Alexandra Harris on Private Passions with Michael Berkeley 29th November 2020

Michael Berkeley talks to Alexandra Harris, one of the very first Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers, about her passions for landscape, weather and music.

As the evenings draw in and the weather gets colder, Alexandra Harris could not be happier. There’s no greater fan of English weather – even the miserable cold, wet variety – so much so that she’s written a book about it – Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies.

Alexandra is a Professor of Literature at the University of Birmingham, is this year’s chair of the Forward Prizes for Poetry, and among her other highly praised books are a biography of Virginia Woolf, and Romantic Moderns, about the complex relationship between modernism and tradition in English art and literature, which won the Guardian First Book Award.

Alexandra tells Michael about her love of weather, winter and Schubert’s Winterreise, and about the music that conjures up the English landscapes that mean so much to her: we hear pieces by Britten, by the violinist Laura Cannell and by the Norfolk composer Simon Rowland-Jones.

Alexandra’s twin passions, for early church music and for the quiet of the evening, are brought together in music by Tallis written for the monastic service of Compline – and she acknowledges how lucky she is to be able to listen to it in the warmth and comfort of her home rather than in a freezing medieval monastery.

Producer: Jane Greenwood

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3