Indeed. As a teacher, he probably taught me more in one tutorial than anyone else could in a year. He could also be rather intimidating and it was that which sowed the first seeds that came to fruition in Four and Twenty Fiddlers some years later. At the end of one academic year, Dart called us all in and asked what he were going to do during the holidays. He wanted us to undertake some sort of research project and I said that I wanted to look at the violin in England during the seventeenth century. Dart got really quite annoyed, suggesting it was a pretty useless subject to tackle and that I’d find you could count the sources I’d find on the fingers of one hand. As an adolescent I was a rather obstinate and contrary sort of person, so I went off and did it.

I suppose the next step was the formation of the Parley of Instruments?

Well, no. I actually started as a member of a group called Ars Nova, which was very much a pioneering group. It existed for some years.

This was a period instrument group?

Yes, and like a lot of period instrument groups at that time we tried to do far too much, everything from a medieval programme one day, to eighteenth century music the next. Obviously, things like David Munrow’s Early Music Consort of London influenced it. It was a kind of compromise and I wasn’t that happy with it. The catalyst for the Parley’s formation was meeting Roy Goodman and realising that I wanted to devote my energies to a particular repertoire, a repertoire that would more closely reflect my interests as a musicologist.

The thing that must really have put the Parley on the map, as indeed it did Hyperion, was the famous Monteverdi disc?

Absolutely. I can no longer remember exactly how it came about, but I think we’d done a concert with Emma [Kirkby] of some Monteverdi, along with Purcell and Matthew Locke and it came just at the right time. There had not been many recordings of the smaller-scale Monteverdi works then, most of them being choir based. And of course I now realise that choral recordings of Monteverdi’s sacred works are very largely unhistorical. We had already done one record of Croft with David Thomas for Meridian, which was the first time I worked with Ted [Perry].