It’s my responsibility to ensure that everyone in the House has the right music at the right time: the orchestral parts, the scores and the vocal scores (which are piano reductions of the full score for use by the singers). When a director cuts some bars during a rehearsal, we have to pencil that change into at least 60 parts. It’s a lot of work! For the strings we mark in the bowings, which tell the players which direction to move the bow while playing. The work can be a bit monastic, but I love working with sheet music.

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I’m a composer, and as such I know all the orchestral instruments and can read scores. For DIE FLEDERMAUS by Strauß, we discussed with the conductor which version we should use. Scores can change over the centuries through copying and use; musicologists research how the pieces were originally intended. It’s a great moment when, after weeks of work on a piece, I have a big pile of music in front of me that I know backwards and forwards.