Simon Rattle: My 12 favourite composers

In October 1997 Simon Rattle conducted the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in the first performance of Thomas Adès’ work for large orchestra, Asyla. The following year, when he was leaving the CBSO after 18 years, Rattle chose to include Asyla in his farewell concert.

To then start his inaugural concert as Chief Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic in 2002 with Asyla shows an extraordinary confidence in the startling power of Adès' Surrealist symphony. "I wanted to bring what was new and extraordinary to Berlin," he told us.

Our still shows Simon about to bring Tom out of the audience and up onto the stage after that 2002 performance.

For the Playlist we chose the third movement – Ecstasio. It's a kind of contemporary scherzo, with 1990s techno/rave music replacing the 19th-century dance rhythms of Beethoven and Brahms. The recording that Simon made with the CBSO was nominated for the 1999 Mercury Music Prize.

As chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra between 1971 and 1975, Pierre Boulez had a profound effect on the British musical landscape – revolutionising the repertoire orchestras played and how they played it. "He taught a whole generation of us how much great music there was that we simply didn't know," says Rattle.

The still is his 1973 BBC publicity shot – frustratingly, no matter how hard I look I can’t make out what the score on his desk is.

In Taiwan we filmed a vast, outdoor audience listening with rapt concentration to Simon conducting Boulez’s Notations for Orchestra. On the Playlist is the first brief miniature from the original 1940s piano piece 12 Notations.

Some of the first music that the Berlin Philharmonic performed back in the late 1880s was Brahms, conducted by the composer. We were lucky enough to film Sir Simon conducting Brahms on two very different occasions.

First in a rehearsal of the Violin Concerto in D major with Anne-Sophie Mutter and the Berlin Philharmonic during the 2014 Baden-Baden Easter Festival. Then a month later we captured the conductor on the podium for Brahms' 1st Symphony. He was back for the day with the CBSO in Symphony Hall, Birmingham, for a concert in support of The CBSO Benevolent Fund.

We’ve included a bit of this 1st Symphony rehearsal at the end of Simon’s interview. But for the Playlister selection we chose Simon with the Vienna Philharmonic and soloist Kyung-Wha Chung playing the final movement of the Brahms Violin concerto.

We filmed Simon and the Berlin Philharmonic performing Bruckner's 7th Symphony in Taiwan. In our interview he explained how he first encountered this piece as a 15-year-old percussionist in the National Youth Orchestra – under the baton of the Austrian conductor Rudolph Schwarz.

During the Second World War Schwarz was held prisoner in both Auschwitz and Belsen. After the war he was also the conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and in the BBC picture archive I discovered a still of the conductor with Benjamin Britten, discussing the score of Britten’s Nocturne for Tenor and Small Orchestra.

Schwarz conducted its first performance, which was broadcast by the BBC Third Programme, in October 1958. In Norman Lebrecht’s book The Maestro Myth Simon Rattle is quoted as saying Schwarz taught him "the paramount importance of imposing his pulse on the music he played".

The Playlister selection, by contrast, is a 1950s recording of Bruckner’s 7th performed by the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of Otto Klemperer.

"I've always loved French music. My parents adored it, my father played it on the piano. I was a percussionist so of course this music with all its colouration was absolute food and drink to me."

The picture below shows Oliver Reed as Debussy with Annette Robertson as Gaby, his mistress, in a sequence from the Monitor Special shown on BBC One on 18 May 1965. Produced and directed by Ken Russell and scripted by Melvyn Bragg, The Debussy Film was a clever exploration of the composer’s life and works.

We see a film company making a film about Claude Debussy. Within this framework, is set the life of the composer - a life far from simple or straightforward. The personalities of Debussy and the people in his life are interwoven with those of the director and cast of the film company making the feature.

For the Playlist we selected Rattle and the CBSO performing the little-known masterpiece Gigues from Debussy’s Images for Orchestra. It's interesting to think of Debussy in Abstract Expressionist terms rather than as an Impressionist – if La Mer is a burnished Mark Rothko then perhaps Gigues has some of the subtle shifting colours of one of Willem de Kooning’s paintings.

"I think he's the great underrated genius of them all," Simon told us. For the documentary we filmed him rehearsing for a period instrument performance of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. There’s a little extract at the end of Simon’s interview.

On the Playlist we have selected his interpretation of The Creation as recorded with a modern symphony orchestra - the CBSO.

The still is one of four Roy Lichtenstein-style illustrations commissioned for the 2009 BBC series The Birth of British Music and, I think, neatly captures the composer in one comic-book panel.

Mahler is indisputably Simon’s touchstone composer: “almost like a family member”.

The Playlister suggestion had to be Magdalena Kožená singing Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (I am Lost to the World) from Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder song-cycle.

Magdalena is married to Sir Simon, and in this recording you get to hear them both together making profoundly beautiful music with the Berlin Philharmonic. “And I just hope sometimes, sometimes we can do him justice.”

In his interview Simon Rattle said: "I love Mozart but I often make a terrible hash of it." As Tom Service’s recent BBC Four documentary argued, there are real reasons why Mozart’s music still affects, moves, shatters, and delights us, even 224 years after his death.

The still below from the BBC picture archive shows Jack Tarlton as the composer in BBC Two's drama The Genius of Mozart, extracts of which featured in Tom’s documentary.

The Playlist features the overture to Così fan tutte performed by Sir Simon and the OAE.

Simon told us that before he started to conduct Puccini "I'd loved a number of the pieces for years, and I'd always listened to them with huge, pleasure, and sometimes guilty pleasure".

The Playlister choice is a "guilty pleasure" - an unashamed crowd-pleaser from Act 3 of Turando:Nessun dorma sung by Plácido Domingo. The BBC picture archive revealed this atmospheric still of the tenor from a 1982 BBC programme called An Evening With Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The Italian conductor Simon refers to in the clip is Giuseppe Sinopoli who sadly passed away in 2001.

Simon describes Schumann's music as a kind of miracle. "You never know where it's going next. It's completely mercurial," he told us.

"It's asking a very different thing of people. I said to the orchestra early on, 'If you're going to think of this music as a cat, do not think of it as a big, well-fed lion, think of it as a hungry panther, think of it as something hunting all the time'."

The Playlist features the Piano Concerto played by Lars Vogt, with Rattle and the CBSO.

Sibelius is at the centre of Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic's visit to Britain in February 2015. In Simon Rattle: The Making of a Maestro we were able to feature a great clip of a very young-looking Simon at the BBC Proms in 1979 with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

He is conducting Tapiola – Sibelius' last major piece after the 7th Symphony and before the composer's last 30 years of silence. It evokes the pine forest world of Tapio, a character from the Finnish epic the Kalevala, a sprite of the pine forests with a beard of lichen and eyebrows of moss.

The Playlister selection provides an alternative with the Sibelius Violin Concerto, where virtuoso Nigel Kennedy and Sir Simon demonstrate that they have a real chemistry between them.

The Rite of Spring is the most startlingly revolutionary score in 20th-century music and has been established as one of Rattle’s signature pieces by numerous recordings and concert performances.

"It was one of the first pieces I conducted. I played it endlessly as piano duet. It's lived through my career and it really doesn’t get old," he says.

In the BBC picture archive I found a wonderful relaxed photo of the composer rehearsing with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at Maida Vale studios in 1958. From his suede loafers to his fluffy cardigan, he is the epitome of avant-garde cool.

On our Playlist is the opening to the Rite of Spring. In the programme we had great fun using this music to evoke the spirit of Cold War Berlin.