This is the first of many enjoyable interviews with conductor, Tortelier, and it has a special place in my heart. At the time I was still quite new to interviewing and I remember pacing the hotel lobby thinking of the best way to start. Should I begin ...

With the composer and academic, Alexander Goehr, I admit, things didn’t get off to a good start. Unfortunately, due to personal worries, I hadn’t slept the previous night. At 4 a.m. I gave up, got up and went to work, feeling fed up and unshaven, stil...

Percussionist, Dame Evelyn, is another great artist I have met so often that I feel we are friends. This excerpt is takes from my second meeting in the summer of 1997 shortly before a concert she gave in Hong Kong for the handover.

On the way to...

Tan Dun is one of a handful of musicians I have interviewed so often that it now feels like talking to a friend. This is a clip from our very first encounter, back in April 1994. He was an emerging composer back then. I met him in the studios of the Ci...

Although my recent interviews with Ashknazy have focused more on his work as a conductor, and also, as panel chairman of the Hong Kong international Piano Competition, my first encounter, back in October 1995, was while he was still known first and for...

This is the first of many enjoyable interviews with conductor, Tortelier, and it has a special place in my heart. At the time I was still quite new to interviewing and I remember pacing the hotel lobby thinking of the best way to start. Should I begin with his father, the great cellist, Paul Tortelier? – surely he had been asked this a million times already. And yet it feel like the obvious way to start. In the event my fears proved unfounded. From the word go he was so passionate, so eager to get to the bottom of his relationship with his father that it all sounded as if he was being asked for the first time. He even seemed to have a new insight, a kind of breakthrough, in the course of our interview.

This, he declared, was the first time that he had seen that it was a ‘duel Freudian problem’ (but, of course!) – that it had worked out for the best.

It was a magical moment for me too.