Private Passions

Latest Episodes:

Kwasi Kwarteng Feb 23, 2014

Show notes

If you should happen to be walking through the House of Commons, and hear loud Wagner blasting out along those corridors of power ? you know you're heading for the office of Kwasi Kwarteng. He's been there since 2010, when he was elected MP for Spelthorne in Surrey. Before going into Parliament, he'd already established a reputation as a historian; his new book 'War and Gold' comes out later this spring, following 'Ghosts of Empire', a fascinating study of the legacy of the British Empire around the world. All this and he's not yet 40.

In Private Passions, he talks to Michael Berkeley about his own background: his parents came here from Ghana as students in the 1960s, and he says that thanks to them, 'the British Empire has always been with me'. His music choices include Wagner (naturally), Gilbert and Sullivan, Chopin, Schubert, Haydn, and Smokey Robinson ? he discovered Motown on an unforgettable American jukebox. He also includes a vintage recording of John Gielgud reading Shelley's 'Ozymandias', a poem which is a salutary warning for a politician about the transience of power. And he reveals that his ambition is to own a piano; he even chooses the ragtime piece he wants to play ? Scott Joplin's Elite Syncopations.

Joan Armatrading Feb 16, 2014

Show notes

When Joan Armatrading's mother bought a piano 'as a piece of furniture' little did she know what she was starting. The fourteen-year-old Joan taught herself to play it, then to play the guitar too and twelve years later she burst onto the music scene with her hit song Love and Affection. In a career spanning forty years, she has made 20 acclaimed studio albums as well as undertaking an international touring schedule which makes me feel tired just thinking about it. She's received three Grammy and two Brit Award nominations, she's the winner of the Ivor Novello Award, and she's the first female UK artist ever to debut at number 1 in the American Billboard Blues chart. And to cap it all, she has an MBE for services to music.

In this programme Joan shares her love of classical music with Michael Berkeley and chooses pieces by Beethoven, Vivaldi, Tavener and Bach. She talks about her childhood as the daughter of immigrant parents in Birmingham, discusses how she managed to study for a degree while on the road, and reveals whether this year's tour really will be her last.

First broadcast in February 2014.

Michael Horovitz Feb 09, 2014

Show notes

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 dying, and a recent 'jazz poem' of his own, where Horovitz plays alongside Damon Albarn and Paul Weller. Plus a few blasts on his 'anglosaxophone'...

Michael Sheen Jan 26, 2014

Show notes

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 Jan 19, 2014

Show notes

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.

Music in the Great War: Pat Barker Jan 05, 2014

Show notes

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 man in the RAF. She never traced her father, and that central mystery in her life, 'half my identity missing', was part of what drove her to write. She talks about the stigma her mother faced as an unmarried mother, and in a moving section of the interview she wishes she could speak to her mother now to tell her 'It doesn't matter'.

Pat Barker's music choices include her grandfather's favourite music hall song - his party piece as a boy in the 1890s; Anton Lesser reading two poems by Wilfred Owen, and Benjamin Britten's setting of Wilfred Owen in his 'Nocturne'; Butterworth's 'The Banks of Green Willow'; original cast recordings from Joan Littlewood's 'Oh What a Lovely War'; and Elgar's Cello Concerto, in the famous recording by Jacqueline du Pré.

First broadcast 05/01/2014.

Hugh Masekela Dec 29, 2013

Show notes

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 instead spent his days playing with other musicians in recording studios; his father found out and beat him severely, and Hugh ran away from home. But a few weeks later his father visited the studio and heard him play the trumpet. Realising that this was his future, his father forgave him and welcomed him back into the family.

Masekela also talks about his relationship with Nelson Mandela, and how Mandela smuggled a letter out of prison to him, inspiring his anthem (and worldwide hit) 'Bring Him Back Home'. He reveals the disillusionment he feels about South Africa now, and reflects on what would have happened had he stayed there - 'I would have died very young'.

Hugh Masekela's choices include Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, J S Bach, Billie Holliday and Ravel.

First broadcast in December 2013.

Justin Welby Dec 22, 2013

Show notes

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.

Tom Hooper Dec 08, 2013

Show notes

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 English inhibition and shyness. Tom Hooper decided to be a film director at 12; he talks entertainingly about his first film, about a runaway dog, and about singing in school musicals, where he discovered a passion for stage lighting, hanging high up above the school auditorium. He loves kit: camera lenses, microphones - he describes the excitement of finding the original microphones used by George V during his wartime broadcasts, and how he used them to record Beethoven for the soundtrack of The King's Speech. He explains too why he made the very brave decision to have all the actors in Les Miserables sing live for the camera.

Music choices include Beethoven, Handel, The Beggar's Opera, Janacek, and the Damned.

Laura Mvula Dec 01, 2013

Show notes

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 reveals how at first she didn't quite at appreciate her big break from producer Steve Brown (she was too busy eating a banana).

Following her appearance at this summer's Urban Prom, Laura Mvula explains why she doesn't believe in separating music into genres and why she remains a passionate listener to - and advocate for - classical music.

In this programme she reveals how she still finds inspiration in classical composers for her own work. She plays a piece of Debussy and talks about how it inspired one of her own songs, 'Make Me Lovely'; she also chooses Elgar, Michael Tippett, William Walton, and 'Lush and Bluesy', a string piece by her teacher at the Conservatoire, Joe Cutler. Other musical choices include William Walton, Nina Simone and Miles Davis.

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