Private Passions

George Steiner discusses his personal music choices with Michael Berkeley in 2002 - drawn from the archive to mark 20 years of Private Passions.

Marina Lewycka, a post-war baby born to Ukrainian parents in a German refugee camp, has lived in England since she was one. Her parents settled in a village near Pontefract, and she has lived in south Yorkshire for much of her life. She read English and Philosophy at Keele University, enrolled for a PhD at Kings College, London, and then spent many years as an unpublished writer, before finally achieving huge success, at the age of 58, with the novel 'A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian'. Her two subsequent novels, 'Two Caravans' and 'We Are All Made of Glue', also deal with aspects of immigrant life, treated with wry humour and great poignancy.Her musical passions, as revealed to Michael Berkeley, begin with two classics of the Baroque repertoire, Bach's First Brandenburg Concerto, and the aria 'I know that my Redeemer liveth', from Handel's Messiah. The Sibelius Violin Concerto was as great favourite of her father, who died recently; while Marina herself has attempted to play her next choice, Mozart's Piano Sonata in F, K332. She loves music that tells a story, and has chosen the March to the Scaffold from Berlioz's 'Symphonie fantastique', for its narrative energy. She says that all writers aspire to the ability to draw joy out of sadness, which Mozart does to consummate effect in the Countess's aria 'Dove sono' from 'The Marriage of Figaro'. Marina's own origins are referenced in the traditional Ukrainian folksong 'The Black Raven', while her deep love of nature is reflected.

Michael Berkeley meets Turner Prize-nominated conceptual artist and film-maker Sam Taylor-Wood, whose latest work, Nowhere Boy, documents the early life of John Lennon. Much of her work has been inspired by music, from opera to Bach, and her choices range from the opening of Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice, the Kyrie from Mozart's Requiem and the opening of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to an Indian raga and Nina Simone singing Wild Is the Wind as well as film scores by Ry Cooder and Michael Nyman.Sig: M Berkeley: The Wakeful Poet (Music from Chaucer) Beaux Arts Brass Quintet (Berkeley/OUP) Duration: 0m26sMozart: Introitus (Requiem in D Minor, KV626) Marie McLaughlin (soprano) Bavarian Radio Chorus and Symphony Orchestra Leonard Bernstein (conductor) DG 431 041-2 Tr 1 Duration: 6m39sRavi Shankar: Prabhati Ravi Shankar (sitar) Yehudi Menuhin (violin) Alla Rakha (tabla) (Shankar, based on Raga Gunkali) Menuhin meets Shankar EMI CDC7490702 Tr 1 Duration: 4m06sGluck: Ah ! Se intorno a quest'urna funesta (Orfeo ed Euridice) Orfeo ...... Bernarda Fink (mezzo-soprano) Rias-Kammerchor Freiburger Barockorchester Rene Jacobs (conductor) HARMONIA MUNDI HMC90174243, CD 1 Tr 2 Duration: 3m18sJohn Lennon: Love Lennon/Lenono Music/BMG Muic Publishing Ltd The John Lennon Collection PARLAPHONE CDP7915162 Tr 7 Duration: 3m19sBeethoven: Symphony No 9 in D minor Op 125 (1st mvt - excerpt) Staatskapelle Berlin Daniel Barenboim (conductor) ERATO 4509 94353-2 Tr 1 Duration: 5m25sRy Cooder: Paris, Texas (Paris, Texas - film sountrack) Ry Cooder, Jim Dickinson, David Lindley (Cooder/Tonopah and Tidewater Music Co BMI) Original Film Soundtrack WARNER 9252702 Tr 1 Duration: 2m56sNina Simone: Wild Is the Wind Nina Simone (piano/voice) Rudy Stevenson (guitar) Lisle Atkinson (bass) Bobby Hamilton (drums) (D Tiomkin, N Washington arr Nina Simone, Famous Music Corp) Work Song (The 60's vol 3) MERCURY 8385452 Tr 8 Duration: 6m58sMichael Nyman: The Heart Asks Pleasure First (The Piano - film soundtrack) Michael Nyman (piano) Nyman/Chester Music Ltd The Piano VENTURE CDVE919 Tr 4 Duration: 1m33s.

Michael Berkeley's guest today is the sitar player and composer Anoushka Shankar, one of the stars of world music today. She studied exclusively with her father, the great Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar, made her debut at age 13 in New Delhi, and released her first solo recording in 1998. In 2001 her third album, Live at Carnegie Hall, was nominated for a Grammy award. In 2002 she appeared at the Royal Albert Hall in a tribute concert to the late George Harrison, conducting a new piece by her father which featured Eric Clapton on solo guitar. Until 2005 she was primarily a solo performer of Indian classical music, but in that year she branched out with her fourth album, Rise, a fusion of East and West employing both acoustic and electric instrumentation, on which she appeared as composer, arranger and producer. It won her another Grammy nomination. She toured extensively in the wake of the new album, forming the Anoushka Shankar Project to present her new non-classical ensemble works to a live audience, and in 2007 released another album, Breathing Under Water, in collaboration with the Indian-American producer Karsh Kale It features guest appearances by her father and her half-sister, Norah Jones. She now applies her expertise as a fine Indian classical musician to working with top-quality musicians from a range of traditions to create innovative music that appeals to a wide audience. She has just released her next album, Traveller.Her eclectic choices for Private Passions include piano pieces by Debussy and Erik Satie; the Andantino from Faure's Piano Trio, Op.120; a piece by Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate, a collaboration which she particularly admires; a raga played by her father; a flamenco piece, and Nick Cave's song 'Into My Arms'.

Broadcaster, John Peel discusses his personal music choices with Michael Berkeley in 1996 - drawn from the archive to mark 20 years of Private Passions.

Philosopher, Isaiah Berlin discusses his personal music choices with Michael Berkeley in 1996 - drawn from the archive to mark 20 years of Private Passions.

Michael Berkeley's guest is Anna Pavord, the distinguished writer about gardens and landscape. Her best-known book is The Tulip, a biography of the bulb that created a mania in the 17th century, but she's written extensively about plants, and places, and spent years as gardening columnist of the Independent. Her latest book "Landskipping: painters, ploughmen and places", is an exploration of how, through the ages, we have responded to the land. The programme is recorded on location in the landscape of west Dorset where Anna Pavord has lived, and gardened, for much of her life. She talks about what this landscape means to her, and why it is that we respond to certain kinds of natural beauty. She discusses her scholarly research into landscape mania in the 18th century, and tells moving personal stories too, such as the time she refused morphine after an operation for cancer, discovering that a mask of sweet peas was more effective - and much more pleasurable. Walking round her garden, Anna Pavord reflects on the therapeutic value - and marvelous madness - of a life spent gardening.Music choices include the Welsh Hymn Cwm Rhondda; the poet R.S.Thomas reading his own work; Bach's Wedding Cantata; two pieces by Schubert; Elgar's Cello Concerto - and a 1929 recording by Cleo Gibson: "I've got Ford engine movements in my hips".

Stephen Hugh-Jones is a fellow of King's College Cambridge and has spent 45 years researching - and living among - the Amazonian Indians who live on the Equator, in South-Eastern Colombia. They are still one of the most remote peoples on earth, and when Dr Hugh-Jones and his wife Christine first went to live there, in the late 1960s, this was a people, and a culture, completely untouched by modern life. This was partly because people were afraid of them; they had a reputation for being dangerous and cannibalistic.In fact, Dr Hugh-Jones discovered that really they were a pacific people, with a very sophisticated set of religious beliefs. And music is a key part of their religious ceremonies. For Private Passions, Stephen Hugh-Jones brings along musical instruments that he has brought back from Colombia, and recordings he has made of music there. He chooses, too, music which he took with him to listen to when he was living so far from home, particularly Bach - who caused a surprising reaction in the Amazon. Other choices include Purcell, Alfred Brendel playing Schubert, Beethoven's String Quartet No 15 in A minor, and Cuban music played by an African band. Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Janine di Giovanni has spent more than two decades reporting from some of the most dangerous places on earth: Sarajevo, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Iraq, and Syria. She's the Middle East Editor of Newsweek, and writes for the New York Times, as well as for glossy magazines - winning numerous prizes, including two Amnesty International Media Awards. She's also written seven books - including most recently "Dispatches from Syria: The Morning They Came for Us", a moving account of the horror, and boredom, of war: War means endless waiting, endless boredom. There is no electricity, so no television. You can't read. You can't see friends. You grow depressed but there is no treatment for it and it makes no sense to complain-everyone is as badly off as you. It's hard to fall in love, or rather, hard to stay in love.When she's not travelling, Janine di Giovanni lives in Paris, with her 12-year-old son. For Private Passions, Michael Berkeley met her earlier this summer on her brief visit to the Hay-on-Wye festival. In a moving interview, di Giovanni reveals how she deals with danger, and her deep belief in her Guardian Angel. The youngest of a large Italian-American family, Janine di Giovanni's sister died as a child; she talks about being brought up in the shadow of that death, feeling that she and her brother were lost, like Hansel and Gretel in the fairytale. She reflects too on love, and particularly her love for her son, and how they both cope with her journeys to the front line.Janine di Giovannni's music choices include Humperdinck's opera "Hansel and Gretel"; Glenn Gould playing Bach's "Goldberg Variations"; Schubert's Trio Op 100 (which she says captures the horror and pity of war); Mozart's Clarinet Concerto; and Jimi Hendrix's "Little Wing". Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Timberlake Wertenbaker is one of our leading playwrights, adapters and translators. Her parents were American, but she was brought up in Basque country in France and has spent much of her life in Greece. Not surprising, then, that her major theme is exile, displacement, flight. She's best known for her play about convicts in 18th century Australia, "Our Country's Good", which was first staged in the late 1980s and which was revived recently at the National Theatre. It has become a set text in schools, and in fact Wertenbaker's own daughter had to study it (refusing all help from her playwright mother).Timberlake Wertenbaker is well known to Radio 4 listeners as the adapter of the recent "War and Peace"; and her new work is a dramatization of "My Brilliant Friend" by the cult Italian writer Elena Ferrante, which will be broadcast as the Classic Serial on 31 July.In Private Passions, Timberlake Wertenbaker talks about her childhood in Basque country, and how that sense of being part of a political minority has influenced her life. She chooses music by Ravel which was inspired by a Basque dance, and a protest song by the Basque musician Mikel Leboa. She talks about the moving experience of seeing her work performed in prisons and chooses the prisoners' chorus from "Fidelio". And she reflects on how little has changed in the theatre since she began writing in terms of how few women playwrights ever get their work on stage. With Schubert, Beethoven, Nina Simone, Ravel, Leboa, and a moving work by the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis. Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Production for BBC Radio 3.