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

Loading article content

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.