Private Passions

Original version

BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

Private Passions Podcast

Discussion & Talk

Music: Classical

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates, and talk about the influence music has had on their lives

Private Passions: Paco Peña

Music

Paco Peña

BBC Radio 3 - Private Passions, Paco Peña

Michael Berkeley's guest is flamenco master Paco Peña.

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates. Michael Berkeley is joined by flamenco master Paco Pena. With music by Bach, Beethoven and de Falla.

Paco Peña first started playing the guitar at the age of six; it was his older brother's guitar, and since there were nine children in the family, all living in two rooms in a crowded house in Córdoba, he had a ready-made audience right from the beginning. He made his first professional appearance at the age of twelve, and toured through Spain before moving to London in the 1960s, where he found himself sharing concerts with Jimi Hendrix. Over the last fifty years, he's established a world-wide reputation as a pre-eminent master of flamenco guitar. He's a composer, too, of both a requiem and a mass in flamenco style. 

In Private Passions, Paco Peña takes us back to the Spain of his childhood; this was only a few years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and he describes the country he was born into as "fragile and tortured". He talks too about making a living as a musician on the Costa Brava, where he met his wife, and about what it was like to arrive in London in the 1960s, a time when flamenco guitar was relatively unknown. 

Music choices include Mozart, Beethoven, de Falla - the Argentinian composer Eduardo Falú - and Bach, the composer Peña always listens to before going on stage to perform. He includes too the track he regards as flamenco at its quintessential best, by singer Camarón de la Isla and guitarist Paco de Lucía. And he gives away a few trade secrets about how to master passionate flamenco strumming - it involves painting your fingernails with glue. 

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3
Produced by Elizabeth Burke.


Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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