A Biography

Why music? There was lot of it in my childhood home. My paternal grandfather was a part-time choral conductor, and my mother’s father was an above-average amateur pianist with a special love for Beethoven. I tried composing at around 8 or 9: at first impossibly ambitious attempts at symphonies which rarely got further than a couple of pages, and later a whole movement of a Concerto for Five Saxophones and Orchestra (needless to say, unperformed).

As a teenager I studied cello at the Northern School of Music, Manchester (later the Royal Northern College), and went on to study composition with Alexander Goehr at Leeds University. However composing soon dried up – I think I’d simply become too self-conscious. After a brief period working for the BBC’s vast Gramophone Library, I did a postgraduate course at Manchester University, researching and analysing Shostakovich’s String Quartets. Then two friends – the composer Robert Simpson and the record producer Andrew Keener – suggested I try musical journalism. This quickly grew into a full-time career.

Since then I’ve broadcast frequently for BBC Radio 3, 4 and World Service. Singling out the most enjoyable projects is hard, but I have to mention the series 14 programmes about the music of Anton Bruckner for the centenary of the composer’s death (1996), and the documentaries about the composers Dmitri Shostakovich (2006), Ralph Vaughan Williams (2008) – both nominated for, and the latter receiving a Sony Award (Gold). Until 2001 I doubled as a concert critic and newspaper journalist, writing regularly for The Independent, The Guardian, and Gramophone. During 1998-99 I was Chief Music Critic for The Scotsman. I still write for BBC Music Magazine, and (when time allows) books on music: titles include Bruckner Remembered (Faber), Mahler (Naxos) and Wagner (Naxos).

From 2003-5 I lectured in music at Exeter University – until, that is, the distressing announcement of the music department’s closure in 2006. In 2014 I was deeply honoured to be invited to join the late Roger Scruton’s Albany discussion group. Having my own ideas examined by some of the sharpest minds in the UK was daunting, at least at first, but it was through their encouragement that I finally found the courage to write How Shostakovich Changed My Mind (see below). I was also hugely impressed by how Roger was able to persuade people with sometimes very different opinions and positions to listen to and respond to each other respectfully.

I have now given up concert criticism (admittedly with some relief) and make my living entirely by writing and talking about music. Being regular presenter for Radio 3’s popular Discovering Music for fourteen years gave me particular pleasure, and the audience feedback was both encouraging and educational. I miss my work with the BBC, but invitations to give talks and interviews continue, mostly at concerts and festivals. I have particularly enjoyed doing concert-presentations and writing essays for Irina Knaster’s Aspect Foundation for Music and Arts in New York and in London, and I’m very much looking forward to working with Irina when her new concert hall/arts centre opens in London, with luck towards the end of 2027.

While recovering from a serious depressive episode in 1997 I found I was able to compose again. I consulted my friend, the Danish composer Per Nørgård, and have since taken advice and encouragement wherever I can find it. After the premiere of my orchestral piece Behemoth Dances by the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra in 2016, I realised this was getting serious. Since then my Angel’s Arc (2019), for clarinet and string quartet, has done particularly well, clocking up seven performances, in three different countries. This has been followed by my String Quartet (2021) premiered by the Brodsky Quartet, two ‘cat studies’, The Nimble and Roguish Paw (2023), for cor anglais and clarinet and ‘five ghost stories for five instruments’, Unquiet Sleepers (2024), premiered at the Australian Chamber Music Festival and given its UK premiere in London in 2025. Three choral pieces, The Miracle Tree, This Going Hence and To Wed Again, were premiered by the Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus in May 2025.

I’ve also been concentrating on improving my skills as a pianist, partly as a tool for illustrating talks on music, but also because it gives me so much pleasure in itself. My teacher, Graham Lloyd, has been a godsend. I particularly enjoy playing in chamber music, and accompanying my wife, Kate, a mezzo-soprano.

German is my second language, and I have occasionally worked as a translator: making English versions of the personal reminiscences included in my Bruckner Remembered, and providing the  English translation of Georg Trakl’s poem Sebastian im Traum printed in the score of Hans Werner’s Henze’s ‘Salzburg Night-music’ Sebastian im Traum (Chester 2005). More recently I translated poetry by Christian Lehnert, as set by Henze in his choral work An den Wind (2011).

Since my early teens I have suffered from bi-polar depression. However I believe firmly that intense involvement in music is one of the main factors that has enabled me to remain just this side of stable – at least most of the time.. With the help of my wife (a psychotherapist) and other specialists, I have explored the psychological and neurophysiological aspects of mental illness, and looked at how music can work upon us therapeutically, in the process throwing light on the way the human mind works, and even helping us make some kind of sense of our lives. I have explored these issues further in my work with The Musical Brain. Some of my – and others’ – thoughts on this can be heard in my radio documentary  Shostakovich: A Journey into Light. This was later expanded into the Rubery Award-winning book How Shostakovich Changed My Mind (Notting Hill, 2017). More recently I produced a book about Mahler’s Eighth Symphony and the world in which it was created: The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910 (Faber, 2019). A sequel to How Shostakovich Change My Mind, also published by Notting Hill, appeared in 2026, its title, Music Lessons: Seven Composers and What They Taught Me.