The great British accompanist aims to score 10 out of 10 travelling through Vivat’s new Decades series.

What was the inspiration behind the Decades project?

It was an idea we did a few years ago at the Wigmore Hall, but we only did German Lieder. We discovered lots of interesting things by doing that, and I thought it would be good for a CD series. When Robert King with his wonderful label Vivat gave me the opportunity, I thought that would be a great chance to expand into other languages and countries. The first two discs are mostly German speaking. On the first we have Viotti and some Fernando Sor, but there’s not much else going on – the German speaking countries were miles ahead – but later on of course it gets much more wide-ranging and far more equally spread between the countries.

How did you go about deciding on the repertoire? Did you spend months burrowing around for unusual songs?

Not at all. In fact, I was helped massively by the wonderful Susan Youens who’s the authority on Lieder and everything to do with German song in the States....