Many people used to call me a child prodigy, but I never thought that. I knew that I had learned everything, that I had very good circumstances.

In contemporary music, the challenge for me is to make the recorder sound as naturally expressive as, for example, the violin - without doing it too much and forcing the instrument. It is very easy to be overly expressive on the recorder, and finding the balance is quite difficult.

You need to express things stronger today, more so than in the Baroque time, and you need to expand the expressiveness of the instrument.

To me, the advantage of the recorder is that it is so natural. I love the fact that it is just a piece of wood, that there are almost no mechanics involved.

Composers often think in terms of music and not of an instrument itself.

When I was very young, Denmark was a very small country, and we still are, but it was then very provincial and everybody knew everybody. Now, we are very much like the rest of the world, especially with the arrival of the internet.

I think that today, in Europe at least, people don't tend to think so much about the instrument that is producing the music; they are more interested to see if the musician actually has something to say.