When you love a teacher very much - as I did Olivier Messiaen - you do have to leave them.One of the things that separated me from Messiaen was my desire to create works with a big structure, a large symphonic sweep. His forms are wonderful, glorious mosaics, but again, I prefer narrative.

I get nervous before I conduct a concert, but then you just go out there and do it.

When I lose direction, it becomes very hard to write. I actually get a physical pain, as if my subconscious knows better. That may sound mystical and pretentious, but it's true.

The London music world isn't a particularly cohesive place. And when I'm composing, I'm not very friendly. I need isolation.

The feelings of being in the audience and being on the podium are very far apart. When you're onstage and something goes wrong, you can do something about it. In the audience, you just have to sit there, and if it's a disastrous performance, I'm the one that gets blamed.

Concerts are dangerous because anything can happen - which is one of the joys as well.

It's not only that I want to get things right when I'm composing but that my imagination often gets lost, and then I have to wait until I come back to the path. I think there's an internal force that makes a piece logical from beginning to end; I like to tell stories in music that are unexpected but also logical.