Private Passions

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 this month.And music is central to her private life too, with two pianists and a DJ in her family. She chooses music by Dvorak, Janacek and Wagner associated with her theatre and opera productions, jazz performed by her partner, and tantalizing music performed on instruments made of ice. Producer: Jane GreenwoodA Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3.

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 played on the saxophone; and a joyful piece of African music from his childhood. Running through his music are the ideas of compression and the perfection of the miniature - themes that emerge time and time again in the cultural history of India in the lives of poets, musicians and miniature painters. Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3.

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, working, playing, laughing, eating, drinking, you assume you're in control. Things change though when the world topples from its axis and your glorious certitude that tomorrow will be as good as today is exposed as pitiful complacency.In Private Passions, Melanie Reid talks about adjusting to life after her accident, 'a painful rebirth'. Although music has been important to her since childhood, after the accident she found that for several years she could not listen to it - the emotional effect was unbearable. Now, though, she finds music inspiring and sustaining. Her choices include Jacqueline du Pré playing Bach's 1st Cello Suite; Beethoven's 'Emperor' Concerto; Gustav Holst's 'Planets' Suite, Nielsen's Violin Concerto, and Strauss's 'Four Last Songs'. In an inspiring conclusion to the programme, Melanie Reid talks about the happiness she has re-found recently, and the way her life has slowed down so that she can appreciate the beauty of nature, and the changing seasons. And she pays tribute to her loving husband and son, who both play the bagpipes - a cue to play a very untraditional take on the pipes from the Red Hot Chilli Pipers.Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3.

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 Britain by Woman's Hour, she has a mission to make the internet industry more open to other women - as she says:'The "internet industry" is only 30 years old. Yet what is supposed to be a democratising force is built on a platform of profound gender imbalance. Women occupy just 17 per cent of tech jobs in the UK. The people building the internet, the services we all use, are overwhelmingly men. We have a national digital skills crisis. There are 600,000 vacancies in the sector, forecast to rise to 1m by 2020. If we do not understand why, and try to rectify it, we are missing out on half the talent pool.'In Private Passions, Martha Lane Fox talks to Michael Berkeley about how and why, as the daughter of an Oxford don and gardening writer, she came to be a pioneer of the internet industry. She reveals her passion for karaoke. And she talks about the effect on her life of a car accident in Morocco. Music choices include Beethoven's Fidelio, Chopin's Nocturnes, Verdi's La Traviata, Scott Joplin, Ella Fitzgerald and Judy Garland's 'Get Happy' - a personal anthem.

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 true vocation of journalism and began a career that has spanned Picture Post, the Observer and Saga Magazine. She was also known to millions as the author of Cooking in a Bedsitter, first published in 1961 and still the bible of student cookery. Her music choices include Finlandia, invoking memories of another - happy - false start; a piece of Chopin played by her father; Mozart and Beethoven symphonies; and one of the few songs she and her much-loved husband Gavin Lyall both enjoyed. Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

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 Harris's most recent book is Dictator and it completes a trilogy about the Roman politician and philosopher Cicero, a project which has preoccupied him for 12 years.In Private Passions, he talks to Michael Berkeley about the underlying theme running through his work: what really interests him is power, and the rise and fall of political fortunes. He looks back on the extraordinary overnight success of Fatherland, and its less than enthusiastic reception in Germany. Robert Harris reveals, too, the importance of music when he is researching a new novel, and shares his excitement at the discovery of composers of the Spanish Baroque. Other music choices include Bach, Beethoven, John Barry, and Amy Winehouse. And a rousing extract from a speech which he believes to be the best piece of political rhetoric ever delivered - we hear why.A Loftus Media Production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke.

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 singing again after a gap of more than thirty years. And we hear Shirley singing with her late sister and collaborator Dolly. Her musical choices include Handel, Boyce, Praetorius and two moving field recordings she helped to make - songs from Mississippi Fred McDowell and a gypsy child in 1960s Sussex. Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Production for BBC Radio 3First broadcast in January 2016.

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 effect he has on his audience in places like the Festival Hall - he gets them all up and out of their seats and dancing. In Private Passions, Baaba Maal tells Michael Berkeley why he has a mission to get everybody on their feet, and how he wants to use his music to change minds and challenge political leaders. He remembers his childhood on the edge of the Sahara Desert, and the songs he learnt from his parents. And he reveals the shock - and excitement - of discovering classical music for the first time, and falling in love with Mozart and Beethoven. Other music choices include Fela Kuti, the Ensemble of Mali, and Miles Davis. Produced by Elizabeth BurkeA Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3.

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 from 1990, told the story of an 18th century composer who fell in love with a castrato. As well as the operas there are scores of instrumental pieces, piano concertos and choral works. They have wonderful titles: Humiliated and Insulted; The Destruction of Sodom - a piece for 8 horns and 2 wind machines. In Private Passions, Gerald Barry talks to Michael Berkeley about his childhood in a small village in the West of Ireland. It wasn't a musical household, but as a young boy he heard Clara Butt singing Handel on the radio and that was an awakening for him, 'a visitation'. From then on, he knew he wanted to be a composer, though he didn't even know the word. At the age of 14, he won a medal for composition - by taking a Mozart piano sonata and cutting it up, sticking it together again in random order. Barry went on to study with Stockhausen and the Argentinian composer Mauricio Kagel, and he talks about his struggle to make a living as a church organist in Cologne: he was fired, first for being Catholic, then for being late for 7.30am Mass. He gives a moving account of his mother dying, just as his first opera was performed. And he reflects on the woeful blandness of singing voices in the musical world now, compared with the countertenors and castrati of the past.Gerald Barry's marvellously idiosyncratic choices include Mozart, Alfred Deller, Clara Butt, William Byrd, a hymn setting by Stainer, and Oscar Wilde's letter from Reading Gaol, De Profundis, set by the contemporary composer Rzewski. He ends with a hilarious recording of the Red Army Choir singing 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary'.A Loftus Production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke.

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 barrier between art and entertainment, and above all, a simple, overriding passion for music.His stage shows - both in concert halls and in less conventional places such as old Cold-War German bunkers - are pretty dazzling affairs, and he appears dressed like a matinee idol in a silk robe and slippers. Chilly chooses music by Mahler, Michael Nyman and Scarlatti, and songs from Fauré, Dionne Warwick and Drake. He talks to Michael about musical genius, the art of rapping, and above all the endless possibilities and joy he finds in the piano. Produced by Jane Greenwood A Loftus Production for BBC Radio 3.