[laughs] Well, tell me about the songs that you've included in this suite.

Well, I love this golden age of the American musicals.

You know, you think of all the Rodgers and Hammerstein ones, and then this one, the Sherman Brothers.

I've chosen three iconic, um, songs, Chim Chim Cher-ee, Feed the Birds, and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

It all came about actually during the pandemic when very soon, in, in actually about May or June 2020, uh, I got a message from Lang Lang that he was doing a Disney album for Deutsche Gramophone, and he wanted people to write arrangements for him, and he asked if, if I would do some.

So I ended up doing a dozen of them actually for him, and he recorded seven of them, including two of these from Mary Poppins.

So I probably wouldn't have done them otherwise, but it was a great time to, to do that during the, the time when we were all at home more.

Oh [laughs]

Right.

Which was a rule you couldn't in the last competition.

But I don't see why that shouldn't be part of, of what happens, because that's how the composers themselves experienced music.

It was true of symphonies.

Symphonies were very often played m- a movement, then a singer would come on and sing some arias of Rossini, and then you'd have another movement.

So I think we need to get away from, from this sort of feeling that we, we have to hear everything, we have to hear it with all the repeats, you know, it, it has to be, uh, in a certain way.

I think we're not making it easier for people by doing this, because we're giving them that freedom of choice-

Is that something that you are also conjuring with, or do you think that classical music will always have its place?

Um, oh, beautiful pieces by them.

Oh, thank you.

Well, Malcolm Williamson was one of those on that very first LP.

And when I say, you know, it means a lot to me because we had literally no classical music in the house at all.

And so when I started piano lessons bec- at my insistence, my parents said, "No, we're not buying you a piano," eventually they, they bought the cheapest one they could find, which was £5 from an antique shop in Stockton Heath, Cheshire, and I started lessons.

This was the first record they bought, and on this record was so many pieces that I have subsequently, uh, learned.

So it r- I, I can pinpoint a moment.

Um, you've in- you know, you've written numerous piano sonatas and I, I believe a brand new second movement for Beethoven's Piano Concerto Number 3?