Many artists appear to be busying themselves flooding social media with homemade content. You’re quite absent from that – can you describe your Lockdown experience?

When I’m not in my Sheffield garden, I’m using Lockdown for intensive work on Bach’s English Suites, which we aim to record shortly after lockdown restrictions are lifted. It’s interesting to compare them with his French Suites, which I recorded in 2015. The English Suites make much greater virtuoso demands; four of them treat the gigue – which conventionally acts as the finale – as a brilliant fugue, and five of them (nos 2–5) open with a Prelude laid out on a vast scale and in style very much like a concerto. The sequence of movements shares the same scheme as Bach used for his Cello Suites, and suggests therefore a similar date of composition, around 1720, during Bach’s time at Cöthen when his instrumental show him at the height of his powers... Read more

Amongst your extensive pre-Delphian discography, you are probably best-known for your Messiaen recordings on the Unicorn label. Can you tell us about your more recent and remarkable find in Paris?

You can only imagine my amazement when working on Messiaen’s birdsong sketches I came across several pages of piano score written in a rapid and decisive handwriting: very obviously this was music not a birdsong notation. Once deciphered – no easy task as Messiaen had evidently worked in faint pencil – it was clear that the manuscript was in an advanced state of completion, meticulously detailed, even down to the pedalling and fingering. The piece is in Messiaen’s birdsong style, composed in 1961 a few years after the Catalogue d’oiseaux (1956-58), and I gave it the title La Fauvette Passerinette (Subalpine warbler) after its main protagonist.... Read more

You’ve enjoyed an illustrious career performing and recording music of the twentieth century. How is that you’ve more recently turned so much of your attention to Bach?

Recording all Messiaen’s works for piano was such an enormous undertaking that inevitably I found myself type-cast as a Messiaen ‘specialist’. This was with some justification, because since the recording (which I finished in 1993) I’ve produced no fewer than four books on Messiaen, the most recent being a study of Catalogue d’oiseaux, co-authored with Roderick Chadwick. Nonetheless I never saw it that way myself! Personally, I don’t find any contradiction between performing music by Bach or music by Messiaen. A love of Bach’s music goes back to my childhood.... Read more