Private Passions

Brought up in a comfortable suburb of Sheffield, Hugh Brody has spent his life travelling to the most inhospitable corners of the world. For more than ten years he lived among the peoples of the Arctic and sub-Arctic, learning their languages, discovering their ways of being in the world, and helping map their territories so they could claim land rights. He has also worked in isolated villages in the west of Ireland, in the southern Kalahari, on Skid Row in Edmonton, Canada, and in tribal communities in western India. He has explored these places over the last fifty-five years in a considerable body of work: more than a dozen films, dozens of essays, and ten books. The latest is a moving and beautifully written personal memoir, “Landscapes of Silence: from Childhood to the Arctic”. Married to the actress Juliet Stevenson, Hugh Brody now divides his time between Highgate, North London, and a house on the Suffolk coast, though he admits that he has never really “settled down”. Hugh Brody’s music choices include Beethoven, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Clara Schumann, and the music he heard every day when living with an Inuit family: Johnny Cash. Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

The author Diana Melly tells Michael Berkeley about her life lived on a rollercoaster: she has experienced passion, great friendships and celebrity but also depression, illness, heartbreak and the deaths of two of her children.Running through her life for 46 years was her enduring - but extremely complicated - marriage to the jazz musician and bon viveur George Melly, who died in 2007.She has written two novels, a searingly honest memoir, and has co-edited the letters of her friend Jean Rhys as well as campaigning for charities concerned with dementia and drug abuse. Diana Melly talks movingly about the deaths of her children and the happiness she and George found at the end of his life. And she describes her passion for trying new things late in life including ballroom dancing, philosophy and riding a tandem.But her greatest new passion, developed in her eighties, is for opera and she chooses her favourite arias by Puccini, Massenet, Mozart, Gluck and Verdi. And she reveals why, having been married to a jazzman for 46 years, there is no jazz on her music list.Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Todd Field began his career as a jazz musician and as an actor; he has appeared in over forty films, including Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” and Woody Allen’s “Radio Days”. He then went on to direct two full-length award-winning films, “In the Bedroom” - about grief and revenge in a close-knit family - and “Little Children”, starring Kate Winslet. Both were nominated for multiple Oscars. This week his third feature film “Tar” opens in Britain. Cate Blanchett stars as Lydia Tar, the conductor of a major German orchestra; the film is an exploration of the darker side of the classical music world, the power of the conductor, and of abusive power more generally – it’s also a celebration of some really wonderful music.In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Todd Field talks about how he started writing “Tar” by interviewing classical musicians, and particularly women working in the industry. He looks back on his “free-range” childhood in Oregon, and tells how his wife financed his ambition to become a film director by buying a truck, going round flea-markets, and starting an interior-design shop. He reveals the struggle to release his award-winning film “In the Bedroom” after Harvey Weinstein bought it and demanded more and more cuts. Field won the fight and retained the film he believed in, but it took six months and a fiendishly clever strategy invented by his friend Tom Cruise. Todd Field started out as a jazz musician in a big band, and his choices include two tracks by Sarah Vaughan, whom he met backstage at a concert in Oregon. Other choices include Mahler’s Symphony No 5; Elgar’s Cello Concerto; and Gorecki’s second string quartet, which played constantly in his head while making “Tar”. A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Rabbi, writer and broadcaster Jonathan Romain is minister of Maidenhead Synagogue and one of Britain's leading rabbis in Reform Judaism. He’s the author of twenty books – some scholarly and learned, and others which are very funny – revealing the ups and downs of his day-to-day work, in a way that will resonate with vicars, priests and religious leaders of any description. He’s become a kind of agony uncle, dispensing advice on love affairs, marriage, parenthood, and he’s written about all this in “Confessions of a Rabbi” and in his latest book, “The Naked Rabbi”. On the more serious side, he’s a prominent figure in the campaign for Assisted Dying, he was awarded an MBE for his work on inter-faith marriage, and he’s spent much of the last year working with Ukrainian refugees. In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Jonathan Romain talks about what he’s learned over the years as a rabbi about love and marriage, and why some of his views put him very much out on a limb. His playlist takes in Max Bruch, Leonard Cohen, Rimsky-Korsakov, and a tribute to his love of football. And he tells us his favourite Jewish joke. Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

The structural engineer and author Roma Agrawal tells Michael Berkeley about her passions for tall buildings, bridges, concrete and Indian classical dance. Roma Agrawal is a highly successful woman operating in what is still very much a man’s world. Her job is, essentially, to make sure that the buildings, bridges, roads and tunnels we use every day don’t collapse. She spent six years working out the incredibly complex structure of the spire and foundations of the Shard in London, the tallest building in western Europe. As well as engineering, Roma has another passion: she tells Michael about her lifelong love of the ancient Bharata Natyam form of Indian Classical Dance, and we hear the first piece of music she danced to as a child in Mumbai. She chooses songs by Abida Parveen, Anoushka Shankar and Nitin Sawhney as well as pieces by Tchaikovsky and by Carl Davis which drew her to Western music. Roma tells Michael about her campaign to encourage more women to become engineers, why she decided to speak out about the emotional and physical strain of IVF and how working on the Shard helped her overcome her fear of heights. Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

The geneticist and broadcaster Adam Rutherford tells Michael Berkeley how his passion for music allows him to escape the rigours of science and enjoy the emotional side of life. Adam Rutherford’s career in science has taken him from a PhD on the role of genetics in eye development to becoming a well-known broadcaster who campaigns against pseudoscience and racism.Presenter of Radio 4’s Start the Week and The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry, he’s also the author of six bestselling books; a lecturer at University College London; and the recipient of the Royal Society David Attenborough Award for outstanding public engagement with science.Adam shares some astonishing facts about our genes and our common ancestry: everyone of European descent is definitely directly descended from the eighth-century Emperor Charlemagne – and from the person who cleaned his boots. Adam was a music scholar at school and his passion for the violin started with lessons at the age of four and culminated in playing with his teacher in Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. We also hear his favourite piece of violin music, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. Adam is the President of Humanists UK but asks for music from his two musical gods, Bach and Radiohead. Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Simon Warrack travels the world restoring the most sacred and beautiful buildings. As a stonemason he’s worked on the Rose Window of Canterbury Cathedral, the Trevi fountain in Rome, and the Temple of Angkor Watt in Cambodia. Coming from a professionally musical family - his father is the music writer John Warrack, his grandfather was the composer and conductor Guy Warrack – it’s no surprise that classical music is very important to him. But after taking a degree in Renaissance History at Warwick, Simon discovered his own personal vocation, and he’s now pre-eminent as a stone carver and advisor on the restoration of temples and religious statues. He lives in Rome but is currently in Britain with a delegation from Cambodia who are examining the treasures of British museums to see how many of them were looted illegally and should go back. In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Simon Warrack talks about the joy and difficulty of cutting stone, and about how finding a pair of stone feet in the Cambodian jungle led him on a detective trail to discover how many religious artworks had been looted during the 1970s. Music choices include Mozart, Verdi, Elgar, Britten, Tippett and Vivaldi. Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

The writer Julia Blackburn talks to Michael Berkeley about how music helped her through her traumatic childhood and about the joy of late-flowering love.Julia Blackburn is the author of novels, poetry, plays and books about historical figures including Napoleon, Billie Holiday, Goya, and the Norfolk artist John Craske, as well as books about grief, her love of animals, and the natural world. She’s also published memoirs, including an astonishing book about her childhood, The Three of Us.Julia shares her love of Beethoven, Pergolesi, English folk song, music from central Africa, and the songs of Billie Holiday, which helped her through her a childhood marked by chaos and neglect. And she tells Michael Berkeley about the happiness she has found in bringing up her own children, and the delight she has found in love later in life. Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Stuart MacBride was born in Dumbarton and raised in Aberdeen; abandoning his studies to become an architect, he went to work on the oil rigs, scrubbing toilets. He then tried out careers as an actor, a web designer, and a computer programmer, all the while writing away after work – he wrote four novels before his first, Cold Granite, was published in 2005. Since then, he’s become one of our most successful and prolific crime writers, with twenty-four titles in all, sometimes labelled as “tartan noir”. His latest, about the hunt for a serial killer, is called No Less the Devil. Reviewers say things like “this isn’t a novel to read over dinner”, or “slick, gruesome and brutally intelligent.” Gruesome crime-writing apart, Stuart MacBride’s other notable achievements include winning Celebrity Mastermind (his subject was A.A. Milne) and coming first in the World Stovies Championship. In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Stuart MacBride reveals how his “very dull” childhood developed his imagination as a writer, and how he first discovered crime fiction in the Aberdeen public library. He went to the library every day, read under the covers at night, and borrowed new books the following morning, moving on from the Hardy Boys to Dashiell Hammett. For Stuart MacBride, music is essential; he listens continually when he works, and his latest novel was written entirely to the soundtrack of Wagner’s Ring. Alongside Wagner, choices include Beethoven, Purcell, Bruch and Holst. He also introduces music by the Australian composer Sean O’Boyle, a concerto for didgeridoo, which he loves because it’s so dark. Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

It’s hard to think of an artist with a more striking and ambitious range than William Kentridge; his work spans etching, drawing, collage, huge tapestries - as well as film, theatre, dance and opera. He was born in Johannesburg and brought up during the apartheid regime; his art is highly politically charged. His parents, both lawyers, were notable figures in the anti-apartheid movement – his father being Sir Sydney Kentridge, who represented Nelson Mandela. For forty years now William Kentridge has used his art to explore the legacy of colonialism, and the barbarity of war. He’s probably best known for his charcoal sketches, which become stop-go animations, preserving almost every change and rubbing-out. But he has a keen eye for the absurdity of life too, so we watch typewriters turn into trees, birds flying off the pages of dictionaries, or a film titled “Portrait of the artist as a coffee pot”. In conversation with Michael Berkeley, William Kentridge talks about the importance of music in his work, and brings a playlist that reflects a lifetime of listening. We hear a famous 1937 recording of a Monteverdi madrigal; Janet Baker singing one of the songs from “Les Nuits d’ete” by Berlioz; a duet from The Magic Flute; a rare recording of the American guitarist Elizabeth Cotten; and a collaboration between the Kronos Quartet and a trio of musicians from Mali. He looks back to his childhood in South Africa, and what it was like to grow up under the cruel system of apartheid; and he reveals how important early failures were in enabling him to see the way forward.A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke