The Very Model of a Modern Maestro

A conductor who usually mingles with the musicians backstage during concert intermissions rather than stay in his dressing room, Rattle also represents a model of leadership very different from the long-held image of the tyrannical, almost godlike maestro. It is a model especially relevant in our time, when the world of the arts has been shaken by reports of grotesque abuses by authority figures—including some conductors—who set themselves above mere mortals.

BBC music critic Tom Service spoke for many when he wrote a few years ago that “it’s almost impossible to imagine orchestral music and the idea of what an orchestra could and should be in the 21st century” without Rattle.

Rattle is also a man with a mission that extends beyond concert halls and recording studios: to take classical music to new places and new audiences, from schoolchildren to prison inmates. “Music is for everybody,” Rattle recently told Sarah Willis, a Berlin Philharmonic horn player who doubles as a music broadcaster. “This has been, really, one of my most important goals while I was here [in Berlin]—to spread it everywhere.”

It is a mission of particular importance at a time when the classical music scene is beset by angst about how to counter the graying and dwindling of its audience. “No one has done more for that than Simon Rattle,” Willis told me in an interview in the final days of Rattle’s 16-year tenure in Berlin. “He just embraces the young—and the old, and the underprivileged, and the rich; he embraces everybody, and his absolute mantra is: Music should be a necessity, not a luxury. You know how they said Princess Diana was the princess of hearts and minds? I think Simon is the conductor of hearts and minds in all his outreach work.”

‘I think one of my faults is that I can often love music to death,” a twentysomething Rattle, then a slender, fresh-faced rising star with a heap of curly brown hair, says in an old BBC interview clip—pausing to add impishly, “It’s a lovely way to go.”

That love affair began very early in Simon Denis Rattle’s life, in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Liverpool. His music-loving parents and older sister encouraged his interest in jazz when he was barely out of toddlerhood and in heavier fare like Shostakovich, Mahler, and Messiaen a few years later. When he was 7 or so, he would read scores his sister Susan borrowed from the public library and pore over Berlioz’s Treatise on Instrumentation. (“I think if I found a child doing that I’d think, ‘God, how ludicrous,’ ” he remarked years later to biographer Nicholas Kenyon.) He attended every concert he could at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, ducking backstage to chat up the bemused conductors about what they did in this or that passage. At home, he copied the percussion parts from music scores and held “concerts” in which records were played with live percussive accompaniment from Simon, his sister, and sometimes their parents.

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At the age of 10—four years short of the required minimum age—Rattle was accepted into his hometown’s Merseyside Youth Orchestra as a percussionist. At 12, having won a piano competition in which he was one of the youngest entrants, he played Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the Liverpool Concert Orchestra. Three years later, he assembled and conducted a 72-person orchestra, which included professional musicians, for a charity concert (stunning the organizers, who had expected perhaps two dozen). By 16 he was studying at the college-level Royal Academy of Music in London and helming an international youth orchestra at a festival in Lausanne. At 20, having won an international conducting competition, he was back at the Liverpool Philharmonic, first as a guest conductor and two years later as an associate conductor. His rapport with the musicians, he later said, was somewhat complicated by the fact that they had only recently known him as “a bumptious little kid running around backstage collecting autographs and listening to every rehearsal.” Not long afterward he became assistant conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

In 1980, 25-year-old Rattle took over as the principal conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Over the next 18 years, he transformed Birmingham’s cultural life—among other things, spearheading the effort to build a new concert hall and developing a vast network of community outreach, especially to children—and turned the CBSO into an acclaimed, world-touring orchestra.

Yet the Berlin Philharmonic, which voted in 1999 to make Rattle its next music director at the end of Claudio Abbado’s term in 2002, was on a different level altogether. This was perhaps the world’s greatest orchestra, previously led by such towering figures as Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan—under whose stewardship Rattle had first guest-conducted the orchestra in 1987.

The passionate, expressive Rattle was in many ways the anti-Karajan. In a 2014 interview on the BPO’s video channel, the Digital Concert Hall, Rattle spoke of being “fascinated and awestruck and slightly repelled, almost, by the control and the distance and the perfection” when he first saw Karajan in concert. Rattle has always been open about his distaste for the tyrannical-conductor model; Karajan had been the ultimate autocrat. (Notwithstanding their differing styles, Rattle has recalled in interviews that Karajan was warm and welcoming to him and to many other young musicians.)

By the time Rattle took over, Abbado had already democratized the Philharmonic—by, for instance, asking the musicians to call him by his first name—and added modern fare to its classical and Romantic repertoire. Rattle, known as a tireless champion of the moderns, was chosen in large part because he was seen as someone likely to take the revolution further.

“The orchestra was a very traditional orchestra, and they decided that they wanted to be pushed, they wanted a more modern repertoire—and Simon has certainly given us that, for better or for worse,” Willis says with a laugh. “He made us play John Adams, George Gershwin, Mark-Anthony Turnage—fantastic modern-day composers that pushed our limits in a way the orchestra wasn’t used to doing. Simon made us work very hard on things like Stravinsky—pieces that were part of our repertoire, but that he turned into real everyday pieces for us, [like] Le Sacre du printemps, which we can now play in our sleep thanks to Simon. He has given us 16 years of the most colorful repertoire, from Rameau to the Bach Passions to the absolute modern stuff.”

That repertoire has included new works specially commissioned by Rattle from an international array of composers: German Jörg Widmann, Briton Thomas Adès, Finn Kaija Saariaho, Australian Brett Dean, South Korean-born Berliner Unsuk Chin, and many others. (Rattle’s final European tour with the BPO featured a new Widmann piece, Tanz auf dem Vulcan or Dance on the Volcano.) It has included 20th-century composers who are already part of the canon: Mahler and Sibelius (two composers especially close to Rattle’s heart), Janácek, Shostakovich, Bartók, Britten, Berg, Strauss. It has included underappreciated works by Haydn and baroque music such as Rameau’s sparkling Les Boréades. And it has included, of course, the German canon from Mozart and Beethoven to Brahms and Bruckner—an area regarded by some critics as Rattle’s weak spot, despite an award-winning 2007 Brahms recording and full cycles of Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms symphonies performed as consecutive series.

And Rattle’s innovations at the BPO have extended far beyond commissioned compositions. One of his experiments has been to pair modern atonal pieces with more traditional ones—and, on a few occasions, to perform the two with an uninterrupted transition from the modern into the classic (thus, Ligeti’s Atmosphères became a shimmering foreword to Wagner’s Lohengrin overture while Ives’s The Unanswered Question segued into Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen).

In recent years, Rattle has also teamed up with Peter Sellars, the maverick American theater director, for semi-staged vocal works that depart radically from the usual concert performance in which elegantly dressed singers stand decorously on the stage. Stunning, controversial—and highly praised—realizations of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in 2010 and St. John Passion in 2014 featured the Berlin Radio Choir and top solo singers including Mark Padmore, Thomas Quasthoff, and Magdalena Kožená (Rattle’s wife and frequent collaborator). The barefoot, black-clad singers dramatically acted out Christ’s agony and his followers’ anguish; the chorus too joined the action, surging forward, raising a forest of arms, or collapsing to the floor, and the entire hall became part of the stage with singers walking down the aisles or standing in balcony seats. This was followed by semi-staged performances of several 20th-century operas, most notably a powerful, poignant, intensely physical 2015 version of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, with a large black block and some neon light tubes as the only props.

Also on the Rattle scoreboard: a new tradition, started in 2011, of one-hour late-night (10 p.m.) concerts in intimate settings with dimmed lights, a small orchestra, and sometimes a soloist, and little-known, often whimsical works—from Berio’s Sequenzas to William Walton’s instrumental/vocal Façade, in which Rattle and Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan took turns at recitation in a comical high-pitched patter.

Although Rattle’s BPO tenure began with great fanfare, Berlin was not always smooth sailing. Early on there was criticism that he was eliciting dull, bland performances from the great orchestra. A couple of years later came another rash of negative reviews, along with reports of tensions between conductor and orchestra—mainly over the difficult new repertoire—and hostile articles in the German media suggesting that Rattle had worn out his welcome and that the orchestra was losing its “German soul.” (In a bizarre twist, an editor at Die Welt was caught amplifying his anti-Rattle polemics by creating a sock-puppet to write for another newspaper; the stunt cost him his job.) Many British critics thought the gang-up was driven by German elites’ resentment toward a Liverpudlian upstart. Rattle did his best to take it in stride.

Hiroyuki Ito / Getty

The early Berlin years were also marked by turmoil in Rattle’s personal life. He and Kožená, a Czech mezzo-soprano who had quickly gained international acclaim after the fall of the Iron Curtain, met in the summer of 2003 at the Glyndebourne opera festival, where she sang the trouser part of Idamante in a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo that he conducted. Both were married to other people. The following year, as rumors swirled about the famed British conductor and the beautiful singer 18 years his junior, Rattle ended his marriage to American writer and film director Candace Allen. (From 1980 to 1995, he had been married to American soprano Elise Ross, with whom he had two sons.) In July 2004, he and Kožená publicly acknowledged that they were a couple, refusing all further comment on the issue.

By the end of the decade, things had settled down. Rattle and Kožená married in 2008 after the birth of their second child; their partnership seems to be a remarkable balance of personal and professional. That same year, the Berlin Philharmonic voted to renew Rattle’s contract—due to expire in 2012—for another six years. This year, he is leaving his post to as much of a hero’s farewell as he had arrived to a hero’s welcome—and is already scheduled to return as a guest conductor next March, with two programs including the Sellars dramatization of the St. John Passion.

When Rattle took the coveted job in Berlin, one of his conditions—besides raising the players’ pay and making the Berlin Philharmonic a public foundation independent of the government—was support for music education. The Philharmonic had opened an academy years earlier under Karajan as a training ground for the orchestra’s future players, but Rattle has been at least as interested in bringing music to a far wider circle of young people. He has conducted several Berlin school orchestras. It is no accident that when the Philharmonic arranged for a filmmaking crew to chronicle Rattle’s first season, the venture turned into his first educational project in Berlin: the award-winning documentary Rhythm Is It! that followed the experiences of 250 Berlin schoolchildren from different backgrounds recruited for a performance of Le Sacre du printemps. (The captivating film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in 2004, is available online at DigitalConcertHall.com like the rest of Rattle’s work at the Berlin Philharmonic.)

In 2007, Rattle and choreographer Royston Maldoom brought a version of that performance to New York as “The Rite of Spring Project,” with students from Harlem as dancers. This was just one of Rattle’s many educational efforts in the United States, which have included some off-the-beaten-path projects. When I attended his concert guest-conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Kimmel Center in April 2012, something unexpected happened after the lights dimmed: The orchestra members rose and filed off the stage, to be replaced by a group of neatly dressed children, ranging in age roughly from 10 to 15. Rattle took the microphone to introduce them as members of a West Philadelphia project called “Play On, Philly!” modeled on Venezuela’s 40-plus-year-old classical music education program, El Sistema. (I later learned that Rattle was, in a way, Play On’s forebear: Play On’s founder Stanford Thompson had become interested in El Sistema after hearing Rattle praise it when he was studying at the Curtis Institute of Music and Rattle was a visiting conductor.)

The children went on to give a heartfelt if somewhat dissonant rendition of the finale of Brahms’s First Symphony—and Rattle conducted with every bit as much energy and dedication as if he were leading a real orchestra. (Video of the rehearsal leaves no doubt he was giving his all.) Backstage after the concert, he talked excitedly about working with the young players and shared memorable moments—such as the time one of the children asked if he played the violin and he replied that he wasn’t very good at it, only to be earnestly advised that he shouldn’t say that because it’s not good to put yourself down.

The amateur concert in Berlin this past May—BE PHIL, the brainchild of Rattle and Berlin Philharmonic violinist and assistant conductor Stanley Dodds—shows Rattle is just as dedicated when working with grownup nonprofessionals. “In some ways, it’s better and more beautiful and more loving than any professional orchestra,” he said in an interview with Willis during a break in rehearsals.

Courtesy DigitalConcertHall.com

An American who came to Berlin as one of 101 musicians selected from nearly 2,000 applicants, 36-year-old Cody Lidge is a French horn player who, in his everyday life, works as an administrative manager at the Children’s Law Center at the University of South Carolina. Lidge was deeply moved by the BE PHIL experience. “Sir Simon exudes passion in each second of music he conducts, so naturally, we musicians wanted to convey the emotional and musical expressions he demanded,” Lidge told me by email. “He treated us as if we were professionals and demanded it in a way that was both educational and inspiring.” Lidge was thrilled when Rattle complimented him during a rehearsal—and moved to tears when Rattle shook his hand after the performance, stepping off the podium to thank the principal players as he does with any other orchestra.

Rattle has strong ties to the American music scene and an abiding love of American music (one of his New Year’s Eve concerts in Berlin had an all-Gershwin and Bernstein program, including a 75-minute abridgment of Bernstein’s 1953 musical Wonderful Town). He is a regular visitor to New York—most recently in May, when he led the London Symphony in three Mahler symphonies at Lincoln Center and at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. Besides the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra also courted him as a principal conductor; when Rattle appeared in Philadelphia as a guest conductor in fall 2016, the Philadelphia Inquirer referred to him as “the conductor who got away.” From 1983 to 2000, he was also a regular guest conductor with the Boston Symphony Orchestra—a role that eventually led to a very different kind of concert in Boston after a 10-year hiatus.

That event’s organizer, flutist Julie Scolnik, had gotten to know Rattle when she was a frequent substitute with the Boston Symphony and they often talked backstage. “At the time we both had young children and compared photos and stories,” Scolnik told me in an email. In 2005, Scolnik was diagnosed with breast cancer. After being successfully treated, she organized a breast-cancer benefit concert in her hometown of Andover in 2008, and then got the idea of doing one in Boston and asking Rattle to conduct. When she contacted him through his manager, he readily agreed.

Courtesy Julie Scolnik

The concert, involving musicians from several cities, was scheduled for December 2010, when Rattle was in New York for his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in Pelléas et Mélisande, with Kožená (who sang the lead) and their two sons, then aged 3 and 5. Scolnik gets tangibly emotional when she recalls that in the middle of intensive daily rehearsals at the Met, when time with his young family was precious, Rattle made the trip to Boston for the Concert for the Cure. “His generosity on that day was astounding,” Scolnik told me. “It was supposed to be his day off from the Met. Instead, he took a 4-hour limo [ride] to Boston from New York City, rehearsed from 3 to 6, and conducted a 90-minute concert—then took a limo back to New York, ready to begin his own rehearsals again at 9 a.m. Not only that, but he thanked me for asking him to come.”

Tales of such dedication have been echoed by many others who have worked with Rattle. “It’s not only about the music with him; he has time for everyone,” says Sarah Willis. “He’s opened up the Philharmonie to the outside world. The best thing about Simon Rattle is that he’s Simon Rattle, and he’s an incredible human being.”

I was introduced to Rattle’s work around 2006 by my late father and my mother, both professional musicians. I have heard him conduct dozens of times with different orchestras, in person and in recordings and simulcasts, in an astonishing variety of works—from baroque arias to Beethoven symphonies to Wagnerian opera to Stravinsky’s Petrushka to Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, a masterpiece of existential terror, lyricism, and wistful serenity to which Rattle has returned time and again.

Opinions on Rattle’s musical leadership, though mostly laudatory, have not been uniformly so—and not just during the trying times in Berlin. Some critics believe his quest to expose audiences to more modern music can be hard on the ears; others have complained that his versions of the classics can be too pedestrian or too formless. In a generally glowing review of the recent Mahler concerts in New York, the New Yorker’s Alex Ross noted that at times, “Rattle’s aversion to cliché can lead to . . . arrays of contrarian insights” that don’t feel fully integrated. Yet Ross also praised the “ideal balance of precision and intensity” and the “unsettling potency” in the Mahler series—apt descriptions of Rattle’s overall style. “An unlikely mixture of wildness and precision” is how the Financial Times’s Shirley Apthorp described another recent Rattle performance.

One may always dislike specific performances or quibble with specific interpretations; for me as for many others, lay and professional music lovers alike, Rattle’s defining qualities are charismatic energy and total, contagious love of the music he performs. Three years ago, when Rattle’s return to London was announced, the violin virtuoso Tasmin Little told the Independent that while some conductors occasionally let the orchestra take over, “Simon is fully present every second of performance. Every nerve, every fibre of his being is involved.” It shows.

Rattle’s personality also shines through his stage presence and in his offstage publicity efforts. There is his comedic knack, particularly evident in the police chief’s aria from Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, which Rattle has performed several times with Barbara Hannigan in the devilishly difficult coloratura part, joining her in unscripted antics—jostling for the spot at the podium or storming off in a supposed tantrum to berate the audience for laughing. There is his role as a presenter of music, notably the post-concert conversations on the BPO’s Digital Concert Hall, informative, insightful, and infectiously enthusiastic. There is his longtime involvement in artistic commemoration of the Holocaust, from the 2000 performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the site of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria with the Vienna Philharmonic (which generated intense debate) to the 2015 Holocaust Remembrance Day Concert, performed on a unique collection of string instruments once owned by Holocaust victims and survivors and featuring a poignant slow-tempo performance of Mahler’s Adagietto.

Rattle’s arrival in London as the new music director of the London Symphony Orchestra last September, succeeding Valery Gergiev, was a huge occasion, treated as the homecoming of a native son and celebrated with 10 days of events at the Barbican Hall. Rattle will continue to live in Berlin—because, he has explained, it’s neutral ground between him and the Czech-born Kožená, and because they don’t want to uproot their children, the two boys, now 13 and 10, and a 4-year-old daughter. Nonetheless, he plans to be the hands-on music director that Gergiev was not.

London may not be any easier than Berlin: Among other things, Rattle will face political battles over his demand for a new concert hall in London, an alternative venue to the Barbican’s small stage and notoriously poor acoustics. But he is already leaving his mark on the London Symphony, bringing in unusual fare such as the Genesis Suite performed in January—a rarely heard 1945 composition by seven composers, most of whom (including Stravinsky and Schoenberg) were World War II refugees, in which spoken biblical text is accompanied by orchestral and choral music, and in the Rattle version by 20th-century documentary footage on an overhead screen—and innovations such as the “Half Six Fix,” a series of one-hour concerts that start at 6:30 p.m., a boon to people who can’t afford the time or money for a full evening at the symphony.

Rattle, 63, understandably describes the leadership of the London Symphony as his “last job.” Still, he appears to have lost none of his energy or his youthful sense of wonder. His official tenure in Berlin is concluding with a June 20 performance of Mahler’s Sixth (a perfect coda, since it began with an acclaimed rendition of Mahler’s Fifth) and then a more freewheeling program at the open-air Waldbühne amphitheater on June 24. On July 1, he will lead the LSO in a free concert on Trafalgar Square featuring music from Dvorák, Massenet, Tchaikovsky, and Stravinsky, to be broadcast live on YouTube. The new season with the LSO starts in September. And in fall 2019, when Rattle is set to conduct Der Rosenkavalier at the Met in New York, he also plans on returning to Boston for Julie Scolnik’s next benefit concert.