Private Passions

Olivia Harrison is a prizewinning film producer and charity director. Last year she published Came the Lightening, a poignant collection of twenty poems dedicated to her late husband George Harrison of the Beatles. George died in November 2001, at the age of just 58, and Olivia describes her poems as ‘thoughts, feelings and words about life and death, but mostly love and our journey to the end’. Olivia grew up in Los Angeles, and in her early 20s she joined A&M Records. She first met George in 1974 through her work, and went on to help run his Dark Horse record label. They married four years later. Olivia has protected George’s musical legacy since his death and continued the work of the Material World Foundation, the charity he founded 50 years ago. She also worked with Martin Scorsese to create an acclaimed, Emmy-winning documentary about George. Olivia's musical choices include Bach, Mozart and Ravi Shankar, as well as recordings from Mexico and Bulgaria.

Peter Frankopan is a historian who likes to take on big ideas, sweeping across many centuries and national boundaries. In his acclaimed book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, published in 2015, he argued that the Persian empire gave rise to the West and he explored the importance of the trading routes that linked Arabia and Asia to Europe, and how they spread ideas, culture and religion. The book was a bestseller in the UK, China and India and even inspired a musical collaboration between singer Katie Melua and students at Oxford, where Peter is professor of global history. His follow-up, The New Silk Roads: the Future and Present of the World investigated how economic power is shifting eastwards. More recently Peter has turned his attention to climate change. In The Earth Transformed he examined how it has dramatically shaped the development - and the demise - of civilisations across time. Peter's musical choices include works by Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Edward Naylor.

Rhiannon Giddens has won two Grammy awards for her folk music albums, and a Pulitzer Prize for her opera, Omar, proving that she’s a musician who can’t be quickly categorised. She grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, and as a singer, fiddle and banjo player, she’s been fired by a desire to chart and reclaim the stories of people whose contributions to American music have been overlooked or erased. Her musical journey originally had a rather different destination: she trained as a classical soprano at the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. Now she draws on all these musical traditions as a composer for ballet, opera and film. She also finds time for acting – appearing in the TV series Nashville about the tangled lives of country music stars – she presents podcasts and has even written children’s books.Her music choices include Bach, Dvorak, Duke Ellington and Stephen Sondheim.

Jeremy Deller is a difficult artist to pin down. He’s won the Turner Prize and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, but you’re just as likely to find his work on our streets as in a gallery. In 2016, marking the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, thousands of young men in World War One uniforms appeared unannounced in stations, shopping centres and towns across the UK. Each participant represented a soldier who died on 1 July 1916. Jeremy called this work We’re Here Because We’re Here. 15 years earlier, he recreated the clash between striking miners and police officers in the Battle of Orgreave. He’s toured a rusting car from a street bombing in Iraq around the USA, and in 2012 he created a life-sized inflatable version of Stonehenge which you could bounce on. His musical choices are suitably wide-ranging and sometimes unexpected: taking us on a journey with sounds from across the world, but including Beethoven, Monteverdi and Vaughan Williams.

Raynor Winn is a writer whose first book, The Salt Path, followed the remarkable 630-mile journey she and her husband Moth made around the South West Coastal Path. It was a story of endurance as they had lost their home, had little money and Moth had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. But they found solace in nature and kept putting one foot in front of the other, living for the now: a message that obviously chimed with readers, as the book became a bestseller and is currently being made into a film. Raynor has since written a sequel called The Wild Silence, about readjusting to four walls and normal life after that seminal walk, and Landlines where she and Moth again embark on a thousand-mile journey from Scotland back to the familiar shores of the South West Coast Path. Raynor's musical choices include works by Britten, Schubert and Vaughan Williams.

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.