Private Passions

2023 marks the centenary of the composer György Ligeti's birth, and in this programme, first broadcast in 1997, he joined Michael Berkeley to share some of his musical passions. They include piano music by Beethoven, player piano music by Conlon Nancarrow, a thinking song by the Gbaya people of central Africa and gamelan music from Java. A Classic Arts production for BBC Radio 3 (revised repeat)

Isabella Tree is an author and travel writer. Her award-winning book Wilding: the Return of Nature to a British Farm, describes how she and her conservationist husband Charlie decided after many generations of intensive dairy and arable farming to undertake a pioneering experiment. They would rewild their 3,500 acre estate, Knepp in West Sussex – returning it to nature.Using herds of free-roaming animals to create new habitats, their rewilded land is now – more than 20 years later - a haven for wildlife and rare species like turtle-doves, nightingales and purple emperor butterflies. The estate has become central to the debate about how we look after and regenerate the land. Isabella is also a travel journalist and has written books about her journeys to Nepal, Mexico and Papua New Guinea. Her music choices include works by Schubert, Handel, Bach but also compositions made in response to the Knepp estate.

Alexander Polzin is a German sculptor, painter, costume and set designer. He began his career as a stonemason, but is now well known for his collaborations with writers, composers, choreographers and scientists. He has created sets, often drawing on his work in sculpture, for operas including Verdi’s Falstaff and Rigoletto, and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, for which he created huge illuminated stalactites, suspended above the stage. For a 2022 production of Mozart’s opera Mitridate in Copenhagen, the centrepiece was an enormous layered ochre-coloured rock formation, with which bodies merged or slid across. As a painter and sculptor, he’s enjoyed exhibitions in galleries around the world, and has collaborated with the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk, in 2016 and 2023. His work also appears in prominent public spaces, including his statue of Giordano Bruno in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin.

Naomi Alderman is a writer who likes to question established ways of thinking. In 2017 her novel The Power won the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for fiction. It imagines a world where women develop the ability to emit electric shocks from their fingers, leading to a worldwide reversal in the traditional balance of power between the sexes. The book became a global bestseller, and more recently a nine part TV drama. A sense of rebellion was evident in the title of her first novel, Disobedience: it’s tale of a woman who questions the conventions of the strict Orthodox Jewish community in which she grew up, and draws in part on Naomi’s own experiences. Along with four novels, Naomi created and written computer games, including Zombies, Run! This immersive app encourages you to improve your fitness – by running faster to escape predatory zombies. Naomi's musical choices include Mozart, Respighi, Bach and Stephen Sondheim.Photo of Naomi Alderman: Annabel Moeller.

Beccy Speight has been the chief executive officer of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds since 2019. It is the UK’s largest nature conservation charity with over a million members and manages more than 200 nature reserves providing a home to at least 18,500 species. Beccy began her work in the conservation sector when she joined the National Trust at the turn of the millennium. From 2014, she focused her energies on our trees and woods when she became Chief Executive at the Woodland Trust. She has said she moved on to the RSPB because she wanted to be ‘where the really big fights are in terms of our natural world’ – and where she could make a difference to something she cares deeply about. Beccy's musical choices include Elgar, Vaughan Williams and the folk singer Karine Polwart.

Author Kit de Waal was brought up in a working class family in the Moseley suburb of Birmingham in the 1960s and 70s. She talks to Michael Berkeley about how reading wasn’t part of her childhood; she didn’t discover a love of books until much later in life. Her bestselling first novel, My Name is Leon, written in her 40s, draws on her own childhood experiences and her early career as a legal worker in the foster care system, and she devoted some of the proceeds to setting up a scholarship for aspiring authors from working class backgrounds. Her music choices include tracks from classic film scores - her father was an avid film buff - including Rachmaninov, Gershwin and Oscar Hammerstein's Broadway version of Carmen, alongside Bach, Chopin and Miles Davis.Producer: Graham Rogers

Sarah Lee is a photographer, who was first given a camera on her 18th birthday. She taught herself how to use it by taking photographs for the student newspaper while studying for a degree in English Literature at University College London. The offer of free film and the use of a dark room proved irresistible. Since then her images, with their focus on people, have appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Time magazine and many more. She’s worked for the Guardian newspaper for more than 20 years and is an official photographer for the BAFTA awards. There she captures the likes of Nicole Kidman and Leonardo DiCaprio backstage or on the red carpet, in intimate black and white shots. Her musical choices range from Bach and Mozart to Scarlatti and Nina Simone.

Mary-Ann Ochota is an anthropologist and broadcaster. She is fascinated by what it means to be human and why we behave as we do. Her work has taken her around the world from the poorest parts of Dhaka and Delhi to the Chernobyl Nuclear disaster zone. She has lived with Yak herders in the high plains of Tibet and sailed across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Closer to home, she’s written two books about British archaeology, full of tips on how to read the landscape from ancient burial mounds to medieval woodlands. Landscapes have inspired some of her musical choices – from the Scottish Highlands to Mount Fuji in Japan.

Musician and writer Ben Watt released his first single when he was just 19. In 1981, on his first day as a student at Hull University, he met Tracey Thorn and together they formed the duo Everything But the Girl – taking their name from the slogan of a local furniture shop. Over the next twenty years, they had 12 top 40 singles and 7 top 20 albums. Since then Ben has experimented in dance and electronic music, run his own record label and returned to songwriting with the release of two solo albums. Ben has also written two acclaimed books. The first about his experience of a life-threatening autoimmune disease and the second, a poignant portrait of his parents. Most recently, he’s returned to making music with his wife Tracey Thorn in a new Everything But the Girl Album.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson was born in Washington DC. Her parents moved there in the Great Migration – when six million African Americans left the rural south to escape poor economic conditions and discrimination. Isabel later wrote about this exodus in her bestselling and widely acclaimed book The Warmth of Other Suns, the product of 15 years of research and more than 1200 interviews. She started out in newspapers as a reporter and feature writer, and in 1994 she became the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, when she was Chicago bureau chief of the New York Times. More recently she published her second book Caste: the Origins of our Discontents, an examination of racial stratification. The New York Times described it as the “keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far” and it also won praise from President Obama. Isabel's choices include works by Camille Saint-Saëns, John Coltrane, Philip Glass and Georg Philipp Telemann.