My uncle was a violinist for the London Symphony Orchestra so music is strong in the family. My earliest memories of classical music stem from my early teens. We had a very good music teacher at our school and it was there I learnt the piano for a couple of years. I think my first concert was Haydn’s Surprise Symphony, which is brilliant for school children because it’s fun and everyone jumps out of their seats. I remember being taken to the Royal Festival Hall in London for the first time and thinking I was not going to particularly enjoy it, and then being struck by the power and beauty of an orchestra playing live. It was something very special – quite different from anything I’d heard before on records or on tune-in radio.

Tragically, I went to a very ordinary comprehensive school where I learnt to play clarinet. Unfortunately, what I didn’t know at the time was that the school had somehow managed to acquire a job lot of pre-Boehm system clarinets – they must have hailed from before World War I, before they redesigned the clarinet to make it easier to play. So I was actually taught on...