Lebrecht Column: Simon Rattle's struggle with the world's top bands
2024-08-15
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"Are you finally happy?" I asked.
Sir Simon Rattle gave me a slightly guilty look. He had sat on a sofa in Munich and had talked to me for two hours without reservation about his struggles with the world's top orchestras. Now he looked a little satisfied.
This was the first face-to-face interview we had done in 40 years. When I asked Simon if he would be willing to appear on BBC Radio 3's The Lebrecht Show, he said: "I would certainly enjoy it." The timing was right, after all. Labour had just won the general election. Rattle had been seen as the Tony Blair of the music world, when he was still a young man. I asked him if he would contact the new government.
“I’ll write to Keir Starmer and I’ll write to Lisa Nandy,” Rattle said briefly.
"What would you tell them?"
"Congratulations. Please take care of it."
He is heartbroken by the state of British music. He tells me that he has to find a group of part-time string players for his Tallis Fantasy. “A lot of people have said, ‘This would be a great opportunity, but I’ve changed careers, I’m training to be a teacher. I’m already working in the NHS. We need to feed our families.’ My heart bleeds at what people are going through here.”
And that's at the top of the British music scene. He believes the entry level into a career in music has almost disappeared. "Think about how people have to make their debut now," he sighs. "When I was a kid, I had everything ready for me."
Growing up in Liverpool, he would read sheet music his sister would bring home from the library. "My sister is autistic. Susan thought I would like Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces, so I knew about them when I was eight or nine. And I did. What public library can borrow that now?"
His parents made him listen to the 7.30pm evening concerts on Radio 3. "My mum was a working-class girl from Kent who changed her appearance and spoke with an upper-class accent. My dad took me to jazz. I heard Ellington when I was six. I was literally sitting at the piano. I heard Buddy Rich, Maynard Ferguson. After a while I was listening to local Liverpool poets in pubs." Life was so rich that he hadn't heard of the Beatles yet.
“There were a lot of big names in Liverpool at the time. Fritz Spiegel, an Austrian who had been a flute player with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, did the music for Z-Cars and wrote the seminal book, Taught Myself in the Scouse Dialect. Sitting next to him in the orchestra was [music TV motivator] Atarah Ben-Tovim.” Charles Groves, the orchestra’s conductor at the time, also included him in rehearsals. “He felt it was part of his job to look after young musicians.”
Simon Rattle
He passed his A-level exams at 16, entered the Royal Academy of Music, and soon organized a performance of Mahler's Second Symphony. "The management thought we were not mature enough to play Mahler," he recalls. "It was hard to find musicians... We only had one viola in rehearsal. I was glad I found enough singers, and they all sang very well. I don't want to be mysterious, but it was a very special thing to explore this kind of music. We felt like we could fly high, but I'm sure we just barely managed it."
After being spotted by an agency, he served as assistant conductor at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, and was appointed chief conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the age of 25. Others might have grabbed this invitation with both hands. Rattle's choice was to take a year off and go to Oxford to study literature.
“I wondered at that time, could I live without music?” he recalled. “I had been conducting abroad as a guest conductor, and sometimes I loved the experience, and sometimes it was lonelier than I could have imagined. I wondered what kind of person I would be if I wasn’t a musician.”
He spent three terms at Oxford without going to a concert. "When I got back to music, the first concert I heard was Beethoven's 'Eroica' Symphony with John Carewe and the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra. John said it was a makeshift orchestra and it wouldn't be any good. I didn't care. I sobbed the whole way through. I cried so hard that several people in the audience moved their seats to avoid me."
Birmingham was at its peak, “it was one of those moments when all the stars aligned.” His fellow Liverpudlian Ed Smith was the manager, and together – “we were like Gilbert and George” – they secured a multimillion-pound grant from the Arts Council and permission to build a new concert hall, which turned out to be the best in the country. “I don’t think we knew how lucky we were,” Rattle recalls. “The musicians had been through a tough time. They said, ‘We haven’t been to the dentist in years.’ We went to get our teeth cleaned together. The city wanted to be reborn. The European Community was involved. To this day, no one knows how much the symphony hall cost. Jacques Delors and Keith Joseph broke ground.”
One summer he electrified champagne drinkers at Glyndebourne with Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, an opera about life in the black ghetto. The cast was recruited from America. “Some people were a little sceptical about this very young white man. We had a little disagreement about the tempo of one of the hymns. One of the older members said to me, ‘Simon, we really like working with you. But we notice from time to time that you don’t have any relatives working in the cotton industry.’ ” He still meets regularly with the original cast.
That’s when I met him. We were both picking up our kids from school. I think any other conductor would have sent a babysitter. But Rattle was a new kind of conductor, who enjoyed breaking conventions. He left Birmingham after eighteen years without a job in hand. Then, in 1999, a place at the Berlin Philharmonic opened up because Claudio Abbado was battling cancer. Daniel Barenboim was the obvious choice. But in a secret ballot, Rattle won the players’ vote. The two have since shared a history of pain under the baton. “Barenboim still says to me, ‘Look, Simon, I think I’d be a better fit for them,’ ” Rattle confided to me.
"And what was your answer?"
"I say, Daniel, that's what I thought then...and I think so now."
The Berlin years proved to be a brutal awakening. "At Claudio's last concert, Karajan's widow, Elliette, came up to me, not quite conscious but very emotional. She said: 'Simon, good luck to you. But be careful. That orchestra was great, but they killed my husband and they almost killed Claudio. Be careful. Take care of your health, take care of your sanity.'"
There were a bunch of hard-nosed holdouts in the band, some conservatives, and everyone else was just hard-hearted. I was curious: "How do you face them on Monday morning?"
“You have to try a lot of things,” he shrugs. “Eye contact doesn’t always work. And it’s hard to keep your confidence. I did struggle a few times. One of the older players said to me: ‘James Levine was here last week. He said good morning to me. How am I supposed to play for a conductor who says good morning to me in the morning?’ Another old-timer said: ‘If we’re going to play Elgar, we might as well play – sniff – Mahler.’” Rattle’s Birmingham confidence was instantly a thing of the past.
The best times are the evenings when music takes over. He introduces Berlin to living composers—Ligeti, Gubaidulina, but also Widmann, Ades, and Turnage. When he takes the stage, he looks to his right to see if Chancellor Angela Merkel is sitting there. “She’ll say, ‘This is the only place I can have three hours without interruption, in the middle of this huge migrant crisis.’ ”
Did he see any British prime ministers? "Thatcher, she came to hear Porgy and Bess," he recalls.
He drove the orchestra's Porsche for 16 years until he got out again. "As a conductor in Berlin, it can be friendly and polite, but you are not part of the guild," he said. "They are the Meistersingers there. They are the ones who stay. Conductors are just passing through."
His successor, Kirill Petrenko, is a reserved man who never gives interviews or records. Rattle is delighted. “They have a great conductor who is totally uncompromising in areas where I would give in. Kirill never gives up, which I’m sure drives them completely crazy, but he has made them an orchestra that is… easier… for the rest of us to conduct.”
After his traumatic experience in Berlin, he began talking to the London Symphony Orchestra. “These were all friends I’d known since the Royal Academy or before. It felt like we could simply make music and see how it went.” The LSO asked him to help them build a new concert hall. “I said: hopefully this won’t be the only thing we talk about in the next few years,” he recalls. But it was. Then Brexit and the coronavirus killed the plans, and his patience with touring reached its limit. The musicians wanted more than he could give. He quit as music director.
Just then, a friend from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra came to sweet-talk him and arrange for him to attend several concerts at the speed of a high-speed railway. The sound of that orchestra was imprinted in his mind from his childhood in Liverpool. The musicians in Munich gave him a T-shirt with the words "You'll Never Walk Alone" printed on it - in Bavarian dialect. "It's a bit like Liverpool dialect," he said with a smile.
Once again, the concert hall is an issue. The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra shares the concert hall with the Munich Philharmonic. A new concert hall was promised, but has been postponed to 2036. “You’ll be 81 by then,” I reminded him.
"My job is to convince them to move faster," Rattler said, remaining diplomatic. "It's totally fine for me to continue this process, no matter who my successor is."
I had never seen him so relaxed. He had cataract surgery during the pandemic, and he mentioned that he would forward one of my questions to his psychiatrist. I told him that he looked happy, and he thought for a long time before saying, "Thank you for the compliment... I love working here, the orchestra is like a big family, very easy-going, but they play like demons. I feel like a really lucky person here."
Two cups of cappuccino were already cold on the coffee table. I thanked him for his time, and he said quietly, "Norman, we've been putting off this interview for forty years."
【English】Lebrecht/Wen Shixi/Translated
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