Private Passions

Robert Macfarlane is a writer and scholar who has spent years exploring the wild spaces of the world. In this location edition of Private Passions, he takes Michael Berkeley to an uninhabited island off the coast of Suffolk, Orfordness. It was a place used for military testing right up to the 1950s, and it's littered with abandoned rusty machinery and ruined observation towers; the wind scrapes across the debris and makes a kind of unearthly music. It's the perfect setting, then, to listen to music about wild spaces and bird calls: Mussorgsky's Night on a Bare Mountain and Messiaen's Abime des Oiseaux among them. Robert Macfarlane talks about feeling that he is walking with ghosts, particularly the ghost of poet Edward Thomas who died in the First World War. He introduces the music that Thomas listened to at the Front, Chopin's Berceuse (or Lullaby). The programme also includes a rare recording made in the 1950s on a rock far out into the Atlantic, of a group of Hebridean islanders singing psalms. Macfarlane is a Cambridge scholar and award-winning writer, as well as a climber, walker, and wild swimmer. He is extraordinarily eloquent when he introduces this atmospheric selection of music.First broadcast in July 2013.

Ruth Rogers has become one of our most celebrated cooks and best-selling food writers since she and her friend the late Rose Gray opened a modest cafe in West London more than twenty five years ago. Their modest ambition was to make the River Cafe the best Italian restaurant in the world. Since then Ruth Rogers has been instrumental in changing the way we think about Italian food in Britain.Ruth reveals how her musical passions bring together her love of Italy, food, family, and the human voice. Her choices of music include the joyous ode to wine from Don Giovanni; a contemporary opera chosen for her husband, the architect Richard Rogers; a moving piano tribute to her late son; and a Bob Dylan song which recalls the time, growing up in Woodstock, when she turned down his invitation to watch him rehearse.

Canadian-American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright can justifiably be described as a member of folk royalty. The son of Loudon Wainwright 3rd and the late Kate McGarrigle, he is also the nephew of Anna McGarrigle and brother of Martha Wainwright, all accomplished musicians in their own right. He describes about how he spent the first few weeks of his life sleeping in a guitar-case, sang with his family from an early age, and depended on them during the difficult periods of his life. His teenage years and his twenties heralded difficulties coming to terms with his sexuality and with drug addiction, but he continued to perform and write music throughout the hard times. Now married to artistic director Jorn Wiesbrodt, he is also a father of Lorca, whose mother is the daughter of Leonard Cohen. Obsessed with Verdi, he has composed his own opera, set Shakespeare sonnets to music and composed for the ballet.His choices include Verdi, Massenet, Messiaen, Nina Simone, Kurt Weill, Manuel de Falla, Berlioz and Judy Garland.

As part of British music season on Radio 3, poets from across the country talk about their musical passions with Michael Berkeley.Paul Muldoon, born and raised in Northern Ireland, is one of our most distinguished poets, having won the Pulitzer, TS Eliot and Irish Times Prizes. In this programme he celebrates his Northern Irish roots in music and poetry, and discusses his fascination with the place where popular and serious music meet.For five years he was professor of poetry at Oxford, and he now teaches at Princeton University in the USA, where he is writing libretti and goes to as many rock gigs as possible.Paul's choices include Lou Reed singing Kurt Weill, music from Stravinsky, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy, and a Metallica song played on four cellos.

As part of the British music season on Radio 3, poets from across the UK reveal their favourite music.Sean O'Brien is a perfect choice for Private Passions because his poems capture the musical soundscapes of the north-east of England where he lives: the cries of gulls, the wash of the sea, the rumble of trains. In fact he's obsessed by trains, and for O'Brien, like many other poets, journeys by train are an inspiration and a form of meditation. So one of his choices is Steve Reich's hypnotic work Different Trains, in which the composer mixes fragments of train whistles and announcements. Sean O'Brien's other choices include Little Feat, Schubert, Vaughan Williams, Debussy's La Mer, and Prokofiev's film music for Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, a film he first saw when skiving off games as a 16-year-old. He used to be a drummer in a rock band and likes to listen to everything very loud, so Miles Davies is the perfect soundtrack to Sunday mornings ... Michael Berkeley's guest Sean O'Brien reveals his Private Passions.

As part of British music season on Radio 3, poets from across the country reveal the music which inspires them. Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis has the unusual distinction of having written the largest poem in the world, and it's about music. The words are six feet tall, inscribed over the entrance to the Millennium Centre in Cardiff, the music venue designed by Zaha Hadid: 'In these stones horizons sing'. Gwyneth has a passion for opera and the human voice, a passion which began early when her father played his favourite operas on every car journey - the whole family would sing along. As a child she sang in her school choir, singing opera in Welsh. Gwyneth talks very movingly about the depression she has suffered throughout her life; it was music - and particularly a Brahms choral work (the Alto Rhapsody) which she says 'saved my life'. She reads a poem inspired by listening to opera singers, The Voice. And although she is Welsh through and through and she was for a time National Poet of Wales - she reveals that she doesn't have much time for Welsh music. Choices include Verdi, Poulenc, Brahms, Mozart, Bach, a French chanson - and one haunting Welsh folk song.Producer Elizabeth Burke First broadcast 02/06/2013.