Ruth Padel - Radio and Music

Radio and Music

Padel's radio work focusses on music, literature, nature and the environment. In Wild Things, a series of radio essays for Radio 3, she explored the myths and ecology of five British wild creatures. She has broadcast a series of BBC Radio 3 opera interval talks and has stated that if she could choose any other career it would be that of opera director. She has written on opera and a sixteenth-century madrigal for the London Review of Books, and in a Radio 3 essay series, Writers as Musicians, she spoke about playing viola, an instrument whose "inner voice" illustrates her Newcastle Poetry Lectures Silent Letters of the Alphabet,. For BBC Radio 4 she has written and presented features on writers, scientists and composers including Hans Christian Andersen, Edward Elgar, Charles Darwin and W.S. Gilbert. As guest on Desert Island Discs., chosen works included Beethoven String Quartet Opus 132, Verdi's Requiem, "Down by the Salley Gardens" sung by Kathleen Ferrier, "I’m Ready for You" sung by Muddy Waters, a Cretan folksong and "The Boys from Piraeus", from the film Never on Sunday. Her luxury was a herd of deer.