The trumpet came into my life by pure accident – there was no music in the family. My father happened to pass a music shop and saw a trumpet in the window, which reminded him of a Louis Armstrong concert that he’d been to and enjoyed. So he bought it for me, an eight year old.

Håkan Hardenberger. Photo © Marco Borggreve

My parents then went back and asked who could actually teach me and they were given the name Bo Nilsson, who was then a trumpet player with the Malmö Symphony Orchestra. My first lesson was no little 10-minute session though – it was one and a half hours, quite intense, but I just loved it. My mother has still got one of my assignments from school, where I wrote that I wanted to be a trumpet player when I grew up.

Apart from Nilsson, the trumpeters I really admired in my youth were people like Maurice André. He was the one. He sounded so unbelievable. We went to hear him quite early on when he played in southern Sweden, and I was soon collecting all his records. But one of the...