Dreaming of Private Passions
The composer and broadcaster Michael Berkeley has presented Private Passions on BBC Radio 3 for thirty years, inviting celebrities to choose and discuss various pieces of music. The guests are all distinguished in their respective fields. I will never be invited to take part, but it is fun to play the game, so here are my choices, with the proviso that, with the infinitude of music to draw on, any set could be influenced by any number of factors, ranging from the weather to the season to the vagaries of relationships.
Mozart was one of the first names I learned in music. His Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was on one of the 78s we had when I was a child, with those chords ringing out from a teak wind-up gramophone that sat on the floor of our front room. Later, when trying to learn the piano, I accompanied someone on the clarinet in a version of the second movement from his Clarinet Quintet. I am not a pianist, but there is one opus I can just about manage, and there is a certain pleasure in making the notes that were composed so long ago come to life.
Mozart – Fantasia in D Minor, K 397 – Angela Hewitt
I wish I had progressed further with the piano, but with the excitement of the sixties I was drawn to the guitar. And this perhaps is why my next choice is Bob Dylan. I still have the Freewheelin’ LP which I bought on September 16th, 1965. And I still play Don’t think twice, it’s all right..... Bruce Langhorne’s guitar adds to the effect, but it is Dylan’s confident and articulate farewell to a relationship that is so memorable. It isn’t his greatest song, perhaps, but then given the breadth (and depth!) or his production over more than sixty years, which is?
Bob Dylan – Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
So, I played and sang through my teens, and I was in Dublin when the Dubliners were at their height, and I spent a memorable evening at the Old Triangle folk club where I met Luke Kelly. He had a wonderfully clear, controlled voice and as he closed his eyes, tilted back his head and let flow streams of perfectly balanced ballad history the place fell silent. This is a beautiful song, written by Phil Coulter, which, despite being steeped in Ireland’s contemporary history, touches my own past in my imagination.
The Dubliners featuring Luke Kelly – The Town I Loved So Well
I grew up to the Beatles, and they were absolutely a part of everyone’s life in the sixties. I sat though A Hard Day’s Night twice when it came out and hung on their every appearance on TV. John Lennon had the edge, for me, and on the day he died, some friends and I were involved in a car crash (in Italy) and it seemed that the lights had gone out. This song is an early one and is perhaps typical of the sixties where many pop songs were about holding hands or dancing or falling in love. It is perhaps significant, however, that one of his last recorded songs was entitled Woman – I guess some of us grow up?
The Beatles – Girl: Rubber Soul
On April 28, 1973, Bob Marley and the Wailers came to play in the Great Hall at Lancaster University. I was living and working in Manchester at the time, but went back up to Lancaster (where I had a toehold) for weekends and this was a great night. There was something quite new about this music.....
Bob Marley and The Wailers – No Woman, No Cry
Later I moved to Sheffield and would drink in the pubs down West Street on a Saturday night, and one had a juke box with Rod Stewart’s version of What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made A Loser Out Of Me), and the song touched something within me, (though I didn’t listen). My wife Amanda loved him too, and this recording of Have I told You Lately that I Love You? played her out at her funeral.
Rod Stewart – Have I told You Lately That I love You?
In 1976 I was appointed to teach at St George’s English School Rome, where my adult life took shape. And as time went by, I picked up the guitar again and formed a folk group with a friend and some of the students and we performed concerts for Amnesty International, involving my guests Adrian Mitchell, Roger McGough and then Adrian Henri, and with others at the Folk Studio and The Fiddler’s Elbow. They were good days, but I also became interested in Italian music, and history and I visited many churches and monasteries throughout Italy and learned about Palestrina.
Palestrina - Missa Papae Marcelli – Sistine Chapel Choir, Massimo Palombella
I also went to the Opera in Rome and ‘discovered’ the joys of Verdi and Puccini. And somehow this led back to Mozart. I had a journalist friend who insisted we went to see Joseph Losey’s film of Don Giovanni, in which Kiri te Kanawa played Donna Elvira. Later on, when we had moved back to the UK, I ran a school boarding house and Kiri’s son Tom was one of my charges. On Friday, 20th June, 1997, Amanda and I were invited to see Kiri at a gala performance at Hampton Court, a wonderful evening, with champagne in the dressing room after the show.
Mozart – Cosi Fan Tutte - Soave sia il vento – Kiri te Kanawa.
The supporting artist that night was Andrea Bocelli, and as Amanda was particularly taken with him, the music we played to introduce her funeral was La Voce del Silenzio.
Andrea Bocelli – La Voce del Silenzio
E chi ho tanto amato
Dal mare del silenzio
Ritorna come un'onda
Nei miei occhi
E quello che mi manca
Nel mare del silenzio
Mi manca sai molto di più…
When I lived in Italy, I learned the language, and loved the life, and music was all around. I particularly liked Francesco de Gregori and his friend Lucio Dalla, and more recently got hooked on a version of Alice, with Ligabue.
Francesco de Gregori, featuring Ligabue – Alice
As a counterpoint to this romanticism (which I acknowledge is a weakness) J S Bach is another of the masters to whom I listen again and again. But...... How does one choose? ‘Cello suites (as my brother Simon played at our mother’s funeral)? Organ works (my father and grandfather sometimes played these)? Piano works (as I still try to play)?
That is the difficulty. And while I don’t really understand it, I can immerse myself in St John Passion and let it wash right through me. The Matthew Passion, the Cantatas, etc, they all fill my mind with temporary glory, but I think St John is the best.
J S Bach – St John Passion – BWV 245 - Ruht Wohl, Ihr Heiligen Gebeine: The Choir of New College Oxford, Collegium Novum, Edward Higginbottom
And now, in a different vein, I include a song by John Prine, about whose sharply witty and humanely warm lyrics I knew nothing before his untimely death in 2020 during the Coronavirus pandemic. But his last song, written and recorded only shortly before his death helps me whenever I think back over all the private passions of my life. And it is also one I have learned to play, perhaps as a counterpart to the earlier Dylan track.
John Prine - I Remember Everything
And another song which is quite a different thing, though also strongly emotional. Elton John was not an artist I ever felt close to, but he is music, and some of his songs are inevitably a part of the backing tracks of our lives. Your Song is a sweet example of how he, and his associates, captivated us in the ‘70s. Pop music has an enormous reach, and in certain ways it is the twentieth century’s answer to all the opera house excitement in the days of Mozart and Puccini et al....
Elton John – Your Song
In closure, I would have chosen either Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia, an extraordinarily enduring work which a friend introduced to me when we were first at Lancaster University, or for The Symphony No. 9 in E minor, From the New World, Op. 95, B. 178, composed by Antonín Dvořák in 1893, partly because it was one of the first LPs my brother Simon bought to play on our ‘modern’ record player, and also because, a year or more since the death of my wife, I am now entering a new world, and that sense of entering fresh territory excites me and gives me hope.
However, the music which I would like to fade away with, is that of Chopin. Having visited the rooms in Vallombrosa, in Mallorca, where Chopin and Georges Sand spent an uncomfortable winter in 1839, I continue to wonder at the extraordinary melodic creativity that these pieces offer us. And at the profound melancholy that sometimes settles upon me. I just wish I could play it!
Chopin - Nocturne in G Major, Op. 37 No. 2 – played by Maurizio Pollini
All these pieces could be anyone’s choices, though anyone could choose infinite varieties of others. It’s a game. I feel bad about leaving out so many artists and songs (where are Joe Cocker - You Are So Beautiful; Dolly Parton - I Will Always Love You; Merle Haggard - That's The Way Love Goes; or Sandy Denny - Who Knows Where The Time Goes.... just for examples?)
It's just a game.
But ask for me tomorrow and you will find me a grave man......
Richard Gibbs
May 3rd 2025
