JOHN Suchet knew he was a little bit different to his friends from a young age.

When rock and roll started to transform the music scene in 1950s his school mates were into Bill Haley and the Comets and Chubby Checker but John preferred Tchaikovsky and Beethoven.

“It goes back to my teenage years,” he said.

“At school I was quite a good musician. I played the trombone and won a prize on it. I played hymns on the piano in the evening and I’ve always loved classical music.

“I can remember asking my mum to buy me a biography of Tchaikovsky when I was 17 when rock and roll was coming in.

“Bill Haley and The Comets and Chubby Checker were getting big and I was into Tchaikovsky.

“It’s always been a love of mine. Even to this day my wife says to me: ‘I’m into Rolling Stones, Dire Straits and Status Quo and you’re into Tchaikovsky and Beethoven’. I just have to say sorry that’s the way I am.”

John is best known for his days as a newsreader for ITN but since 2010 he has been part of the Classic FM team where he is able to combine his passion and profession.

His weekday breakfast show attracts almost three million listeners and he has twice been honoured at the Association for International Broadcasting Awards in 2013 and the New York Festivals International Radio Programme Awards in 2014.

One of the things that John is particularly pleased about is that figures released in February show more than half a million of Classic FM’s listeners are aged under 25 – a 43 per cent increase compared to the same period in 2016.

So – like John in the 1950s – young music lovers are again appreciating Tchaikovsky and Beethoven as well as contemporary composers for films and video games.

The 74-year-old added: “Let’s put it this way, the death of classical music has been greatly exaggerated.

“Andrew Lloyd Webber did a series for us earlier in the year and he said there are no such things as different kinds of music, there is just good music and bad music and that sums it up.

“I love trad jazz, pop, rock but classical music is what I play most of all.

“We do anything to break down the barriers. For example we have film music shows.

“I’m convinced that Mozart would be working on synthesisers now and writing for films if he was around today.”

John will be conveying his passion for classical music as part of Lymm Festival.

His talk at Lymm Baptist Church on June 30 will look at the lives of Mozart and Strauss with an emphasis on the fallible human beings behind the great music.

For example, Strauss was part of a family of musicians riven with tension and jealousy while Mozart was a childlike character ill at ease amid the pomp of the Viennese court.

John, whose brother is Poirot’s David Suchet, said: “I’ve got a new biography coming out in September on Tchaikovsky.

“That’s my fifth and my guiding principal with all of my composer biographies is I’m as interested in the man as I am in the music.

“I’m fascinated by the lives that they lived. So often we put them on a pedestal. I’ve got a Beethoven life mask here with laurel leaves around his head.

“That’s wrong. He was a bloke. He had to pay his rent and had to eat and drink like the rest of us.”

John’s talk will also looks at all the myths surrounding Mozart’s death at 35.

He added: “He died so young. I know in those days they did but still 35 was still too young.

“The myth that he was poisoned by Salieri and other rumours began the day after he died.

“He got ill out of nowhere almost and he just happened to drop a chance remark to his wife shortly before he died that he felt like someone was poisoning him.

“She reported that later and that’s how the myth took hold. His was a genius that we just can’t understand. He wrote music the way you and I write emails. It just came so easily to him and people didn’t understand.

“What he produced was beautiful and they couldn’t work out how this rather giggly, awkward individual who you wouldn’t give the time of day to under normal circumstances could create such incredible music.”

Strauss was born 34 years after Mozart’s death so what is the connection?

John said: “It’s a slightly odd combination to put Mozart and Strauss together but there’s one factor that links them and that is Vienna.

“One of the things I’ll talk about is how is it that Vienna became this capital city of music.

“Mozart was born in Salzburg but he lived the last 10 years of his life in Vienna. Of all the great composers who lived and worked in Vienna only two were born there – Schubert and Strauss – and yet all the others gravitated to the city

“It’s got a lot to do with Vienna being at the crossroads of Europe and how refugees came there during the Thirty Years’ War.

“It wasn’t safe to talk politics there because of the French Revolution happened and they were scared the next family to suffer would be the Hapsburg monarchy. And when words are not safe what is? Music.

"So these people came from all over Europe and brought with them their music, their rhythms and the sounds of their homeland...”