Alexandra Harris
b'
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\\u2019s no greater fan of English weather \\u2013 even the miserable cold, wet variety \\u2013 so much so that she\\u2019s written a book about it \\u2013 Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies.
Alexandra is a Professor of Literature at the University of Birmingham, is this year\\u2019s 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\\u2019s 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\\u2019s 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 \\u2013 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\\nA Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3
'