x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

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

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

en

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

en

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

en

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

en

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

en

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

en

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

en

34:15

Christopher Ricks

Private Passions ·

2015/11/29

Michael Berkeley's guest is the distinguished scholar Sir Christopher Ricks, who was described by W.H. Auden as 'the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding.' He has championed the work of new poets including Seamus Heaney and Christopher Hill, and in book after book over 50 years he has thrown new light on the great poets of the past: Milton, Keats, Tennyson, T.S. Eliot. He has been the Oxford Professor of Poetry, and Professor of English at Cambridge; he is now Professor of the Humanities at

en

39:54

Christina Lamb

Private Passions ·

2015/11/22

Christina Lamb is one of Britain's leading foreign correspondents. As a young journalist barely into her twenties, she went to live with the Afghan Mujahidin fighting the Russians; her dispatches saw her named Young Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards in 1988. Since then she has travelled by canoe through the Amazon rainforest, reported undercover from Zimbabwe, infiltrated a crime syndicate in Brazil, and survived an ambush by the Taliban. She has won Foreign Correspondent of the

en

33:05

Free Thinking: Sugata Mitra

Private Passions ·

2015/11/08

As part of Radio 3's Free Thinking weekend, Michael Berkeley talks to Sugata Mitra, who has started a revolution in education. He believes schools as we know them are obsolete; that exams shut down the brain; that children learn best when left alone, with computers, and that the best teachers are not education professionals, but grannies, who simply say 'Wow! That's amazing! How did you do that?' Sugata Mitra is the Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University. In 2013 he was awarded

en

34:16

Kim Brandstrup

Private Passions ·

2015/11/01

Kim Brandstrup is one of the leading choreographers of his generation. He talks to Michael Berkeley about his passion for telling stories through music and dance. Born in Denmark, he originally trained in contemporary dance, but he now also works extensively in ballet, as well as film, theatre and opera, for companies including The Royal Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera, Glyndebourne and Rambert Dance - and his new piece for them is just opening at Sadler's Wells.He chooses

en

31:35

Owen Sheers

Private Passions ·

2015/10/25

Owen Sheers' career as a poet began aged 10, when he won a competition at Abergavenny Show for a poem in which he found a rhyme for "orange" - a mountain in the Brecon Beacons called the Blorenge. He says: "I won 50p and thought, 'there's money in this poetry game'. I've since been proved wrong."He persisted with the poetry, publishing his first volume fresh out of university, and rapidly becoming one of Britain's most successful poets, as well as writing prolifically for theatre, television and

en

32:23

David Tang

Private Passions ·

2015/10/11

David Tang arrived in Britain from Hong Kong aged 13 and not speaking a word of English. Since then he has thoroughly embraced Britishness, and the British have thoroughly embraced him, culminating in a knighthood and a prime place in the Queen's Jubilee flotilla.His business interests range from fashion through clubs and restaurants, cigars, oil exploration and now his lifestyle store aimed at the new Chinese middle class called Tang Tang Tang Tang (sung to the opening of Beethoven's Fifth!)

en

33:48

Athene Donald

Private Passions ·

2015/10/04

Dame Athene Donald is one of our leading physicists, and an outstanding role model and campaigner for women in science. She is Master of Churchill College, Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Cambridge, and as the new head of the British Science Association, she has already made waves suggesting that girls should be given Meccano in preference to Barbie dolls to encourage them into science. It's physics with a clear practical end - the physics of the everyday - which is her

en

32:49

Why Music? Weekend: Frank Wilczek

Private Passions ·

2015/09/29

As part of Radio 3's Why Music? weekend, Michael Berkeley talks to the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek. Frank Wilczek was brought up in Queens, New York, the son of a radio repairman. By the time he was a teenager it was clear that he was a mathematical prodigy. By the time he was 21, he was doing the ground-breaking research which won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004. He's currently Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he has a great mission to explain

en

34:05

Amitav Ghosh

Private Passions ·

2015/09/13

Amitav Ghosh is a writer with a worldwide reach. Born in Calcutta, educated in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria, he lives now between New York and Goa; his books have sold over 3 million copies, and have been translated into 33 languages. His books have won awards in Canada, Italy, France and Burma, but his greatest readership is in India and he has been awarded the Padma Shri, one of India's highest honours, by the President of India. His new novel Flood of Fire is his tenth, and completes his Ibis

en

34:45

Val McDermid

Private Passions ·

2015/09/06

Val McDermid is one of the biggest names in crime writing. Her novels - 30 so far - have sold over 10 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 30 languages. But in Private Passions she reveals that what she really wanted to be early on was a singer. As a teenager she played the guitar and sang in folk clubs, though hampered by the fact that she never managed to learn to read music, though she tried both as a child and an adult. But she still sings, with the poet Jackie Kay and with

en

36:17

Jancis Robinson

Private Passions ·

2015/08/30

In her forty-year career writing and broadcasting about wine, Jancis Robinson has probably done more than anyone else to make wine an accessible and joyous part of our lives, and to strip away a great deal of the pretensions that used to surround it. But she's also one of our leading scholars of wine, and the fourth edition of the book she describes as her 'fourth child', a mammoth updating of her nearly 1000-page-long Oxford Companion to Wine, is about to be published next month. She talks to

en

34:25

Virginia Ironside

Private Passions ·

2015/08/16

Agony aunt, novelist and stand-up Virginia Ironside talks to Michael Berkeley about her favourite music, the Swinging Sixties, ukuleles, and growing old disgracefully.Virginia has worked for pretty much every British national newspaper, and currently answers readers' dilemmas in the Independent as well as writing a monthly column for the Oldie and a series of books - full of warmth and humour - about the perils and joys of getting older. And she's playing the Edinburgh Festival with her one woman

en

33:12

Faramerz Dabhoiwala

Private Passions ·

2015/08/09

Faramerz Dabhoiwala, who is Professor of History at Exeter College, Oxford, has proved that what people got up to in the past is a serious and neglected subject of historical enquiry. His book The Origins of Sex explores what he describes as 'the First Sexual Revolution' - a transformation of attitudes to sex which happened in Britain in the 18th century and which gives us the template for how we think about sex today. He argues that during the 18th century older, punitive attitudes to sex began to

en

484 results

Similar Podcasts

Pasquale Maassen Soundcloud

Pasquale Maassen

Marian Klose

Marian Klose

sevenism

sevenism

Dean Delray"s LET THERE BE TALK

Cactus Radio Network

Word In Your Ear

Mark Ellen, David Hepworth and Alex Gold