Favourite film: Michael Clayton
Favourite Piece of Music: Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of Saari, by Sibelius
Ideal Holiday Destination: any vast wilderness or seascape, like Big Sur, California
Career High: The Exploring Antarctica concert, working with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conducting with a live video feed on stage from the Scott Base in Antarctica.
Career Low: Trying to persuade the Armenian Philharmonic that using Armenian composers was a good thing
Last Book Read. Blue Ocean Shift by Kim & Maugborgne
Best Trait: Tenacity
Worst Trait: Tenacity
Biggest Influence: My instincts, but also recently, Canadian conductor, Jannik Nézet-Séguin
Best Advice Received: People only care about what you did yesterday, what you’re doing today, and what you’ll do tomorrow.
Worst Advice Received: (On telling Gordon McPherson I was the Music Director of the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq) “Ye’ll be killed.”
Advice to 16 Year-old Self: As gay ballet-dancing teens growing up in Dunfermline with paranoid schizophrenic mothers go, you’re doing brilliantly. Well done and get out now!
Ideal Dinner Guests: Peter Maxwell Davies - great at dinner with anyone, and I miss him - Leonard Bernstein - replacing stoicism with irrepressible charisma whilst having the talent and intellect to pull it off. A complete **** but great for one evening.
And the unidentified woman whose arrest sparked the Stonewall Riots in New York, 1969. And Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, founder of the Iraq relief agency.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
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