This Cultural Life Folgen

German-born British composer Max Richter tells John Wilson about his earliest musical influences, including the revelatory experience of first hearing Bach’s Double Violin concerto. He reveals how, growing up in Bedford in the early 1970s, a contemporary music-loving milkman would deliver albums by the likes of Philip Glass, John Cage and Steve Reich, musicians who helped inspire Max to pursue his interest in composition. He recalls the raw energy and political engagement of punk bands like Stiff Little Fingers and The Clash whose gigs he saw as a teenager; and how hearing German synthesiser-pioneers Kraftwerk on a BBC nature documentary sparked his interest in electronica. Max also pays tribute to the Italian composer Luciano Berio who tutored Max in Italy and honed his compositional skills. Max Richter is one of the world’s most successful contemporary composers, selling more than a million albums and clocking up over a billion streams. His melodic, evocative compositions have been heard in television soundtracks and films scores, including Arrival, Shutter Island, Mary Queen of Scots, Bridgerton and many more. His albums include Memoryhouse, The Blue Notebooks, the eight-hour-long composition Sleep, and Recomposed which reworked Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. He has also composed for theatre and ballet. Producer: Edwina Pitman

Since her breakthrough in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm, Nicole Kidman has played a hugely diverse array of roles - in arthouse films like Lars Von Trier’s Dogville and blockbusters including Paddington. She talks to John Wilson about the influence of some of the filmmakers with whom she worked, included Jane Campion who directed her in Portrait Of A Lady, and Stanley Kubrick who became a close friend after she starred, with her ex-husband Tom Cruise, in Eyes Wide Shut. Nicole Kidman recalls the making of Baz Luhrmann's musical Moulin Rouge and The Hours, the film for which she won the best actress Academy Award for her role as Virginia Woolf. She also discusses the excitement and fear she experienced on the London stage in the plays The Blue Room and Photograph 51.Producer: Edwina Pitman

As leader of rock band The Police, and as a multiple-Grammy winning solo artist, Sting has sold more than 100 million albums worldwide over his four decade career. In conversation with John Wilson, Sting explores some of the people and places that helped shape his creativity. He recalls his working class upbringing in the Tyneside shipbuilding communities, and how hearing The Beatles inspired his musical ambitions as a child. Sting explains why, at the height of their international success, he split The Police in the mid-eighties. He also reveals how Miles Davis and other jazz musicians, and classical composers including Bach and Prokofiev, inspired his new musical direction as a solo artist. Producer: Edwina Pitman