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revival of Dominic Dromgoole’s Gabriel, a tribute to Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain and performances
with the Britten Sinfonia of works by Purcell and Birtwistle, among others. And she has just released Royal
Fireworks, an album on which she and fellow baroque specialists blast, thrillingly, through arrangements of
masterpieces by Bach, Handel, Telemann and, again, Purcell.

Alongside that, Balsom juggles childcare for her son, and the daughter she had two years ago with her
husband, the director Sam Mendes, whose film 1917 is about to open. To her great pleasure, her son plays
the piano and the drums. “And he practises without me having to remind him,” she beams proudly. The
logistics of her life with Mendes sound scary. “We are just really organised with our diaries, and both
preciously guard our time together as a family.”

Balsom is also known as a passionate evangelist for music education, which continues to be starved of
meaningful funding despite compelling evidence of its contribution to mental growth and wellbeing. “It has
the capacity to unlock every part of the brain. It’s desperately sad, short-sighted and dangerous to think of
education only in terms of ‘You will pass this exam in this subject’, and to make that directly related to the
vocation you go on to take up. That’s not an education. Education is where you learn how to learn, and
music can play a huge part in that unlocking process.”

Her own music education in Hertfordshire state schools occurred at a time when the state system’s funding
for the arts had yet to be as squeezed as it is today. She is constantly grateful for that, she says. “It was
always there, and I never imagined it wouldn’t be. I took it for granted.

“It’s heartbreaking to talk about it now in this context, where the next generation is going to be cheated of
that. Because it’s such a basic thing. Why are we even needing to discuss it? I feel furious about it, as do all
my peers. And it’s not because we’re professional musicians, but because we had that rounded education.”

Balsom praises music education: ‘the next generation is going to be cheated of that’LIZZIE PATTERSON

As a child, Balsom’s musical epiphany came in two parts — the first when her mother gave her a Dizzy
Gillespie album, the second when an uncle bought her a CD of Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert
performing three of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos. “I put it in my Walkman and walked around listening to
it. I didn’t know it was called baroque music, or what a harpsichord was. But the way he played it, to me,
sounded like someone smashing up their electric guitar at the end of a concert. It was like an orgasm in