When I finished St Mary’s I was originally thinking of going somewhere like Cambridge or to do a joint course between Manchester University and RNCM. About three months before I left I won the Piano section of The Young Musician of the Year and it gave obviously a lot of publicity to me and I really just wanted to take a year out because I had a lot of concerts lined up as a result, I just thought it would be fun and also it would give me time to think about what I wanted to do next. At the end of that year I decided to actually go to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, I think if I’m really honest about it, the reason I went is because it was free. Its one of the very few places in the world which is entirely scholarship entrance, it’s about eighty years old now, this Institution, and it was started with a very large endowment, and I thought it would be fun. Now initially I thought I would go for about a year and I thought maybe I don’t need to get the actual result, I’d just come back and do something else. It ended up of course, I didn’t return to the United Kingdom until the year 2000 and I went to Curtis in the year 1989 so I ended up spending eleven years in the States in total. I did my undergraduate degree at the Curtis Institute then I went to Harvard where I did a PhD, and I got that in 1999. You are probably wondering why I said I didn’t do a masters, its because the Harvard program had basically, regardless of where you entered from, you do two years which is equivalent to masters and then you go into a PhD. I had this itch to move back to the UK and I think I was also at that point in my life where I realized that I would either spend the rest of my life in the United States or come back to the UK and I really, at heart, didn’t want to live in the United States. 

My composition teacher at the Institute was Ned Rorem who is not that well known here in the United Kingdom, but is obviously a very high profile composer in the United States and he has in fact, just had his eightieth birthday here with lots of performances. He was a completely different teacher from Geoffrey King and I did enjoy my lessons with him but he had a very specific way of teaching which might seem, I’ll explain what a lesson was like, for a start we would go to visit him in New York and that was paid for by the Curtis Institute, so that was quite nice, I quite enjoyed my weekly visits to New York. He had three students, he would make us all lunch which was very nice and we’d always do that, so we would have lunch at about twelve, and then we would end up talking for a little around about one and he would then take us into his drawing room and we would sit around the piano and the lessons would actually take place at the piano, so regarding writing, it could be a piece for hundred instruments, the music would be on the music stand and I would have to play it, and he would make all kinds of comments. That was a very different style of teaching from someone like Jeffrey King, sitting at the desk and very kind of fine details, and in my own teaching style I tend to be more like Geoffrey King than Ned Rorem. I did like Ned Rorem very much and he did force me to think as well, he could be quite provocative, he was very interested in being as simple as they could be, but not simplistic. When I was at Harvard I studied with Mary Debdoski who was much more hands on than anyone else and I enjoyed that very much, that was really my last teacher.

I kept on studying the piano, I wouldn’t say I learned the piano at Curtis because it had been my main kind of bastion for technique, but I did enjoy my piano teacher while I was at Curtis. Towards the end of my time I began to find more and more that I was veering towards being a composer and not a pianist. I think it was for that reason that it seemed like the right kind of thing to go to a place like Harvard, although I still was playing a lot, I got to a particular stage, in 1993, and I remember this, where I felt something was going to happen, I had a really crazy month where I had to go three times to Europe including one trip to Greece, to play the Scottish First Piano Concerto and I was finishing a commission as well. I was going to have a physical breakdown, but as much as I enjoy the piano, I’m very comfortable sitting next to one, I like it, but I really wanted to be a composer and I felt that I was in real danger of not doing either of them, so it was a natural decision and it was interesting, I’d foreshadowed that because in the late 1980’s I kept getting asked by interviewers ‘Which are you going to choose composition or piano, you need to choose’ and I said that if ever it comes to a point in my life where I’ll choose, I think it will be a very easy decision, in a sense that it will be made for me, and it was, it was very natural, I don’t regret it, I had a fantastic time playing piano I played at the Albert Hall, The Proms, I think I regret maybe not having ever performed Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto but I did enjoy that side of it, but I am much happier being a composer.

I think because of my relationship with Boosey & Hawkes I was still getting performances and commissions here and it was a bit of both. Its actually very interesting to me since moving back to the UK, I am still getting American commissions and I wrote my first string quartet for an American group last year, I’m just about to begin my fourth string quartet for another American group and its kind of interesting that, but you’re right, I think it’s a very different kind of scene, people often ask where its easier to get performances and it’s a hard one to answer that. I think there are some UK composers, I was thinking of someone like James McMillan who has been very successful in the States and gets really a lot of performances there, then obviously there are some composers who you would expect to get more performances in the States who perhaps don’t, and visa-versa, I mean Ned Rorem is a good example of a widely performed composer who isn’t performed as much as you would expect him to be here.

Is there a relationship between your piano-playing and your composition? My relationship between the piano and composition is an interesting one and it is worth going back a little bit further to my teenage years, where I think I made a very conscious decision not to write much for piano, especially after those initial pieces I had written. Most of the music I wrote when I was at High School didn’t involve composing, and I was quite conscious that I wanted to keep it apart, and this went on for quite some time and I did, in my early twenties, sorry late teens, I wrote a few piano pieces and occasionally I would get a commission for a solo piano piece and I would do it, I wrote my piano concerto in 1993 and that was really my largest scale piano work up until that point. There has always been an attachment between my pianism and my composition, for a start I don’t actually compose on the piano, if I am writing a piano piece I will often try things on the keyboard, but not always, I have just finished a piano quartet which was firstly commissioned as a concerto for a piano and a string quartet, they wanted the piano part to be quite bravura and I am actually going to be playing the premier myself, but I didn’t compose it at all at the piano. I use the piano to check pitches and chords but I will never sit down and actually improvise, which I can do, I think one of the things is that I worry that improvisation, while a lot of fun to do, isn’t particularly interesting for me musically, and the way that I think compositionally is very much based from the point of view of the manuscript paper and the imagination. So I use the piano when I want things but on the whole it’s my inner ear that I use as my guide when I compose.