Historically it seems right to begin at the very outset of the Italian baroque, with Monteverdi. At the other end of our time scale, we have occasionally played Mozart, but that experiment wasn’t always completely convincing. The divertimenti are fine, but for much of Mozart’s music there are fundamental differences which are really not within our compass. And before Monteverdi, the music of the early seventeenth century is still mostly vocal, more Renaissance than baroque.

My real interest is in instrumental music. I am not a singer and I feel that I don’t know enough about singing to be entirely at ease directing vocal music: I would rather leave that to René Jacobs and Véronique Carroz. The only problem is that festival directors are constantly asking us to bring along some singers. Audiences like vocal music, and it is true that our most successful recording is the Vivaldi Stabat Mater with Andreas Scholl.

Is the fact that you are one of the rare women conductors to lead your own ensemble important for you – and for others?

Yes, I am sure it is. To begin with, women — but this is not only true in the world of music — almost never, no matter how happy a marriage they may have, have the sort of back-up in their private lives that many men do. The devoted wife who takes care of all the logistics simply doesn’t have a male equivalent. The only exception to that rule I know is the organist Marie-Claire Alain. I am fortunate because I have a life outside music. I was there for the student revolts of 1968; I love to go to the theatre — and most important, I have a child. Whatever else we do, the fact of becoming, of being a mother changes us profoundly. The most wonderful thing I have ever done is to have a child.

Creative women have always had difficulties being recognised. It is better for performers (for whom the “only” obstacle, in addition to those faced equally by men, comes with the practical difficulties of leading what is often a double life.) As a conductor with a small ensemble there is no problem, but even if I were interested in nineteenth or twentieth-century symphonic music, I can’t really see myself conducting a huge orchestra, with 120 men in front of me. That requires a tremendous amount of pure strength, too much, without even speaking of the misogyny that persists in some of those orchestras, Berlin and Vienna to begin with.

Even there, I think the situation is beginning to change. It will probably take another generation, and then things will be different. With 415, in any case, I feel absolutely no problems. True, a few festival directors remain ambivalent about an ensemble led by a woman. They don’t express their reticence in so many words, but you sense that they would be happier with a male conductor. LIESL GRAZ