Private Passions

Asif Khan is a world-renowned architect and designer whose work inspired a recent headline – ‘is there anything Asif Khan can’t transform?’.
His current projects include the re-invention of the former Smithfield meat market into the new London Museum, and the extensive renewal of the Barbican Centre. Further afield, in Kazakhstan, he’s turned a vast former Soviet cinema into a new cultural centre.
He opened his own studio in 2007, and has designed exhibitions, temporary pavilions and installations around the world. He views architecture as a multidisciplinary field, bringing together design, science and art.
His musical choices include Chopin, Shostakovich, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Brian Eno.
Producer: Katy Hickman

Philippa Gregory has been called the ‘Queen of Historical Fiction’. The English royal court has inspired many of her best-selling titles, and she’s written sixteen novels about the Plantagenets and Tudors. One of them – The Other Boleyn Girl – became a BBC TV drama and a Hollywood movie starring Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman.
This success probably surprised her A level teachers: she says she found history ‘insanely boring’ at school, but her passion was fired at university. She’s also written non-fiction, notably seeking the stories of what she calls ‘normal women’ over 900 years. More recently she’s returned to the Tudors, with a novel called Boleyn Traitor, focussing on the intrigue surrounding Anne’s sister-in-law, Jane.
Her music choices include Mozart, Philip Glass, Scott Joplin and the Mazurka from Coppelia by Leo Delibes.
Producer: Katy Hickman

Richard Stokes has been passionate about song since he was a teenager – although, as he readily admits, he’s not a great singer. Instead, he’s become one of the world’s leading authorities on German art songs – or lieder – and has also co-written books on English, French and Spanish songs.
His work as a translator includes the complete Bach cantatas and the complete songs of Hugo Wolf, as well as operas by Wagner and Berg. He also collaborated with the pianist Alfred Brendel on translations of his poetry. Since 2006 he’s coached young singers at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he’s Professor of Lieder.
His choices include music by Bach, Mahler and Stravinsky.
Presenter Michael Berkeley
Producer Graham Rogers

The botanist Dr Sandra Knapp is a senior researcher at the Natural History Museum - but that title doesn’t convey the sheer adventure of her work. She’s a kind of Indiana Jones of the plant world, travelling to remote regions of Central and Southern America and beyond. Her speciality is the Solanum genus, which includes potatoes, tomatoes and aubergines – and she has found and named more than a hundred new varieties.
The rainforests, where she has worked for more than 40 years, are a long way from the dry rural deserts of New Mexico, where she was born.
Her music choices include works by Mozart, Brahms, Hindemith and Holst, as well as music inspired by the biodata of some of her beloved plants.
Presenter Michael Berkeley
Producer Katy Hickman

Paul Chahidi is an actor whose versatility shines through in prize-winning performances from Shakespeare to satire. He delighted West End and Broadway audiences as Maria in Twelfth Night and won acclaim from filmgoers as the hapless Nikolai Bulganin in The Death of Stalin. On TV, he’s played a well-meaning vicar in the BAFTA-winning This Country, an archangel in Good Omens, and he’s currently a spook in the BBC thriller The Night Manager.
Such shape-shifting came early: Paul was born Ghiv Khatib-Chahidi in Iran before moving as a child to the Oxford countryside. He studied Arabic and Persian at university with an eye to becoming a foreign correspondent, before the lure of Shakespeare and Sondheim won him over.
His choices include music from Iran, as well as Vaughan Williams, Chopin, Beethoven and Palestrina.
Presenter Michael Berkeley
Producer Katy Hickman