Talking about the last couple of years, I wonder if there’s anything that you feel you’ve gained from your position as Composer in Residence with the Orchestra, above and beyond getting your work performed (as important as that is)?

There is something very special about the sound which I was starting to get when I worked with them a little bit ten years ago. For me, I feel the Orchestra has really developed over the last ten years, so that’s something that you don’t always get with orchestras – sometimes it goes the other way. So I feel that what I’ve got, and I have had with some residencies but not with all of them, is the way that they play my stuff, that they understand the style immediately, so in a way the rehearsals are almost short-cuts. As soon as they start – compared with an orchestra I’ve never worked with or only worked with a few times – there’s an immediate knowledge of the style, which is interesting. It takes you less time now in rehearsal to get pieces together, particularly if you’ve got someone like Marin Alsop or Vladimir Jurowski who I have great sympathy with.

I was talking to clarinettist Michael Collins yesterday about Riffs and Refrains, and we talked about all sorts of aspects of it.  One of the things he said was that he’s done it about half a dozen times and he really feels that just about now it’s settling down into what he would see as a performance, and into what you probably had in mind when you were writing it. I wonder if you can empathise with that and if you think it’s important to have works revived like that, so they have a chance to settle down?

Yes! I’m just off to Scotland to see John Patitucci play this piece for jazz bass and orchestra. We’ve done it quite a few times in Europe now and this will be the, I think, third and fourth performance, apart from rehearsals, and he’s going to do it in the future too. The good thing about co-commissions is that you hear pieces played more than once and they develop. The first performance is always very exciting. Michael Collins is amazing, he was amazing even in the first performance, and I can see that, especially if it’s quite a virtuosic piece, it just gets better and better. First performances are always on the edge in a way, but I know that probably what he’s saying is that you just start really feeling comfortable with it and really feeling even more musical with it once you’ve got it there under your fingers.

Talking about another revival – the ones we’re doing on this disc we’re about to release, and first of all Twice Through the Heart  - I think the music is as direct as the poetry, you can almost come out of it singing the tunes as well, which feels quite strange for such a dark piece. I wonder how you think about it ten years on, and having gone through the recording process?

I’m still fond of it, I’m very glad [mezzo-soprano] Sarah Connolly is doing it, because in a way it’s almost made for Sarah. She didn’t sing the premiere, but she’s very close to the heart of that piece. It’s funny because in that double bill I’ve withdrawn the other piece, The Country of the Blind, it’s gone, so the fact is that I was much more happy with Twice Through the Heart.

I wondered why I hadn’t seen that piece around…

Yes, it’s withdrawn, I’m very brutal with pieces like that, and if they don’t work, I’ll get rid of them. But obviously I had great difficulty writing that piece, Twice Through the Heart, perhaps because of the subject matter, you know, what do I know about that?! Yes, I’m still fond of it but there’s nothing really hysterical about it, in fact it’s quite shocking because it’s so matter of fact.

It seems a very distilled piece – you workshopped it and amended it quite a lot in that process didn’t you – and it seems a very perfected and distilled piece at the end of the day.

In a way it went back to the original poems. It’s a very delicate subject and a very tricky one, and I feel that it should be done very straightforwardly like the text, it shouldn’t be flowery. That’s what I tried to do with the music as well, to make it emotional but not a woman smiling and stabbing, you know…

Ten years on from that, do you feel that the music you’re writing is very different? Perhaps you’re less easily influenced?

I think probably I might be more individual but some things might have gone along the way which worries me slightly. I think that it probably sounds more like me than it used to, and that there are fewer influences, obvious influences, but at the same time I worry that you start softening the edges. I feel some pieces like Three Screaming Popes which was one of my earlier pieces is quite rough and perhaps I didn’t know quite what I was doing some of the time, but the pieces have some sort of edge to them, and it’s probably our attitude thing unfortunately, you get slicker, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s exciting, and I worry about that. Most composers, when you ask them their favourite piece, they’ll say the piece they’re writing at the moment. I’m not like that funnily enough, I do think I’ve written some of my best pieces ten years ago.