I started learning to play the piano from the age of six. For a long time, all I really knew was what I played, graduating slowly from the simplest Bach Two Part Inventions, through early Mozart and Haydn, to the least demanding Beethoven and Chopin. My parents loved music, but the only music I actively remember them listening to on 78s – yes, I’m that old – was Myra Hess playing Franck’s Symphonic Variations and a ten-inch disc of Chabrier’s España, a work I still adore. Toscanini’s Beethoven I loved from the time I first started to explore other music seriously on my own initiative. Particularly the third and seventh symphonies. I loved his dynamism and amazing rhythmic energy. Only much later did I appreciate Toscanini’s extraordinary instinct for and control of the micro tempo-changes that make a performance live, wonderfully displayed in his recording of the Eroica with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, especially in the tricky-to-judge first movement.

I first experienced opera at a very young age, with a performance of The Mikado at the Empire Theatre, Liverpool, aged about ten. I cried at the end because I didn’t want it to stop. Italian opera was considered to be slightly vulgar in respectable musical circles then, ridiculous as that seems now, when Verdi is regarded as one the greats. The first opera I knew well was Falstaff, which of course is clearly extremely sophisticated compositionally. That was my entry-point; but I found I loved it not just for that, but also for the wonderful range of human feeling and experience that Verdi portrays. The recording that captured me was Solti’s with Geraint Evans in the title rôle. His histrionic range is beautifully captured in this great monologue at the end of Act 1 scene 1. As a little footnote, Geraint, whom I knew quite well, was the first person of standing to encourage me as a conductor, after he had heard my first foray into opera, alarmingly Verdi’s La traviata with the Kentish Opera Group. Long story, but a sweet one.

When I began to strike out on my own in developing my musical tastes, and escaping the constrictions of the German hegemony, I began my life-long love affair with Fauré’s music. I loved both the Piano Quartets, but the less well-known second was and still is my favourite chamber work of his. It is complex and dramatic, but has moments of great tenderness where the underlying sensuousness of his music comes to the fore. The first recording I knew was made in 1945 with Marguerite Long, Jacques Thibaud et al. Extraordinarily atmospheric as that recording is, I find the performance by the Fauré Quartet, the only permanent established piano quartet in the world, to be more organic and more revealing. The slow movement of this work has the most heart-stoppingly beautiful coda.

I knew very little of singers of the recent past until I met the great Rupert Bruce-Lockhart, an inspirational and fascinating singing-teacher, for whose lessons I often played. He was extremely knowledgeable about singers such as Rosa Ponselle, Miriam Lycette, and of course Claudia Muzio, all of whom he had heard in the flesh. As he once memorably remarked, when rather publicly berating the then general director of the Royal Opera over a very lacklustre performance of La sonnambula, he had been attending that opera house since 1911. (He had never heard such a DISGRACEFUL display of singing, announced in stentorian tones audible throughout the crush bar.) He loved Muzio’s singing, and I fell in love with it too. Her fearlessness and passion, as well as the beauty and character of her voice, are very much on display in this aria, recorded at the end of her career. She only had one functioning lung by this time, but that didn’t stop her.

It is of course a truism to assert that Carlos Kleiber was the greatest conductor of recent times. He too had immaculate technique, highly expressive and communicative, but as clear as crystal when necessary. His knowledge and love of the works in his repertoire were enormous and deep. And every performance with him was very special. Above all his conducting is always linear, so one so often feels drawn through a work as on an endless, passionate melody. This is particularly important in performing Brahms, whose music can seem constipated and academic. I loved Brahms as a teenager and listened over and over again to his fourth symphony, in the old recording conducted by Bruno Walter. Then I fell out of love rather until I heard Kleiber conduct the symphony, through a video of a live performance which I found on YouTube. It is wonderful to watch Kleiber: it is blindingly obvious how he wants the music to sound from his extraordinarily expressive body-language. I was entranced and moved by this performance. His conducting of the first movement is a masterclass in conveying the passion and drive of Brahms’s music.

I had the good fortune and delight to get to know Margaret very well, and help her when she was learning all her Verdi rôles. She had one of the most beautiful voices I have ever heard, and was a great interpreter, and a surprisingly good and nimble actress, despite her rather ample frame. To me it is a lasting stain on the Royal Opera’s name that she was not installed as heir prima donna assoluta when she was in her prime, that in fact she was largely ignored. She was a star of the Paris Opera: President Giscard d’Estaing offered to arrange French citizenship for her the very next day, when they dined together. She was the most treasured soprano at Cologne, and a Kammersängerin at Munich and Vienna. But prophets in their own land and so on… I first heard her at the Royal Opera, singing the countess in Figaro, and was stunned by the beauty of her voice. Her commitment to excellence was exemplary. Every note had to be perfectly placed, every rhythm exact, the language immaculate before anything else could happen. I loved our work together. We gave a few concerts in Wales, and I played the Schubert several times with her and the lovely Thea King. This recording, with Jack Brymer and James Lockhart, is a happy reminder of that time.

I came to Mendelssohn’s music late. But when I did, I fell badly in love with it. I have conducted the violin concerto many times. I remember the director of the Philharmonia Orchestra apologising to me for including it in a concert we were to give three times in out-of-town venues. My reply was that if I could conduct the work every day for the rest of my life I would be a happy man. Mendelssohn’s music was sidelined for decades, which is perhaps why I ignored it for so long. He suffered from anti-semitic prejudice, both in the nineteenth century and of course in Germany during the Hitler time; he was “too clever to be profound”; and he was quite wrongly regarded as a child-prodigy who failed to fulfil his potential. The third symphony, for example, is for me one of the very greatest of romantic symphonies, and conducting it was one of the highlights of my performing life. This piano trio, however, is the first work of his which opened my eyes to his genius. Like my favourite Fauré, it is less well-known than its twin; but I think it is a better and more profound work. What for me is special about Mendelssohn’s best works is his ability to find an ecstatic positivity at the end, often after dark and emotionally vulnerable material. The coda of the final movement of this trio shows that positivity at full blaze in this beautiful performance by the Florestan Trio.

Some of my happiest days of collaboration have been with John Tomlinson. He and I have known each other since we were both children at Glyndebourne in the early 1970s, he in the chorus and understudying and I an almost-humble répétiteur. I visited his house in Lewes often and was a particular favourite of his father, whom I adored, which John always remembers fondly. John is a great artist and a great human being, and has remained utterly true to himself throughout. In recent years we have given many concerts and made recordings together. Performing Mendelssohn’s Elijah with him was especially memorable. In the recording studio I conducted his two recital discs for Chandos in the Opera in English series, a huge project underwritten by the Peter Moores Foundation, born out of Peter Moores’s passion for opera in the vernacular. An interesting and long debated subject – another day… John and I have performed and recorded quite a number of Wagnerian bleeding chunks together: I am not known for my Wagner, but apparently, according to the Wagernites, I can do it quite well. The recording of the monologue from The Flying Dutchman for the series turned out to be the beginning of a process. The powers-that-be considered it to be so exciting that at the sessions themselves they decided that John and I should record the whole opera in English, which we did a few years later. And I went on to conduct the opera on stage in the USA, in Christopher Alden’s brilliant production. So this original version of the monologue is for me very special, with John’s own expert translation, of which one can of course understand every word, so brilliant is his declamation.

I make no apologies for including Martha Argerich again. She is still at the top of her game. What can I say about this relatively recent Mozart recording, with Claudio Abbado also at his absolute best, and the wonderful Orchestra Mozart, which he created very much in his own image? This is how Mozart should go. That is all there is to say.