I started off at eight years old at a choir school in Windsor [the Chapel Royal]. I continued as a music scholar at public school and then went to Oxford, where I was a choral scholar at Christ Church. It was at that time that I started getting very interested in early music; I suppose Oxford and Cambridge both foster a lot of impromptu groups that go for early music, and I started one that I called The Clerks’ Group.

That was in 1988?

Yes....

Can I just stop you there a moment, because this Oxbridge choral tradition is I think something we perhaps take for granted in this country, but since Goldberg has an international readership, there may be readers who are not so familiar with the background. Perhaps you could explain a little about it and what it meant to you personally.

Well, there are two aspects to it. The first is very practical; both as a treble and as a choral scholar you learn to sight-read. You have to sight-read very quickly, so being able pick up a piece of music and basically perform it after one rehearsal is something that influences the entire English choral world, I think. That’s something we could talk about for ages, and I think it is very important. The second is a more aesthetic thing, I suppose. It is that it becomes part of your very nature that worship is involved with music—with beautifully produced music—and one simply gains through knowledge of it a greater love for it. Having said that, I think there are distinct disadvantages to being brought up in the choral scholar tradition, and again these have two aspects. The first is that if you’re not careful, a group like The Clerks’ Group becomes labelled in a blanket way as being “an Oxbridge type of English group. ” That’s something that a lot of younger groups—and that includes The Clerks’ Group—really want to try to move away from. Secondly, there’s also the aspect that there is a flip-side to being able to sight-read very well, which is that sometimes there is a complacency about the approach to the music. If you can sing the notes therefore you can perform the music. In fact that’s absolutely wrong. In the last three years I’ve been conducting an amateur choir which has to work at a slightly slower pace because they can’t sight-read in the same way, and I find that enormously rewarding, because one can actually start to get inside the music. For the same reason, Continental groups that consist of singers who perhaps aren’t quite so adept at first-time reading sometimes have the benefit of being able to give more profound performances because they have perhaps struggled with them that little bit more. Now this brings me to something we’ll come to later, I think—notation reading, which I’m very enthusiastic about, partly because we are going have to struggle with the music because this is notation we’re not familiar with. So we will be learning the music brick by brick, breve by breve, and we’ll have an insight into it which sometimes simply through lack of time and our facility at reading the notes we don’t get in day-to-day performing.