‘Don't study music expecting to learn its secrets so that you’ll like it; just keep listening to it until the penny drops.’

There was never any question in my mind about whether I should interview Anthony Payne for this book. Like most music lovers, I imagine, I have a sense of him being at the centre of British musical life: as a reviewer and critic for the Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Times; as the author of a book about Frank Bridge; as a commentator for BBC radio and television; and as a contributor to film documentaries about Delius, Parry and Vaughan Williams. And of course he's known internationally for Elgar's Third Symphony, which he completed from the composer's sketches to create an ‘elaboration’ (the term required by the Elgar estate) that has been performed more than two hundred times. More recently he has completed Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No. 6 and has orchestrated Vaughan Williams's Four Last Songs. But it was only when I made contact with him to ask if he would contribute to this book that I realised how little of his own music I knew.

He and his wife, the soprano Jane Manning (whose contribution to British music as a performer is surely as significant as his as a commentator and arranger), have lived in north London for more than forty years. But at his suggestion I interviewed him at their second home, a small, terraced cottage up a village lane in West Sussex – not far from where Arnold Bax and John Ireland lived, I thought, as I drove there through leafy countryside in July 2012. The door was opened by his wife, who did most of the talking until ‘Tony’ (as he's known to almost everyone who meets him) took me upstairs, to the room that he uses as a studio, for the interview. Afterwards he moved to his work desk so that I could photograph him.

He was rather more solemn than I’d expected, and I was interested to read just over a year later an interview in which he told a journalist, ‘I laugh, but I don't smile, so people often think I am a bit unfriendly.’