RB As children did you make music together?

MD We each played piano duets with our father. He was a church organist for most of his life and there was a lot of music at our local church.

PD Hymns are magnificent. My father was a difficult act to follow because if you were practising in the house and getting something wrong he’d call out from elsewhere: ‘It's a B flat – can't you read?’

RB Was it determined from an early age that you were going to be a musician, Peter?

PD Not at all. I went up to Cambridge, having got the organ scholarship to Queens’ College, and I was expecting to read law. Consequently at The Leys School, also in Cambridge, I had done my performers’ diplomas in piano because I thought that was my chance before I became a lawyer.

RB Were you spending most of your time at Cambridge doing music?

PD Yes, because I was by then reading music, playing, doing chamber music, having my own things played. It became an obsession: there was no turning back. I still had to find a place in the world as a musician interested in modern music which doesn't automatically lead to making a living.

RB Let's hear a piece you wrote at Cambridge, the first of the Four W. H. Auden Songs. Tell us something about that.

PD I shall never forget this because I went into the bookshop in Cambridge and came across the poetry of Auden. I had the nerve to write to him asking for permission to set his poems and when I saw he was coming to Cambridge to give a reading I arranged a private performance.

RB When did your performing partnership start, Meriel?

MD When I came back from studying in Vienna in the 1960s, Peter had returned from three years in America, and we began to give fairly conventional programmes in England and it went on from there.

RB America was an important experience wasn't it?

PD Yes, it certainly was. I was pleased to say at a gathering in New York not long before John Cage died that I met him at an impressionable age and I’d never recovered from it.