Bryan Ferry has been a very familiar voice for more than 50 years, as the co-founder of Roxy Music and as a solo artist and songwriter.

When Roxy Music first appeared on Top of the Pops in 1972, millions of viewers suddenly saw something new: an extravagantly dressed band, featuring an early synthesizer, an oboe, and Bryan leading from an upright piano, wearing a sparkling black and green jacket. 'This one definitely arrived from Planet Mars', according to one critic. It was a performance which helped to propel Bryan to stardom, and a career which has produced two dozen studio albums, and numerous international hits, as well as explorations of jazz and the songs of Bob Dylan: his most recent release, Retrospective, includes a new version of Dylan’s 1965 song She Belongs to Me.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Bryan reflects on his early days in County Durham, the role of his art school education and his approach to song writing. His musical choices include works by Prokofiev, Elgar, Mahler and Charlie Parker.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Brian Cox has enjoyed a prolific career in theatre, film and television over the last 60 years.

Born in Dundee, he was obsessed by film from an early age and when he left school he worked behind the scenes at Dundee Rep theatre. He soon fell in love with the life he saw there and moved to London to train as an actor. Over the years he’s never been afraid to take on difficult, unlikeable characters, including Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter, Hermann Goering in Nuremberg and most recently the terrifying media tycoon and patriarch Logan Roy in the TV series Succession, for which he won a Golden Globe.

On stage Brian has played King Lear at the National Theatre and won Olivier awards for his performances in Titus Andronicus and Rat in the Skull. In 2023 he portrayed the composer J S Bach in a play called The Score at the Theatre Royal, Bath.

His musical choices include Bach, Mahler, Verdi and Joni Mitchell.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

(This is an extended version of a programme first broadcast in 2023.)

The American writer Garth Greenwell won widespread acclaim for his first novel, What Belongs to You, including the British Book Award for the Debut of the Year in 2016. This success would have surprised his high-school teachers in Kentucky. As a teenager, he failed English and decided to follow a very different path: he turned to singing and eventually trained as an opera singer.

Studying music led him back to literature – writing poems, novels and working as a teacher in Bulgaria. His most recent novel, Small Rain, focuses on a severe medical emergency which leads to deep meditations on our vulnerability, life and love.

Garth's musical passions include works by Mahler, Britten, Richard Strauss and the 16th century English composer John Taverner.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Sarah Ogilvie is a lexicographer and a proud and self-confessed word nerd: languages are her passion and are at the heart of her writing and scholarship.

She worked as an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary and went on to write a book about the thousands of volunteers around the world who submitted words for its first edition. She has researched endangered languages in Australia, North America and most recently Indonesia.

She is also the co-author of Gen Z Explained, where she analysed how 16-25-year-olds communicate with each other, in words, images and emojis. She’s currently a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford.

Her musical choices include Monteverdi, Allegri, Mozart and Nina Simone.

Presenter: Michael Berkeley Producer: Clare Walker

The costume designer Jenny Beavan has won three Academy Awards for three very different films: the elegant Merchant Ivory drama Room with a View; the post-apocalyptic Mad Max: Fury Road; and most recently the Disney film Cruella, for which she created a huge, vibrant parade of 1970s-inspired fashion.

She’s received a further nine Oscar nominations across her 40 year career. She found just the right top hat for Colin Firth in the King’s Speech and ditched the deerstalker in favour of a bowler for Robert Downey Jr in Sherlock Holmes. And despite claiming she has “never been interested in fashion”, she re-created striking Dior outfits for Mrs Harris Goes to Paris.

Jenny's music choices include Handel, Mendelssohn, Sondheim and - with a nod to the film the King's Speech - Beethoven.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Lucian Msamati has played leading roles on our most famous stages: Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus at the National Theatre, Iago in Othello at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Estragon opposite Ben Whishaw in Waiting for Godot at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London. He started out performing – in his words – ‘for farmers sitting on beer crates in rural Africa, with tables for a stage’. And when he decided to leave Zimbabwe, where he began his career, to see if he could make it in the UK, he had to work as a cleaner to pay the bills. His perseverance paid off: as well as success on stage, he's appeared in high-profile TV shows, including Game of Thrones and the Number One Ladies Detective Agency.

After his role in Amadeus, it’s no surprise to find Mozart among his musical passions, which also include Satie, Tchaikovsky and an unusual track by Stevie Wonder.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Jay Rayner has his dream job: he loves writing and he loves food, and for the past 25 years he’s been the restaurant critic for the Observer.

Jay is also familiar as a broadcaster, appearing as a judge on Masterchef, and hosting The Kitchen Cabinet on Radio 4. His recent book, Nights Out At Home, provides recipes to enable readers to create some of his favourite restaurant dishes in their own kitchens. He started out as a news journalist, after growing up in a house in which his mother – Claire Rayner – was a prolific magazine and newspaper columnist and the author of dozens of books.

Jay has a very public musical passion: he performs as a jazz pianist, leading his own band in venues around the country. His choices include music by Rimsky-Korsakov and Madeleine Dring, along with a classic Broadway overture and jazz from Michel Petrucciani.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Ann Cleeves is one of Britain’s most successful and prolific crime writers, reaching millions of readers around the world.

She’s reached millions of television viewers too, with series including Vera and Shetland, adapted from her books.

She has written on average a book a year for almost four decades, but success was anything but instant. She was 32 when her first title was published, and she only became a full-time writer in her early fifties. In 2017 she was awarded the Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association, the highest honour in British crime writing, and in 2022 received an OBE for services to reading and libraries.

Her choices include music by Britten and Elgar, a film score by Patrick Doyle and fiddle music from the Shetland Islands.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Artist and printmaker Norman Ackroyd was born in Leeds in 1938. He fell in love with the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales, riding around on his bicycle as a young boy and studied art despite his father believing it was a waste of time. He is now one of Britain's most acclaimed contemporary printmakers, with works in collections around the world including the Tate, Rijksmuseum and MoMA.

Norman has travelled all over the British Isles to visit what he calls "the farthest lands" which inspire his elemental etchings of rock formations in all weathers. His musical inspirations include Schubert, Beethoven, Bob Dylan and a BBC archive recording of Cwm Rhondda.

Thomas Adès is one of the UK’s foremost and most successful composers. His first opera, Powder Her Face, was premiered in 1995, when he was just 24. With its racy subject matter, based on the life of the Duchess of Argyll, it put him squarely on the musical map, winning widespread critical acclaim. His catalogue now includes almost 90 works, with commissions from the world’s leading orchestras and festivals, two further operas, The Tempest and The Exterminating Angel, and an epic ballet score for Wayne McGregor, Dante, based on the Divine Comedy.

To anticipate the UK premiere of his new work, Aquifer, at the 2024 BBC Proms, Thomas Adès talks to Michael Berkeley about his musical inspirations and passions, including works by Schubert, Chopin, Walton, Stravinsky, Berg and Harrison Birtwistle.

Producer Graham Rogers

The best-selling American writer Daniel Handler is perhaps better known by his pen name, Lemony Snicket.

Lemony is the cynical narrator of a thirteen book saga called A Series of Unfortunate Events. It’s the tale of three unlucky orphans, Violet, Klaus and Sonny Baudelaire, who are hounded by their guardian, the sinister Count Olaf. The books are a phenomenon, selling more than 70 million copies around the world, along with a film starring Jim Carrey and a series on Netflix.

Lemony has published many more books for children, and Daniel has also written seven novels for adults under his own name, as well as a screenplay inspired by Verdi’s Rigoletto.

He’s also a keen accordion player and has performed with bands including Death Cab for Cutie, the Decemberists and the Magnetic Fields.

Daniel has described himself as an ‘unrepentant classical zealot’ and his musical choices include Dvořák, Scriabin and Berlioz.