Life Lessons: Timothy Ridout

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As a kid I wanted to be a singer, not a violist.  I was singing as a boy treble in choirs and musicals when all the peripatetic music teachers at my school came to demonstrate their instruments. I chose the viola partly because the teacher played us ‘Hedwig’s Theme’ from the Harry Potter films but I didn’t touch it very much at all until a few years later, when my voice began to break. By the time I started at the junior department of the Royal Academy of Music I’d spent a couple of years working much harder at the viola but I was still way behind everyone else. I’d fallen in love with it by that point, though, so I didn’t mind having to practise twice as hard…