"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."

"I had an instant soft spot for Ari Aster when he treated anaphylaxis (in “Hereditary”) as the terror that it really is, whilst some other contemporary directors sadly still think someone’s face swelling up is hilarious. “Midsommar” really goes to places untraveled. I heard a lot about its folk-horror roots along with similarities to “The Wicker Man,” but I keyed much more into its cathartic wail borne out of grief. I remember seeing a video of the performance artist and musician, John Duncan lying naked on the floor and letting out an extraordinarily protracted primal scream and the dark heart of “Midsommar” lies somewhere within that realm for me. The film is brimming with the explosive power of grief and it’s one of the starkest examples I can think of in modern cinema. My first reaction when seeing all that verdant grass was the almost invisible menace of ticks — an anxiety that Aster quickly acknowledges. The fear of tick-borne encephalitis is not unusual in both Sweden and Hungary where the film was shot and in some askew and unintentional way, I could imagine seeing the film alternately as a fever dream of someone who had been afflicted by the disease during a meadow ritual. Of course, the front of house is hallucinogenic folk horror, but maybe I bypassed that due to my lack of knowledge, which led to a more primal and simplistic interpretation. I was also blown away by the presence of Björn Andrésen, whom I remember from Visconti’s “Death in Venice.” Aster’s film buff credentials are really to the fore here even though I’m aware that nobody sadly uses the term “film buff” anymore. The ghosts of Bergman, Jancsó and Paradjanov circle the film."