"Last year I arrived in San Diego at the beginning of a tour, where I was playing the Thick As A Brick material. I ambled down to the theatre in the morning having arrived the night before, where the theatre manager said there was a note for me in my dressing room, left behind by Alfie Boe who they’d had a couple of nights before. I recognised Alfie Boe as a hotshot, super popular opera star who played at the Queen’s Jubilee Concert in Hyde Park. They crop up from time to time, these people who cross over from a more insulated music into wider popular culture, and Alfie Boe has certainly done that in the last couple of years with opera music. You might think he’s just another of the usual not-quite-authentic people who just find themselves singing the odd aria at working men’s clubs, and getting a record deal and a ton of money. But Alfie did his apprenticeship by studying at the Royal Academy of Music, worked with the D’Oyly Carte Opera and spent ten years of his life learning his craft. And he was a man born with enormous natural talent. Rather like Lou Gramm he has this very assured level of control – he knows what he can do. I read his note to me, wishing me a good show and leaving me a phone number. So a few weeks later in England I called Alfie and we had a few chats on the phone, and though we haven’t met we were due on two occasions to have lunch, but he had to cancel because of his mother’s illness. But I hope I do get to meet Alfie because I think he’s a very fine singer. I understand that while his desire is not to leave classical music, he wants to demonstrate he’s got the cojones of a Tom Jones or a Robert Plant or whoever - he wants to be a rock and roll singer. Far be it for me to say that might be mistake, you’ve got to give it a go. So Alfie’s branching out into rather middle-of-the-road pop and rock at the moment. As a classical singer, I think he has the gravitas and vocal expertise, perhaps more vocal expertise, than Pavarotti at his relatively young best. If you listen to Alfie’s ‘Nessun Dorma’, I think you’ll hear something that is sung with enormous technical ability, control, authority and with the right amount of gravitas, it has a weight to it that I think is really great. I hope he doesn’t sell himself short in the realm of middle-of-the-road pop music."

"This was originally going to be last but instead I put Alfie Boe last, and I thought I’d bookend things with classical music, without wanting to sound snobbish. Actually I do want to sound snobbish – there’s nothing wrong with being snobbish when what you’re being snobbish about is the gold dust of our musical worth. Beethoven to me is the consummate classical composer. He learnt stuff from Bach, and Mozart, but he came at a time when he could bring all of his many influences together and not only from the classical tradition. He had an awareness of folk music and rhythm that I think is demonstrated in the ninth. The scherzo from the ninth symphony is a very rhythmic affair and one of those occasions where he utilised elements of rhythmic folk music, which is kind of interesting I think. A lot of composers looked down on the traditions of more naïve music forms but Beethoven seemed to recognise their worth. And of course towards the end of his days he would leave the symphonic work behind and concentrate on string quartets, and that again is a very disciplined, controlled fine art in music, to work with finite musical resources and treat them almost as if they are a symphony orchestra. So Beethoven is kind of the guy for me, he’s the top man. I probably first became aware of Beethoven’s ninth through A Clockwork Orange and that took me through the electronica versions of Walter - now Wendy - Carlos, and then to the original score by von Karajan. That is the one I still enjoy best to this day, the Sixties Deutsche Grammophon recording, where the tempo’s just right. I’ve listened to lots of other variations that are too fast, too slow, a bit sloppy, too cacophonous, but von Karajan in spite of his rather dictatorial nature, did the job."