‘I quite like the notion that my music provokes and disturbs.’

After twenty years of presenting Private Passions on BBC Radio 3, Michael Berkeley knows more than anyone how to lead conversations with people whose response to music is instinctive or intuitive rather than technical or analytical. One of his gifts as an interviewer is his ability to encourage guests to share their enthusiasms without feeling judged or criticised for having tastes that are quite different from his (which, incidentally, are much broader than I’d realised before I met him), and listeners sense his eagerness to establish common ground before contributing insights into the music being discussed. All this is done in a manner that's learned but not over-intellectual, authoritative but not intimidating.

So although it was initially disconcerting to be in the physical presence of such a famous voice, and daunting to be the person asking the questions, my encounter with him in September 2013 was relaxed and informal. It was seven months since I’d first asked if he would be interviewed for this book, and in the intervening period it had been announced that he was to be made a non-political peer in the House of Lords; so it was Baron Berkeley of Knighton who welcomed me into his home – a large, five-storey, bay-fronted Edwardian house in west London. ‘Big blue house’, he’d described it in his directions, and before I climbed the front steps to ring the doorbell I couldn't help wondering why, on a street of predominantly unpainted brick, the adjoining property is as boldly red as his is blue. But there were more important things to discuss in this interview, which took place in his splendidly spacious and light top-floor studio.

There was the extent to which his decision to become a composer had been encouraged or discouraged by his father, Sir Lennox Berkeley (to whom he refers in interviews as variously ‘my father’ and ‘Lennox’), and the extent to which his dual career as a broadcaster and composer is the result of a conscious choice rather than something that has simply happened. There was his personal and professional relationship with his godfather, Benjamin Britten. And there was his hearing loss, dating from the summer of 2010, and its impact on his music-making.