I’m tough and I guess I can be exasperating, like most conductors, but I don’t think I’m so difficult to work with. There are two things I’ve learnt in what I suppose must be confessed as middle age. The first is that I have very strong convictions about the music with which I work and I don’t find it difficult to have an opinion. I have an almost scary vision in my head of how music should sound and that comes over particularly in rehearsal. I always go into every project thinking that I don’t know the music well enough, but once I start working it’s all there. The second thing is that I hugely enjoy working with people, which is why I conduct.

You are now spending rather less time with early music. Why is that?

The economics of the business can be extremely frustrating—projects have to be put together in a very short space of time and the repertoire is in fact incredibly limited because of commercial considerations. Of course the repertoire for early music is vast, but we only play a tiny percentage of it and that increasingly frustrates me. That’s probably why I’m now only spending about a third of time working in that area; there are only a certain number of performances of, say, Acis and Galatea or the St. John Passion that you want to give in your life. And as many Goldberg readers will know we’ve done a lot of recorded work in the Spanish Renaissance, Praetorius, Schütz and all sorts of areas that are fantastic music but fundamentally un-commercial and arguably only really work in the marvellous churches for which they were designed. So I think at this stage in my life I’m happier to work in early music when I want to and the rest of the time I’m working with modern orchestras and opera companies. There, of course, the issues are different; the frustrations often lying in the practicalities of the way music is made. If I could get the best of both systems, incorporating into the mainstream the interest and flexibility of early music, and the desire to be more questioning about how we play music, I’d be a happy man. I’d also love to have the opportunity to work in Classical and Romantic music with period instruments, but it’s so hard to do that on a touring basis.

When you work with modern orchestras in Baroque or Classical repertoire, do you make a conscious attempt to instil period practice into them or is there not time to do that?