Private Passions

Thérèse Oulton burst on to the scene in 1984, fresh out of art school, with a highly-praised solo exhibition, which was followed three years later by a nomination for the Turner Prize.From the very beginning she has challenged the orthodoxies of both abstract and figurative painting. And her recent highly detailed landscapes find beauty even in a damaged, fragile earth, evoking both familiarity and strangeness.Her work is highly prized by collectors and is in major public collections around the world, including the Tate and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Thérèse talks to Michael Berkeley about her passion for Wagner, the physicality of music and painting, and the pleasure of listening to live music. Her music choices include Britten, Shostakovich, Wagner, Brecht and Mary Lou Williams - inspired by the time she spent waitressing at Ronnie Scott's as an art student.Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Helen Oyeyemi wrote her first novel The Icarus Girl, about a mixed race child and her imaginary friend, in secret, while she was still at school studying for her A levels. Four more novels have followed and, most recently, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, a collection of short stories. She appeared on Granta's Best of Young British Novelists list in 2013. Helen's twisted fairy tales possess a heightened reality, blurring the everyday and the fantastic, making her readers question what is real and what is unreal. In her world it's not just narrators that can be unreliable - even geography and time are unstable. She talks to Michael Berkeley about the pleasures of storytelling, the power of fairy tales and her passion for her adopted city of Prague, reflected in music by the Czech composer Martinu. And she chooses music that sparks her imagination from Rimsky-Korsakov, Offenbach, Elgar, and a South Korean rock band.Produced by Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Paterson Joseph bunked off school when he was thirteen and spent the next two years going to the local library instead, reading his way from Agatha Christie through to Alexander Pushkin. It was a good training for someone who's become one of our most versatile and successful actors. Paterson Joseph is well known from numerous Shakespeare productions at the RSC and the Royal Exchange Manchester, and from Casualty and Dr Who. He achieved notoriety as the grotesque boss Alan Johnson in Peep Show. Paterson Joseph has recently been touring America with a show that he's written himself, about one of his heroes - the black 18th-century London grocer and composer Ignatius Sancho. He talks to Michael Berkeley about why Sancho has been unjustly neglected, and what he thinks about "colour-blind" casting. Music choices include Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, Louis Armstrong, Bach, Charlie Mingus, Billie Holliday - and Ignatius Sancho. Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Lara Feigel made her name writing about the relationship between life, love, literature and history in London during the Second World War with her wonderfully titled and highly praised book The Love Charm of Bombs.Her latest, The Bitter Taste of Victory, returns to the 1940s and looks at British and American attempts to impose culture from abroad in the hope of 'civilising' post-war Germany. She talks to Michael Berkeley about what it was in her family history that drew her to writing about the Second World War, the perils of romanticizing it, and the emotional toll of engaging with such a distressing period of history. As well as Bach and Beethoven, Lara chooses music which reflects preoccupations and personalities in post-war Germany - Furtwängler's recording of Tristan und Isolde, a song from Marlene Dietrich, and music by Richard Strauss. Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Production for BBC Radio 3.

Grayson Perry burst into the public consciousness in 2003 when he accepted the Turner Prize with the words: 'It's about time a transvestite potter from Essex won the Turner.' Since then he's become celebrated for his beautiful, intricately decorated vases, which juxtapose images of innocence, obscenity and humour. He's worked across many other media as well - from tapestry to bronze, print-making to architecture, and the outrageously flamboyant frocks he wears when he goes out dressed as a woman are works of art in their own right.He chooses Tchaikovsky, Philip Glass, Marcello and Kathleen Ferrier and explores with Michael Berkeley the emotional power of music and memory; escaping an unhappy childhood; the fun of demystifying the art world; and the joys and perils of moving from rebel to national treasure. Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

As BBC Radio 3 celebrates 70 years of pioneering music and culture, Michael Berkeley travels to Sussex to meet Dame Joan Plowright for a special edition of Private Passions. Dame Joan's extraordinary six-decade career has taken her from the Royal Court Theatre to international movie stardom, via the West End, Broadway and the National Theatre. Along the way she has won a panoply of awards, including an Oscar nomination for The Enchanted April. In a moving and wide-ranging interview, Dame Joan shares memories of a life well-lived: from her childhood in Scunthorpe, to her work with figures such as Franco Zeffirelli, and the man who was to change the course of her life: Sir Laurence Olivier, whom she married in 1961. Looking back to the Third Programme, Private Passions has unearthed a clip of one of Dame Joan's signature performances, Margery Pinchwife from Wycherley's The Country Wife, broadcast in 1960. (Laurence Olivier himself was a leading member of the 'Third Programme Defence Society'.) Dame Joan reveals her love of music, with her since childhood, and now especially important since she lost her sight a few years ago. Many of her choices are associated with special friendships in her life. Where better to start than with 'Nimrod' from Elgar's Enigma Variations, a series of musical sketches depicting some of the composer's closest friends? Other music includes Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and William Walton's Cello Concerto. We also hear Olivier's electric (and highly musical) delivery of the St Crispin's Day speech, before Dame Joan herself recites, from memory, a Shakespeare sonnet: 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments...'.A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Jane Greenwood and Oliver Soden.

A former Turner Prize-nominee, George Shaw is renowned for his highly detailed approach and suburban subject matter, and for his idiosyncratic medium - Humbrol enamel paint, typically used to colour model trains and aeroplanes.Armed with a sketchbook, the teenage Shaw made regular day trips from his home in a caravan on a Coventry council estate to the National Gallery in order to draw from works by artists he found inspiring. He's now back at the National Gallery with a major exhibition, My Back to Nature, the culmination of a two-year residency. He has developed into one of Britain's most inspiring contemporary painters, a close observer of nature, with the sharp eye of a Freud or Hockney.He talks to Michael about the music that inspires his life and work and chooses works by Schubert, Elgar, Purcell and Brian Eno.Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

On this, the 15th anniversary of 9/11, Michael Berkeley's guest is Daniel Libeskind, a world-renowned architect, known for concert halls, opera sets, museums, hotels and universities. In 2003 Libeskind won an international competition to produce an overarching vision for buildings which would stand on the site of the Twin Towers. That vision is now almost complete, and includes a memorial to those who were killed in the attacks. He's called his plan "a site of memory, a healing of New York". Daniel Libeskind had already made his reputation with buildings that symbolised and preserved tragic histories, such as the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and the German Military Museum in Dresden. In Private Passions, he talks to Michael Berkeley about the day he first visited the site and climbed down into the crater left in the earth. He says that experience changed his life - he began to hear the voices of the dead. He talks about how he decided this should be a "sacred site", and that the footprint of the twin towers should never be built on. He reveals his concept of a light memorial to the dead, created by using shafts of light filtered through the spaces between skyscrapers. The sun strikes the ground at exactly the same times as the planes hit the towers. Daniel Libeskind is extraordinarily musical; in fact, a gifted accordionist, he was something of a musical prodigy. He decided to follow architecture instead, but is still inspired by music. His music choices include Renée Fleming singing "Amazing Grace", Perotin; the contemporary Finnish composer Saariaho, and Mark Padmore singing Bach's Cantata for the 16th Sunday after Trinity - so the right cantata for 11 September 2016. Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Steve Silberman is an award-winning investigative reporter based in San Francisco; he writes for The New Yorker, Nature, Wired and Time Magazine. He has spent ten years researching the untold history of autism for his book "Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently". Published last year, it won the biggest British prize for a non-fiction book, the Samuel Johnson prize, as well as many American awards. The book sets out to answer a deceptively simple question: why is so little understood about autism, 70 years after it was first discovered? Since writing it, Silberman has become an ally to thousands of people with autism who haven't had a voice, and for what's become known as "neurodiversity".In Private Passions, Steve Silberman talks to Michael Berkeley about his time listening to people with autism, trying to understand the world from their point of view. He discusses the connection between autism and eccentricity, and between autism and musical ability. He reveals too his own sense of being an outsider, growing up gay, and reminisces about years spent working as an assistant to the poet Allen Ginsberg. Steve Silberman's music choices are fascinating and unconventional, ranging from the 13th century to Steve Reich. He includes music by the contemporary American composer Lou Harrison, who was wonderfully eccentric - he built an American version of a gamelan out of hubcaps! Other music choices include Bill Evans with "Peace Piece" and "Timeless" by Oregon. Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Michael Berkeley welcomes the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, as his Private Passions. The first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly gay person to hold the post, she was appointed in 2009, having won many awards for her poetry collections since taking first prize in the National Poetry Competition in 1983. Most recently, 'Rapture' (2005) won the TS Eliot Prize, and her latest collection, 'The Bees', won the 2011 Costa Book Award for Poetry.Born into a Roman Catholic family in the Gorbals, a poor area of Glasgow, Carol Ann developed a passionate love of literature at school, and for a decade from the age of 16 she lived with the Liverpool poet Adrian Henri. She had two plays performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and received an honours degree in phoilosophy from the University of Liverpool. In 1996 she was appointed a lecturer in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University and later became creative director of its Writing School. She was appointed Poet Laureate in 2009. Her work as laureate includes poems on the MPs' expenses scandal, the deaths of the last British servicemen who fought in World War I, David Beckham's tendon injury, and the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. Her poems, which explore everyday experience and a rich fantasy life, are on the school curriculum in the UK.A keen music-lover, Carol Ann Duffy learnt the piano as a child. Her choices include Chopin's E major Etude Op.10 No.3, which her mother loved to hear her playing; extracts from Mozart's 'Marriage of Figaro' and and Christy Moore singing a song with words by W B Yeats. This edition, first broadcast in June 2012, is part of Radio 3's celebration of British music - Private Passions' guests this month are four poets from across the UK.