Private Passions

The film director Ken Loach talks to Michael Berkeley about the classical music he’s loved throughout his life and the dangerous power of music in film.Ken Loach began his career directing Z Cars - but very soon entered the national consciousness in the late 1960s with films such as Cathy Come Home, Poor Cow and Kes. He’s kept up this prolific pace in the subsequent fifty years, making more than fifty award-winning films for cinema and television, and achieving a level of realism rarely captured by other directors. His latest film, Sorry We Missed You, is about the impact on families of the gig economy. Ken talks to Michael about the music of his childhood growing up in Nuneaton after the war – he chooses Brahms's Academic Festival Overture to recall music lessons at school - and he we hear a piece by Schubert which reminds him of his own children growing up.Ken picks recordings which bring back particular moments in his life: the sheer energy and excitement of Carlos Kleiber’s 1974 recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; the 1968 recording of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto by Mstislav Rostropovich and Herbert von Karajan, which brings back memories of making Kes; and Geza Anda’s recording of Mozart’s Piano Concerto Number 21, which was used in the film Elvira Madigan.Every one of Ken’s films has a cause at its heart such as homelessness, unemployment and civil rights. We hear the music of resistance that reflects the struggle of ordinary people for justice and dignity that has driven his career.Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Psychotherapist and author Philippa Perry talks to Michael Berkeley about the power of music to shape our emotions and tell the stories of our lives.Philippa left school at 15 and did all sorts of jobs, including a stint in McDonalds before training as a psychotherapist and becoming a best-selling author, agony-aunt and broadcaster. Her graphic novel about the process of psychotherapy, 'Couch Fiction', was published in 2010, and since then she’s written 'How to Stay Sane' and 'The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read – and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did'. Philippa talks to Michael Berkeley about her thirty-year marriage to the artist Grayson Perry, and how a song from La traviata broke through her father’s dementia; she emphasises the importance of learning new things throughout our lives, choosing music by Shostakovich that surprised and delighted her at this year’s Proms.We hear music played by the violinist Min-Jim Kym; a supremely joyful moment from Beethoven; and Philippa is moved to tears hearing a piece of Chopin that her aunt played when she was a child. A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Producer: Jane Greenwood

Sir Venki Ramakrishnan is President of the Royal Society and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2009 for his research into the ribosome – the mysterious ancient molecule that decodes DNA, what he terms ‘the mother of all molecules’. He’s what you might call a science all-rounder: he gained a PhD in Physics before turning to Biology, and his Nobel Prize was in Chemistry. Born in India, he moved to the US as a postgraduate student, and in 1999 came to Britain to work at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.Alongside science Venki Ramakrishnan has another passion – for music, and, in particular, chamber music, which grew out of the Indian classical music he heard as a child. His son Raman is the cellist with the Horszowski Trio and we hear their performance of music by Schubert, as well as a Brahms piano quartet and a Beethoven cello sonata, reflecting both Raman's and Venki’s deep engagement with that instrument. Venki's other great love is for the violin, and he chooses music by Mozart alongside Bach's Double Violin Concerto - which Venki himself played whilst learning the violin as a graduate student in the USA.He talks to Michael about the central role of music in his life, about how he would reform the Nobel Prizes in science, and why he swapped the mountains of Utah for the fens of East Anglia.Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Selina Cadell is one of our most versatile and accomplished actresses - from French and Saunders to Chekhov on Broadway, and from Alan Bennett to Shakespeare, she brings humour and sensitivity to stage and screen. Michael Billington described her recent performance in Charlotte Jones’s play Humble Boy as ‘one of the best pieces of acting you’ll see anywhere'.Instantly recognisable to millions as the infatuated neck-braced pharmacist in the hugely popular TV series Doc Martin, Selina has another string to her bow – as a director specialising in 18th-century drama and, particularly, opera. She talks to Michael Berkeley about how she coaches singers to become better actors and she chooses arias from operas she’s directed: Handel’s 'Arianna in Creta' and Stravinsky’s 'The Rake’s Progress', written in 1951 but set in Handel’s time. Selina shares memories of her godfather Sir Ralph Richardson - and his acting tips – and we hear his beautiful reading of Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale. She chooses a song by Noel Coward in memory of her brother, the actor Simon Cadell, and she speaks movingly about the death of her husband and mother earlier this year, choosing Debussy’s 'La Mer' as a celebration of her husband’s love of the sea. Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Peter Tatchell was still a teenager, living in Australia, when he started on what has been a long and headline-grabbing career of political protest. He was only fifteen when he began campaigning against the death penalty, and in support of aboriginal rights. At the age of seventeen, he realised he was gay, and the struggle for gay rights became his increasing focus: he was a leading activist in the Gay Liberation Front in the 1970s, and, more recently, a campaigner for same-sex marriage. He gained international celebrity for his attempted citizen's arrest of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe in 1999 and again in 2001, on charges of torture and human rights abuses. Beaten by Mugabe’s bodyguards, he suffered permanent eye and brain damage. He has also been beaten up by Neo-Nazis in Moscow, and held in prisons across the world. He says, ruefully: “I’m the master of the motorcade ambush”. One of his tactics has been literally to run into the road and throw himself in front of official limousines; he did it not just to Mugabe, but also to Tony Blair – protesting against the war in Iraq – and John Major.In a rare personal interview, Peter Tatchell talks about the early experiences which fired him into trying to change the world. He grew up at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Australia - his mother believed it was against her Christian principles. And yet despite this Peter loves, and forgives her.The music list is a mix of stirring protest and softer romantic pieces which help Peter escape from daily pressures. Choices include Prokofiev’s “Battle on the Ice” from the film score to Eistenstein’s Alexander Nevsky; Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”; Prince; and the jazz drummer Billy Cobham. A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Deborah Levy was born in South Africa; when she was five, her father was arrested as a member of the ANC and spent four years in jail. The family left for England, arriving when Deborah was nine, in 1968. Unsurprisingly her work as a writer is concerned with themes of identity, exile, dislocation. Beginning as a poet and a playwright – her plays were staged by the RSC – she then turned to novels, and there are now seven in all, of which the last three have been nominated for the Booker Prize. The latest is ‘The Man Who Saw Everything’.Deborah talks with Michael Berkeley about the music that means most to her. Many of the pieces she loves are to do with saying farewell: Lotte Lenya saying ‘goodbye’ in Brecht and Weill’s Alabama Song; Orpheus pining for Euridice in Kathleen Ferrier’s legendary recording of Gluck’s ‘Che Faro?’; sisters wishing their lovers safe travel as, purportedly, they depart for war, in the trio from Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte. Deborah talks openly about her memories of her father’s imprisonment and of his return home; about the enormous transition in her life when, aged fifty, her marriage ended; and about how she found a room of her own in which to write, renting a friend’s garden shed and working to the noise of apples dropping onto the roof. Also among her music is Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata (‘the silences are as important as the notes’); a song by Leonard Cohen; and a translucent setting of a Verlaine poem, ‘La Lune Blanche’, composed by Billy Cowie and sung by identical twins. Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Lord Stirrup, former Chief of the Defence Staff, talks to Michael Berkeley about his passion for music from Renaissance motets to twenty-first-century opera. Jock Stirrup was lucky to survive when a bird hit one of the engines of his Jaguar jet in 1983. With the cockpit glass obscured and one engine on fire, he chose not to eject from the plane, but to try to land it to save the life of his student pilot. For this he was awarded the Air Force Cross.This calm under pressure served him well as he rose through the ranks of the RAF, commanding forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and becoming Chief of the Defence Staff – the head of all the UK’s armed forces – until his retirement in 2011. A member of the Order of the Garter, he now sits as a cross-bencher in the House of Lords and has spoken critically about the regime in Russia and equipment shortages for troops in Iraq. He talks to Michael about the pressures of commanding forces, dealing with casualties, and speaking out on behalf of the men and women in the armed forces. Less well known is Jock Stirrup’s lifelong love of classical music. Now he’s retired he spends as much time as he can listening to music live, and he’s chosen pieces that span five centuries and many genres – a motet by Josquin Des Prez, music by Bach and by Mendelssohn, part of George Benjamin’s 2012 opera Written on Skin, and music from Die Walküre, illustrating the passion he’s had for Wagner from his schooldays. Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

It’s hard to sum up the extraordinary reach of Siri Hustvedt’s work. On the one hand, there are popular novels such as What I Loved and The Summer Without Men, which became international best-sellers and were translated into thirty languages. But underpinning her six novels there’s an impressive body of philosophical exploration – about Freud, neurophysiology, painting. Then there’s her own art work: Siri Hustvedt illustrates many of her own books. She has published a volume of poetry, and she’s also a lecturer in Psychiatry at Cornell Medical College. She lives in New York with her husband, the writer Paul Auster. In Private Passions, Siri Hustvedt admits that she enjoys being hard to pin down, because much of her work is about identity and how it shifts across a lifetime. She reflects on her own youth in New York, where she was so poor that she ate by cruising bars during “Happy Hour” and eating the free snacks. She reveals too that she has neurological episodes where she loses consciousness, sees auras, and sometimes visions and voices. She admires the visionary composer Hildegard of Bingen, and also composer Meredith Monk, who is pushing the human voice to the limit in "Scared Song". Other choices include Mozart’s Don Giovanni, John Cage’s Sonata V, Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, and Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’Ete. Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

David Cannadine describes himself as “staggeringly lucky”: he found what he wanted to do early in life, and it has rewarded him richly. He is one of our most distinguished historians; his period is the 19th and early 20th century, and he’s written more than twenty books, on Churchill, on class, on the aristocracy - among many others. He’s the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and the President of the British Academy, and a frequent broadcaster on Radio 4. He was knighted for services to scholarship in 2009. But perhaps the most surprising thing about David Cannadine is that although he was born in Birmingham and his historical research focuses on Britain, he himself lives in America; he’s spent ten years at Columbia University and is currently Professor of History at Princeton.In Private Passions he reflects on how his trans-Atlantic life changes his perspective, and enables him to see both Britain and the US as foreign countries. Although he’s now at the heart of the British establishment, he confesses that he’s always felt an outsider. His childhood in Birmingham was far from privileged, although the grand 19th-century buildings that surrounded him gave him a sense of Victorian grandeur, and his schoolteachers inspired him to aim high. They also inspired his passion for classical music, and many of the choices relate to his childhood and to his years at Cambridge and Yale. David's music includes Haydn’s Creation, Purcell’s King Arthur, Walton’s First Symphony, and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, in a performance of which, somewhat improbably, Sir David sang in the girls’ chorus. A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

James Ellroy has been dubbed the ‘demon dog of American crime fiction’, a label he relishes. His crime novels, fifteen to date, are international best-sellers; the world they depict is Los Angeles at its wildest and darkest, cops and criminals as violent as each other. Ellroy’s own life has been dominated by crime; his mother was murdered when he was ten, and Ellroy himself got involved in petty theft and, as a young man, spent time in jail. In Private Passions, James Ellroy reflects on a turbulent life, and how he honed his story-telling skills in a cell with five other criminals. He reveals how much he owes to classical music – and particularly to Beethoven. He has a bust of Beethoven on his desk as he writes, and speaks to him every day. Sometimes Beethoven answers back. James talks too about his other heroes: Mahler, Shostakovich, Bruckner and Wagner, and his admiration for their monumental works. The choices have a strong romantic streak, perhaps surprising in a writer whose world is so violent and dark. But in conversation with Michael Berkeley, James Ellroy reveals himself as never before. A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke