'I'm one of the laziest conductors I know!' Swensen says with that twinkle in his eye.

When I compare myself to those who somehow conduct one programme after the next, month after month, year after year and manage to maintain their sanity, I am really quite impressed, in a kind of perverse way - because I could never live or work that way. I love the time I take in between my working periods. It's time with my family of course, which I adore. And it is time spent getting inside of the music I will be conducting in the coming weeks. As a process, it feels organic, even spiritual, and it will not be rushed. But when it bears fruit, it is the most wonderous experience I know. Absolute magic!

Paavo Berglund once said to me of himself, most conductors' repertoire gets bigger and bigger every year but mine gets smaller and smaller. I didn't really understand that until quite recently. My first decade of conducting professional orchestras was an explosion of sorts. Hundreds of orchestral pieces studied over the years needed to be released somehow from the captivity of my mind. So nearly every programme was different during those early years. But, for one reason or another, many of those pieces needed only to be programmed once, whilst others compelled me to return to them over and over. Those special works are what you might call my repertoire - by a process of elimination. Fortunately, they still form quite a large body of full length pieces.

But that's not to say Swensen has stopped learning new repertoire:

At the moment I'm learning Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande. It is one of the great pieces I missed as a child. In fact, I didn't even know it existed. I think it is as fine a piece, in my opinion, as anything Mahler ever wrote and, just as it took many decades for Mahler to come to the attention of the concert going public at large, I suspect it is only a matter of time before people realise that this work is one of humanity's great artistic achievements. And there's absolutely nothing you could call frighteningly inaccessible about this music. Tragic, yes. But, as with all great tragedy, powerfully uplifting. I am also very excited about new music and the great potential of present-day composers.