If the (British) Arts Council give you money, they also tell you how to spend it.

I just wish, maybe, that I'd started conducting earlier. I was about 40 when I started. Apart from that I don't really have any regrets. Is that bad?

Initially we performed in halls with capacities of 1,000.

I would like new people with new ideas to come into it and change it.

The awful thing about a conductor becoming geriatric is that you seem to become more desirable, not less.

So I've never found there was any particular separation between the two cultures at all, musically speaking.

Music is a continuum and the modern and avant-garde composers of today will be part of the standard repertoire 30 years from now.