ALL IN A DAY'S WORK: Celso Antunes, artistic director, The National Chamber Choir, DCU

Jerru in the DCU canteen never has to ask - he gives me my double espresso at 8 a.m. and that keeps me going almost until dinner time. I don't like to eat when I'm rehearsing. A musician's foible, I suppose.

I read my Irish Times and then head for the Interface Centre to practice piano alone before the day's rehearsal begins at 10 a.m. Once I start working with the choir I get lost in the music. The singers have to tell me when to stop for a break. Twenty minutes later we're back in the throes of Ravel or Fauré and it's only when Father Augustino knocks on the door at 12.50 p.m. that I'm brought back to reality. He wants the centre for lunchtime Mass. I try and beg a few more minutes from him in Italian. We carry out this bargaining session every day. I win some and lose some.

I don't do lunch. I'm still running on espresso when I meet Karina Lundstrom to discuss the movements of the chamber choir over the coming year. We share an office.

At 2 o'clock the rehearsals return to their former intensity. We don't waste a second between 2 and 4.30 p.m. Then I have to attend to the office work until 7 p.m., when I can set myself free in the city, or lock myself up for a night alone on the piano.

I started studying guitar at the age of five, that's pretty normal for a Brazilian kid. My interest in music was mainly connected with the possibility of playing rock 'n' roll in a band, which I regularly did from the age of nine, so that the hours spent at the conservatory which should be devoted to learning harmony and counterpoint were happily spent, when I could escape from the class, on playing the new Beatles songs.

Music became very serious for me when I was 12, that was the time I decided to learn the cello - all rock 'n' roll dreams were buried and replaced by etudes, scales and arpeggios. I was a member of the choir as part of the syllabus, an idea I simply dreaded! That was how I came to rehearse my first Mozart Mass when I was 14. This was such an emotional experience that I wept my way through the whole thing - something you wouldn't really expect from a Latino teenager. From then I was bitten by the vocal bug, with the added bonus of discovering that I had perfect pitch.

In May 2002, I took up the post of Artistic Director, and Principal Conductor with the National Chamber Choir here in DCU. I am also Chief Conductor of the Audienda Chor Krefeld, the Oratorienchor Brühl and the Konzertchor Hürth. I return annually to conduct in Brazil with the Camerata Fukuda, the Paraná State Symphony and the Sao Paulo State Symphony.

If I have been practicing all evening and hunger eventually gets to me, I return to my DCU apartment and raid the fridge. I am not a good cook. The first thing I do when I arrive in Dublin is a clean sweep of Marks and Spencers. I call my wife in Cologne. I am getting use to shuttling between Dusseldorf and Dublin.

If we have been performing, we usually go to Toners on Baggot Street for a pint with the choir afterwards. When I say a pint a mean a pint - then I move on to wine. To my shame I can only stomach one pint of Guinness. I need more practice.

In conversation with Louise Holden