David Hill: Your favourite beverage?

Simon Halsey: About five years ago we gave up alcohol, having had a dry month and feeling infinitely better at the end of it. I never had an alcohol problem, always enjoying the occasional glass of wine or beer, but at the age of 60 I felt much better without it. We obviously had to come up with a substitute, as we enjoy the rituals. We've come across many good low alcoholic beers and gin. I also love coffee, which I suppose I should give up at some point.

DH: Your favourite cuisine?

SH: I started working in Barcelona in 2016, partly to enjoy a better way of life – warmer weather, tremendously open and generous people, good food, good wine to mention a few. Prior to 2016, I didn't know what to do with tapas, since I'd not been brought up with it. When I discovered it was lots of delicious little dishes and you could have as many as you wanted until you're full, this became our favourite way of eating.

DH: What about composers you would find it difficult to live without?

SH: For the moment it is Haydn. Having chorus-mastered The Creation a million times, I only conducted it for the first time six months ago. My dad worked with Britten and I encountered him on a number of occasions without knowing it, right up to when he died. I love the perfection of the music: remove one note and the whole piece falls down. There are no spare notes and his response to text is incredible.

I really miss Gibbons and Byrd as my career has been made up of preparing works from Mozart's Requiem to music of the present day.

DH: Bach or Handel?

SH: I would go for Bach, undoubtedly, even though I'm a great fan of Handel. The reason for that was being involved with the Rattle staged versions of the Passions with my Radio Choir, the Berlin Phil, and some of the world's greatest soloists. We toured performances of them all over the world. We went into so much detail with the choir learning it by heart. To hear it all being done so beautifully was just overwhelming.

DH: Your earliest influences?

SH: There are two people I want to mention. David Nield was director of music at Kingston Parish Church, where I was a chorister; I joined this enormous cathedral-standard choir when I was six. When we did Joubert's There is no rose at an Advent carol service, I saw David with tears running down his cheeks onto his cassock and surplice. And I remember thinking, ‘There must be something in this’; even aged 6 or 7, it seemed extraordinary. Then I became a chorister at New College, Oxford, with David Lumsden, who was deeply inspiring, particularly in the repertoire we did: lots of English Renaissance music. A new organ was installed, which took two years. Every weekend we would have a string ensemble or group of viols and perform the great English verse anthems of Purcell and Gibbons, with James Bowman as a choral scholar singing the solos!

DH: When you left Cambridge, having been a choral scholar at King's, what happened?

SH: It was a series of accidents! I went to King's as a counter-tenor. I always knew I wanted to conduct and – like you, as we were exact contemporaries – we were flexing our muscles in trying to put things on. While I was a postgraduate at the Royal College of Music (RCM) studying conducting, I was lucky enough to get hired by Scottish Opera to conduct their education work. That was an enormous eye-opener, as I'd never been north of Oxford at that point! In Scotland my job was to do community music in the shape of operas with Graham Vick. He and I went on to form the Birmingham Opera Company and to spend our lives doing community music-making. It was the most wonderful year.

At the end of it I saw an advertisement for a director of music at the University of Warwick. I thought I'd never get it, but applied. Simon Rattle, then aged 24, had just been appointed chief conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO). He had been asked to choose the new director of music at Warwick. I was chosen, aged 22, and stayed for ten years in a job with amazing facilities and students. Simon remembered me, as two years into all this he asked me to become director of the CBSO Chorus. Two years into the post, having done a lot of work with the orchestra, reasonably successfully, Simon said to me, ‘There's room for one or two people in every generation to make a name as a symphonic chorus master, and there are too many second-rate orchestral conductors. Why don't you try the first and give up on the second?’ I woke up the next morning and thought, ‘He's right!’ While we were building up the chorus in Birmingham, we became famous for doing Beethoven 9 and Mahler 2, particularly in the Netherlands, France, Belgium and other places where there weren't symphonic choruses. I became noticed by the radio choirs and so things started to evolve more widely. And of course, 15 years at the Berlin Philharmonic – I'd pinch myself when I was standing next to Simon Rattle for the applause and possibly next to Mark Padmore and Gerry Finley and we'd bow together while saying, ‘What the hell are we doing here? This is amazing!’

DH: What are some of the most important aspects of being a successful chorus master?

SH: It's a very different art from the one you do at The Bach Choir, where you conduct the final performance – I don't. My job is to train a group to be as flexible as possible and to respond to gesture like a professional orchestra. Various techniques are involved: different speeds, time relationships, reading the hands and different possible up-beats of conductors: it's a rigorous set of requirements. The other aspect is preparing very different repertoire, such as Shostakovich 2/3 and 13 and lots of other works requiring the presence of a chorus in very different ways: The Planets, Daphnis et Chloé and so on. Finally, the forming of youth and community choirs, where the CBS0 were pioneers. As an organisation, there are 500 involved, of whom 80 are the professional orchestral players. I like being at the high table talking with great conductors about repertoire, and I'm very happy to be making things possible from within our choral community.

DH: Where do you think we are with singing in the UK as we re-emerge after Covid?

SH: I think it is divided. Putting Covid aside – we will all have to find our own way back from that: it's a separate journey – I think that in our private schools and our top universities, things have never been better. If the private schools are prepared to build enormous music schools, employ five full-time music staff and install expensive organs, then the elite clearly think music is actually very important. That begs the question, why is the state sector largely starved of opportunity? The one thing you and I and others are going to have to do before we die is to protest, protest and protest! in order to give the key to the door of music to all those people who just don't get given it at the moment. We have to harness all the resources we have in order to give everyone the chance of being involved in music. Don't think that we have all the problems, as in Germany there is a lot of despair about the state of music education. Probably the best examples of music education are in Scandinavia, where music really is taken seriously.

DH: Future hopes and aspirations?

SH: I've decided I'm going to do a bit less; and in the fewer places in which I will work, I intend doing really interesting and more diverse repertoire and to bring as many new people into our halls as possible. I'm presently in Cologne doing a piece Considering Matthew Shepard by Craig Hella Johnson – a wonderful oratorio which is basically a modern-day SMP. It's about the crucifixion of a young gay student 20 years ago, and how the community related to that. We are doing it for the Christopher Street Festival. Cologne is a very progressive place with a huge Gay Festival, so this is being done in conjunction with TV, large screens for audiences and with a huge numbers of performers.

DH: Good luck with all this, Simon, and thank you.