I live in Copenhagen with my wife, the Danish violinist Kristine Algot S¿rensen (an extraordinary woman and mother and my very favourite chamber music colleague) and our two sons, Jonathan (born in 1996) and Nicholas (born in 1999).

I also have an older son from a previous marriage, David (born in 1988) who lives in New York. David plays electric guitar in a rock band, which is very exciting for me as I have always been in interested in all kinds of music. For example, when I was seven, I received Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as a Christmas gift from my parents. I think I must have played that record three times a day for years. That was the beginning of a period when I learned just about everything by The Beatles, picking out the chords by ear on the piano. At nine I had formed my own rock band and we were doing lots of Beatles' tunes but we were also writing our own stuff. Those were very inspired years for new popular music, which strangely enough coincided with one of the least creative periods of classical music composition in living memory.

Of my two younger sons, Jonathan has just started playing the cello, and Nicholas wants to play the cello too (or the tuba, he says).