Private Passions - Barbara Stocking

Michael Berkeley's guest today is Dame Barbara Stocking, Chief Executive Officer of Oxfam. Born into a working-class Methodist family in Rugby, she grew up with a strong sense of the values of community and of helping other people, and after studying at Cambridge and Wisconsin Universities she decided to make a career in international development. She worked first on the Science and Heath programme in the USA, then for the NHS and the World Health Organization, before becoming in 2001 the first woman to take the helm at Oxfam, one of the UK's best-known international development charities. Music has always been a passion. She learnt the piano at school, where she first sang in Bach's B minor Mass (her first choice), and then discovered opera while studying at Cambridge. Today her love of opera is represented by an aria from Mozart's 'Marriage of Figaro', while Mozart features again with his last piano concerto, No.27 in B flat, played by Daniel Barenboim, who Barbara Stocking greatly admires for his work in the Middle East. The beautiful Notturno from Borodin's Second String Quartet reminds her of early dates with her husband, when they often went to chamber music concerts, while the importance of countries such as Africa and Latin America in her life is represented by the South African national anthem sung by women of the Calabash; Agustin Lara's 'Granada', sung by Jose Carreras at the famous Three Tenors concert at the 1990 World Cup, and finally music by Juan Luis Guerra, an artist she discovered recently in the Dominican Republic after visiting post-earthquake Haiti.