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Sarah Perry

Michael Berkeley鈥檚 guest is novelist Sarah Perry. With music by Bach, Dvorak, Hindemith and Brahms.

Sarah Perry鈥檚 novels are like extraordinary highly coloured dreams - or nightmares. Her bestseller The Essex Serpent features a mythical sea-creature that roams the Blackwater marshes, and the novel that followed, Melmoth, is a terrifying gothic tale with a female ghost who always seems to be just behind you, almost out of sight.

In Private Passions, Sarah Perry talks to Michael Berkeley about ghosts and Gothic nightmares, and admits that the ghost in Melmoth haunted her too. She wrote the book high on painkillers amidst the 鈥榯orment鈥 of spinal collapse, an experience of pain which thankfully she recovered from, but which has changed her view of life. She looks back on her upbringing in the Strict Baptist Chapel, in which popular culture was banned 鈥 but classical music was played on speakers so large they reached her shoulders, and Beethoven blasted her out of bed at night.

She talks too about Essex, and trying to live down the social shame of being an 鈥淓ssex Girl鈥 鈥 before realising that Essex girls have a proud tradition, and being an Essex girl was something to aspire to: loud, pleasure-loving, refusing to fit in.

Sarah Perry was a viola player as a child, and her music choices include one of Hindemith鈥檚 sonatas for viola 鈥 which she describes as 鈥渢he Essex girl of instruments鈥. She also loves late Beethoven quartets, and Dvorak, and Bach, and the contemporary composer Stephen Crowe, whose setting of fragments from Sappho is one of her choices. She hates jazz 鈥 well, almost all jazz. She invites us to hear the one track that completely seduced her.

A Loftus Media production for 大象传媒 Radio 3
Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Available now

35 minutes

Last on

Sun 1 Nov 2020 12:00

Music Played

  • Paul Hindemith

    Viola Sonata, Op.11 no.4 (1st mvt: Fantasie)

    Performer: Nobuko Imai. Performer: Roland P枚ntinen.
  • Ludwig van Beethoven

    String Quartet in E flat major, Op.127 (1st mvt: Maestoso)

    Ensemble: Alban Berg Quartett.
  • George Gershwin

    I Loves You, Porgy (Porgy and Bess)

    Ensemble: Bill Evans Trio.
  • Johannes Brahms

    Intermezzo in B minor, Op.119 no.1

    Performer: Anna Scott.
  • Anton铆n Dvo艡谩k

    Song to the Moon (Rusalka)

    Singer: Emalie Savoy. Orchestra: Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt. Conductor: Matthias Foremny.
  • Stephen Crowe

    Honeyvoiced Mythweaver

    Performer: Maximilian Ehrhardt. Conductor: Chloe Weiss.
  • Benedetto Marcello

    Concerto in D minor, BWV.974 (2nd mvt: Adagio)

    Performer: V铆kingur 脫lafsson. Music Arranger: Johann Sebastian Bach.

Broadcast

  • Sun 1 Nov 2020 12:00

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