I don’t think there is any such contradiction, since the two aspects of my work are totally distinct, though the frameworks within which I carry them out are complementary. In the first place, authenticity is not my main objective. Authenticity is a means. My objective is to bring the beauty of music to as many people as possible, and this is made possible by recordings. At a concert, you are only reaching a limited number of people, no matter how well attended it is. With a recording, you reach everybody.

Don’t you think there are too many recordings based on historical criteria?

I don’t, no. What I do think is that there are too many recordings which are not, so to speak, “essential”. Discs often serve commercial purposes rather than providing an outlet for a specific artistic project. That’s really the main danger of the recording industry. Nowadays, a disc is less an artistic medium than a commercial one.

A friend of yours, the flautist Romà Escalas, once told me that the true importance of the approach taken by yourself and others lies not so much in the instruments you use as in the way you tackle the music...

Of course, but the choice of an old instrument or a modern one already conditions you. The instrument is important in that it encodes an expression, a structure or a way of communicating.

In a recent issue of this magazine [4], Hopkinson Smith was, I remember, full of praise for Glenn Gould’s versions of the works of Gibbons and Byrd. He described them as “a lesson”.

I’ve always had a great deal of admiration for Glenn Gould, though not so much for his playing style as for his love of detail, the care he puts into making even the most microscopic bit of the music comprehensible.

Even though he might be using an inappropriate instrument?

It’s that obsession with detail, along with his ability to express an overall vision of the music he is performing, which really constitutes his great lesson to us, regardless of all his problems and the mythical halo he has created around himself.

Musicians like you attach great importance to timbre and articulation in using instruments like the fortepiano or the natural horn. But don’t you sacrifice clarity by failing to take advantage of the possibilities offered by a Steinway or a French horn?

In a case like that, you lose in richness what you gain in ease of execution. Not just richness of timbre, either, but also the richness which affects character. Despite their limitations, the characteristics of a natural horn or a fortepiano fit in with what the composer imagined. Even when inventing new forms, a composer would always start from the means then available to him. That’s why it’s essential to hear the works played on the instruments they were written for.