CD: You said in another conversation that you started to compose because you love the sound of the orchestra, so I wonder if we can look at some of your orchestral music, starting with The Crazed Moon.

JA: That was the only slow piece I wrote at the time. Except for the second part of Diptych, most of my music between ‘88 and ‘98 was very fast. It was because of that list of adjectives I assembled describing my previous music. My teacher, John Lambert, said, ‘I do get bored of seeing music always at crotchet equals 40.’ Then, when I started writing the opposite, he said, ‘Hey, what happened?’ [Laughter]

CD: So what prompted the return to slow music?

JA: A friend of mine had died, a young composer called Graeme Smith, who was a lovely guy. He just dropped dead of a brain haemorrhage one evening on a railway platform. He was working as a freelance for a few years, and had decided to go back to study composition at postgraduate level. He was about to come study at the Royal College – not with me, but we knew each other well. He worked in Tower Records in Piccadilly. I remember, he found me the Reinbert de Leeuw recording of [Messiaen’s] La Transfiguration, which had just come out. I went to collect it and thank him, and that was the last conversation we ever had.