Music has been a solace for me, countless times. There’s a sort of rationality about music, even the wilder stuff, that gives you a calming sense, when you’ve seen things you wish you hadn’t seen. I remember after the massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989 – I’d spent the whole preceding three weeks in the square with the students, and then watching them and other people just being mown down was a really, really difficult experience. To restore some sort of balance in your mental life after something like that, I found I was listening to, particularly, Brahms. I found that the symphonies were really good at bringing me back. It’s not all just beauty and charm, there is real force and drive behind them. The music that he wrote seemed to take in the wilder, more violent side of things and to show some kind of way to calmness and a conclusion. It’s probably silly, imaginative stuff on my part, but that’s certainly what I felt at the time. It was real, real therapy. And it worked.

‘I don’t want to give the impression that I go around like a vicar singing lots of hymns in difficult times, but the tunes are there with me a lot’

I did play the flute – not well, but it’s still pleasant even if you make awful squeaks and grunts, it still gives you a sense of achievement to get through a piece of music (though people on the other side of a thin hotel wall don’t necessarily see it that way!). I took my flute with me everywhere, but it got more difficult as security searches increased – you found yourself having to explain it, and put it together, and it just irritated me after a while. I did have a teacher for a bit, but that’s quite difficult when you’re travelling around and they get bored of being put off for the fifth time in a row. It was essentially just a little hobby, and I might as well have used a mouth organ – in fact I wish could play that as it is quite small and you can get away with that!

At school I remember singing in the choir: Brahms’s A German Requiem is in my head quite a bit all these years later. And all the old C of E hymns. And when things are difficult, and you’re stuck somewhere, trapped perhaps, you find yourself falling back on these things. It’s quite likely that the cameraman will say, ‘Stop whistling that bloody tune!’, and you say, ‘Terribly sorry’ – but it’s how you keep yourself together. I don’t want to give the impression that I go around like a vicar singing lots of hymns in difficult times, but the tunes are there with me a lot. It’s another part of trying to keep a grasp on what you would like to regard as reality at a time when things around you seem to be going a bit crazy. I remember a time in Afghanistan when we came under absolutely constant shelling for a long time. There are lots of nasty experiences you can have, but that sense of being shelled is really difficult. There’s a line in Homage to Catalonia where George Orwell talks about that, and says the shells seem to be speaking to you – ‘I’m coming for you’ – and you hear that in the sound of the shells or the mortars. It’s scary, and you’ve got to have some way of just keeping a grip. I don’t know how other people do it, but my way is to think of music, and it works really, really well.

I feel I kind of invented the Walkman, before it was actually invented! I was working at BBC radio, and they issued us all with the latest fantastic technology, which was a cassette machine; that was the thing you wanted, and you complained if your colleague was issued with one and you weren’t. So I used to record Radio 3 on to it, and go around with my rather unfeasibly large recorder listening to music with my headphones on, when nobody did that kind of thing. And then Sony invented it and I thought, ‘That’s old hat, I’ve been doing it for ages!’

I’m one of the last people to have an iPod, now they’ve phased them out – but I notice they’re still selling for vast amounts on eBay – and mine covers everything. I’m very keen on Bartók and Shostakovich. My good friend Nicholas Snowman is always trying to get me interested in really up-to-date, modern music, but it’s not quite my thing. We shared a room in my second year at Cambridge, and his huge thing then was opera (he later became the head of Glyndebourne), and he educated me in music as much as anybody educated me in anything else. I owe him a huge debt.

This article originally appeared in the February 2019 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue of the world's leading classical music magazine – subscribe today