for Simon

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31:03

Melly Still

Private Passions ·

2016/04/10

Melly Still is a theatre and opera director whose work has been described as inventive, ambitious and magical. She stages the unstageable - mermaids, angels animals, underwater realms - putting whole worlds of myth and magic into the theatre or opera house. She came to fame 10 years ago with Coram Boy at the National - the play about Handel, his Messiah and the Foundling Hospital. Since then she's directed at the Proms and Glyndebourne, and her new production of Cymbeline for the RSC opens later

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33:31

Sunil Khilnani

Private Passions ·

2016/03/29

Professor Sunil Khilnani is the Director of the India Institute at King's College London and the presenter of Radio 4's epic history of India: 'Incarnations: India in 50 Lives.' His books include an accompaniment to the series and the acclaimed The Idea of India. He talks to Michael Berkeley about his musical passions, which reflect a life lived all over the world, and chooses music by Mozart, Berg and Beethoven, as well as a ghazal from 13th century India; a piece of southern Indian classical music

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33:37

Melanie Reid

Private Passions ·

2016/03/27

For Easter Sunday, Michael Berkeley's guest is Melanie Reid, who writes a weekly column in The Times about her life as a tetraplegic. Six years ago, on Good Friday 2010, she was out cross-country riding in the Scottish countryside near her home in Stirlingshire. The horse refused a jump and she was thrown off - flipping her body. She broke her neck and back. Since then Melanie Reid has been paralysed from the armpits down.When you're well and young, or young at heart, and busy devouring life,

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31:54

Martha Lane Fox

Private Passions ·

2016/03/06

To mark International Women's Day, Michael Berkeley's guest is Martha Lane Fox. At the age of only 25 she co-founded Lastminute.com, which floated at the peak of the dot-com bubble and was sold seven years later for £577m. Since then, Lane Fox was appointed, at 40, the youngest female member of the House of Lords (she's a cross-bencher) and the Chancellor of the Open University. She's also championed digital inclusivity and has recently founded Doteveryone. Voted one of the most powerful women in

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24:05

Katharine Whitehorn

Private Passions ·

2016/02/21

A chance to hear Michael Berkeley talk to the veteran journalist, Katharine Whitehorn, who died in January 2021 at the age 92. In this programme from 2016, Katherine Whitehorn talks about the music she loved all her life. She’s often quoted as saying: ‘Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for it.’ Katharine explains that she had quite a few false starts along the way - running away from school, failing as an architecture student, dabbling in modelling - until she found her

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35:39

Robert Harris

Private Passions ·

2016/02/07

Robert Harris made his name with Fatherland, a thriller which imagined what life would have been like in Britain had Hitler won the War. It sold over three million copies, was translated round the world, and became the first of three films inspired by his books. He went on to write thrillers about the Enigma Code, the financial crash, the Dreyfus Affair, and the destruction of Pompeii. And Ghost, a memorable book and film about a ghost-writer to a politician who closely resembles Tony Blair. Robert

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34:53

Shirley Collins

Private Passions ·

2016/01/31

Shirley Collins talks to Michael Berkeley about her musical passions and her sixty-year career in folk music. Much praised for her clear, unaffected singing voice, she has won worldwide acclaim as a pivotal figure in the English folk revival of the 1960s and 70s, not only as a performer, but also as a curator, a saviour of a rich tradition of music which might otherwise have been lost. She tells Michael about her Sussex childhood, her passion for Baroque music, and the pleasure she?s finding in

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28:26

Baaba Maal

Private Passions ·

2016/01/24

As a prelude to the Folk Connections weekend on Radio 3, Michael Berkeley's guest is the world music singer and instrumentalist Baaba Maal. He performs at Glastonbury and Womad, and fills venues like the Royal Festival Hall and the Royal Albert Hall - no surprise there, as Baaba Maal is an international superstar, with 11 albums so far, fusing music from his African roots in Senegal with rock and pop, and collaborating with musicians like Brian Eno. What's surprising, though, is the electrifying

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33:57

Gerald Barry

Private Passions ·

2016/01/03

For New Year New Music, Michael Berkeley's guest is the Irish composer Gerald Barry. We tend to think of 'New Music' as something deadly serious and even agonised; Gerald Barry utterly confounds that stereotype. His latest opera, which will be staged at the Barbican this March, transforms The Importance of Being Earnest - with Lady Bracknell sung by a bass in a business suit, and Gwendolyn and Cecily throwing dinner plates at each other. It's Barry's fifth opera; his first, The Intelligence Park

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33:09

Chilly Gonzales

Private Passions ·

2015/12/27

Canadian pianist Chilly Gonzales is on a mission - to get us all playing. His piano books and online pop music masterclasses attract hundreds of thousands of hits. Classically trained, he has one of the least orthodox careers in recent music: he made his name in rap, electronica and pop, becoming a successful songwriter and producer for the likes of the rapper Drake and the band Daft Punk. More recently he has been composing for piano and now for strings as well. He has a mission to break down the

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31:57

Alan Bennett

Private Passions ·

2015/12/20

Michael Berkeley's guest this week is Alan Bennett. We know him as the much-loved playwright and diarist who's been entertaining and moving us as a writer and performer since Beyond the Fringe in 1960. But there's one aspect of Alan Bennett that's less well-known: the central importance of music in his life, including the extraordinary fact that he once wrote a libretto for William Walton. (Sadly, Lady Walton was not impressed, and shoved it firmly to the bottom of her handbag.)In a moving and funny

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31:34

Akram Khan

Private Passions ·

2015/12/13

Akram Khan is hardly ever still; an international star, he spins around the world with his dance company - just this last month he's been performing in Santa Barbara, Corby, Moscow, Seattle, Spain, Austria... Born in London, the son of a Bangladeshi restaurant owner, Khan was talent-spotted at the age of 13 by director Peter Brook, who cast him in the RSC production of the Mahabharata - which led to his first international tour on stage. Now just into his forties, Akram Khan has won numerous

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28:46

Northern Lights: Sara Wheeler

Private Passions ·

2015/12/06

As part of Radio 3's Northern Lights season, Michael Berkeley's guest is the award-winning writer on the Polar Regions, Sara Wheeler.Sara Wheeler spent years resisting the magnetic North. She established her reputation with books about the South Pole, where the American Government appointed her writer-in-residence: she is the only person to have slept on Captain Scott's bunk, apart from that great Antarctic explorer of course. Her book about the Antarctic became an international best-seller, and she

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