An interview to mark Berkeley's seventy-fifth birthday published in The Musical Times, May 1978. These are answers to written questions.

pd Fifteen years ago, on your sixtieth birthday, I ended a Musical Times article by saying that twentieth-century English music would be seriously incomplete without your work. That view has been confirmed for me by getting to know your earlier music better and by the new works you've written since then. So I think it's very satisfying to find that some of your larger pieces are now recorded: the Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, as well as the symphonies – the first three anyway – and the Concerto for one piano and orchestra. Do you feel that this is your most important public music, or would you equally like to see the operas and larger choral works on record and more widely performed?

lb I don't really attach more importance to works of longer duration or using larger forces than to small pieces, though I think it's necessary for a professional composer to be able to cope with them. They certainly make more impression on the public, and involve a much bigger effort en the composer's part, so it's gratifying that I am now being offered recordings of them.

pd Have there been any surprises in the way that your music has been received over the last fifty years? In other words, would you have expected your career to have turned out as it has done, after you decided to work exclusively in music and study with Nadia Boulanger?