Private Passions

Michael Berkeley introduces a selection of former Private Passions guests talking about a particular opera they love. Artist Quentin Blake chose a duet between hero and villain from Act II of Verdi's 'Otello'; Joanna Lumley talks about the great quartet from Beethoven's 'Fidelio'; Scottish writer Janice Galloway says how she finds great satisfaction in seeing the rake Don Giovanni dispatched to Hell at the end of Mozart's opera; Jonathan Miller remembers the alarm he felt as a young and inexperienced opera director faced with putting singing animals on the stage in Janacek's 'The Cunning Little Vixen'; director Anthony Minghella chooses Cavaradossi's pre-execution aria 'E lucevan le stelle' from Puccini's 'Tosca'; children's writer David Almond loves the Greek myth of Orpheus and Euridice as imagined by Monteverdi; actress Maureen Lipman has a particular affection for the voice of Maria Callas in a brilliant coloratura aria from Rossini's 'The Barber of Seville', and Stephen Fry waxes lyrical over the tumultuous ending of Wagner's 'Tristan und Isolde'.