Last year you marked 20 years as Artistic Director of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen – congratulations! What defines them?

One of the things is incredible versatility, particularly when it comes to truly understanding ‘HIP’ – historically informed performance practice of course, but the people are pretty hip too! This orchestra really understands it. They use the right instruments, or if they do decide not to use natural horns, for example, they know how to make them sound like natural horns. This opens up a lot of interpretive possibilities, because you are constantly dancing between the Romantic and the Classical, plus a little hint of Baroque.

Making recordings with them is clearly hugely important to you.

You know, even if we are sold out in Bremen every night, it’s still only a limited number of people. And these recordings travel for us – they do the work of introducing us in the places that we will most likely never visit. I get to look at the statistics from the streaming services, and there are people listening in Iran, in Africa – the reach is there. The other thing is that for me, recording has always been a posterity issue as well – it’s never been about money, it’s never been about even marketing, it’s about presenting yourself and what you have done with a particular orchestra.

Do you find intense immersion in a composer’s music – like for Haydn’s ‘London’ symphonies – is important?

Absolutely. Very often, in order to really feel comfortable with the language, you need to have enough time to speak that language. It really helps, if you’re recording Haydn’s symphonies for example, that you don’t do it just for one week and then in the middle something entirely different. For other conductors, in order to make life more interesting for the audience as well, they do other things with the orchestra, but with me, I always take a project and I will try to stick to it until we’re finished, then we do something else.

Tell us about your rehearsal space, which is really quite special.

We were looking for a rehearsal space, a home, in the city of Bremen, and what the orchestra and the city came up with was a school about 30 minutes away from the centre, in an underprivileged neighbourhood, where there was a large gym. The city renovated it for us as a studio, but it’s physically connected to the school. So we hear the bells ringing, the students come to the rehearsals every day, we are living inside their school. The orchestra eat in the student’s cafeteria. You can see people growing up, it’s a very unique way of connecting to young people. It’s a life changing experience – you can see it in their eyes, they are totally taken by the music.