Simon Rattle on Sydney Opera House’s refurbishment and the ‘cultural vandalism’ tearing the British music scene apart
Conductor Simon Rattle will test out the $150m refurbishment of the Sydney Opera House’s concert hall next month. But it’s funding cuts to the arts in his native Britain that have him incensed.
Simon Rattle is not one of those conductors to leave the sturm und drang in the concert hall. When something needs to be said in defence of classical music, he’ll come out with guns blazing.
The conductor is speaking a couple of months after Britain’s peak arts body, Arts Council England, slashed funding to some of London’s best-known cultural organisations by about £50m ($A93m), in order to “level up” or spread funding more evenly across Britain. Many major companies are affected, including the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre, Donmar Warehouse, and English National Opera, which lost its grant entirely. The London Symphony Orchestra, one of five symphony orchestras in the capital, and where Rattle is music director, had its funding slashed by 12 per cent.
Rattle doesn’t mince words.
“It’s an act of cultural vandalism,” he says on the phone from London, his voice calm and measured but the meaning clear. “I don’t think there’s really any argument about that.
“The type of cuts that are going on, countrywide, are making a mockery of the (Conservative) government’s claim to do levelling up … It has been illiterate and shortsighted in the most astonishing way. A real violence to the British music scene.”
A funding blow is not the way Rattle, 68, would have wanted to end his tenure at the LSO, Britain’s pre-eminent symphony orchestra. From next year, he takes up his new post as chief conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich. But before then, he’s on a farewell spree with the London players, enthusiasm undimmed, bringing them to Australia for a three-city tour to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.
The modern masterworks and high romanticism on the concert programs are Rattle’s speciality – including works by Mahler, Debussy, Ravel and Adams – and will show off the LSO in all its sonorous glory. Founded in 1904 as a co-operative, where the musicians shared in the profits, the LSO has always been fiercely independent. To this day it remains a self-governing organisation – the players, for example, choose the conductors they will work with – and Rattle says a similar commitment is evident in its music-making.
“It was always an orchestra of incredible energy and intensity,” he says. “That really hasn’t changed, (although) it’s no longer that kind of rough-and-tumble ensemble that I think it was in the 60s and 70s, when it was famous for its sharpness and aggression.
“Now, without losing any of the virtuosity, because there are simply astounding soloists within the orchestra, it has a much more amazingly kind of sophisticated, colourful way of playing, and very sensitive.
“It’s still one of the orchestras in the world that can play seriously pianissimo in a way that you don’t often hear. I mean, I find them completely wonderful, lovely people just to be with.”
Rattle will be making only his third visit to Australia: previous tours have been with the Berlin Philharmonic, where he was principal conductor for 16 years, and as a guest conductor with the Australian World Orchestra. But Rattle has attained the kind of status in the conducting profession that transcends association with any one orchestra. Somehow, seemingly in the blink of an eye, he has entered that age of the Great Conductor, with an enviable legacy of recordings, honours – a knighthood in 1994, the Order of Merit in 2014 – and popular and critical acclaim. And yet he’s happy to be addressed simply as Simon: no Sir, and certainly not Maestro.
He’d grown up in the Liverpool of the Beatles, but more interested in the world of classical music than rock ’n’ roll or the jazz his father loved. At age nine he heard his first symphony concert, with the Merseyside Youth Orchestra, and was hooked. A later performance by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic decided him on making his career as a conductor. By 15, he’d organised his own orchestra, borrowing players from the Liverpool Phil, for him to conduct a concert including Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.
He came to wider attention when he was named chief conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, where a civic plan had been hatched to make the Midlands city the musical equivalent of Berlin or Chicago. It’s where a picture formed in the public mind of Rattle, then in his mid-20s, as the wunderkind maestro, his head a halo of curls, his face raised in musical ecstasy.
And he did perform miracles with the Birmingham orchestra. The first recording purchased by this writer of Mahler’s second symphony, the Resurrection, was Rattle’s shattering and transcendent account with the CBSO, chorus and soloists Janet Baker and Arleen Auger. He introduced me to new and unfamiliar music, especially by the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski, the music glittering like Byzantine mosaics, and to the propulsive American minimalism of John Adams (whose Harmonielehre is on the program for Rattle’s Australian concerts). Of course, he has also recorded key corners of the repertoire, including symphonic cycles of Beethoven, Mahler, Brahms and Sibelius, focusing on the major concert works rather than opera. Many of his recordings were with the now-defunct label EMI (since reissued on Warner), whose association with Rattle started when he won a conducting competition at 19.
Watching Rattle today, on the podium or in videos of his concerts, the exuberance of his early performances seems undiminished. Only the hair these days is grey. He once described in an interview the experience of watching Herbert von Karajan, one of his illustrious predecessors at the Berlin Philharmonic, and not being able to make sense of a conductor who avoided making eye contact with the orchestra. Last weekend, I watched a DVD of Rattle conducting the Berlin orchestra in Bach’s great Eastertide oratorio, the St Matthew Passion. Rattle conducts without a baton, and begins the music of the opening chorus as if feeling the pulse of it with his hands. When the double chorus enters with the exclamation and question – See him! Whom? – Rattle’s eyes are wide open. There’s no lofty or mystical distance, just full and direct communication with his orchestra and singers in the business of making music.
The repertoire of the Australian concerts is something of a contrast. In the first program, Adams’s minimalist masterwork Harmonielehre – inspired by dreams of levitating supertankers and rhythmically-driven tonal harmony – and two pieces of sensuous French impressionism, Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe Suite No 2, and Debussy’s tone-poem of the sea, La Mer. The second concert is of Mahler’s Symphony No 7, while Sydney will also have a third concert, featuring Bruckner’s Symphony No 7 and a recently commissioned piece, Sun Poem, by British composer Daniel Kidane.
“In a way, the program is a kind of wishlist for me,” Rattle says. “In my last year (with the LSO), what do I want to travel around and hear this orchestra play?”
Each of the pieces, in its way, will showcase a different aspect of the LSO players’ virtuosity and tone colours. Harmonielehre, for example, requires four percussionists and an array including gongs, cymbals, vibraphones and marimbas.
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‘In a way, the program is a kind of wishlist for me.’
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“For me it’s one of the big masterpieces of the past 30 or so years,” Rattle says. “It’s a piece we have done before and which the LSO play to the manor born.
“It’s exactly the kind of thing one would not normally be able to tour – it’s incredibly expensive, in terms of how much percussion is in it. And it’s not the normal kind of thing that promoters will allow you to do. So I’m so delighted that it has worked out for Australia.”
The French works on the program are awash with shimmering textures and orchestral colours.
“I wanted to bring some French music because ever since the time of Pierre Monteux” – in the early 1960s the French conductor, then 86, was appointed the LSO’s chief conductor on a 25-year contract – “it has been one of the orchestra’s great calling-cards,” Rattle says. “It just remains part of their lingua franca.”
It’s a coincidence, he adds, that two symphonies numbered seven – by Mahler and Bruckner – are in the Australian concerts. Mahler’s seventh is a nocturnal fantasy, evoking cowbells and horns, a romantic serenade with guitar and mandolin, and the eerie mood of nightmares. The arc of the symphony, to the extent it may be described as having a program, is a “journey from night to an almost blinding dawn”, Rattle says.
Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7, to be heard in Sydney only, is similarly a showcase for the orchestra.
“It needs an unbelievable control of dynamics and colour,” he says, “and a completely unified approach to phrasing, the shape of every phrase. But, also, it simply requires inner intensity, which is what this orchestra has in spades, and one of the great brass sections in the world. That’s really something.”
Rattle’s three concerts with the LSO at the Sydney Opera House will be his first in the newly refurbished Concert Hall, and also will be broadcast live to the Forecourt outside. When he visited with the Berlin Philharmonic in 2010, he described the sound as experienced on the Concert Hall stage as confusing, because it “seems to come from all sides”. Last year, the hall reopened after a refurbishment costing roughly $150m, including improvements to the stage and the acoustic design. What are his expectations now?
“I’m so curious to see,” he says. “I mean, this seems to have been an enormous success, the renovation. Oh, my God, do you deserve it …
“It was always a great thing to be able to play there, but it was very hard to be able to judge what was going out. Look, it’s fascinating: concert halls change the way you play, just as having a different violin will change your string playing. If you know the sound goes out there, you can find a sound that mixes and blends, that will really be a boon … And with a little more bloom on the sound, then you can make other colours. It enables you to play in a different way.”
The London Symphony Orchestra makes its home at the Barbican Centre, and plans had been developed to build a new Centre for Music on the site of the Museum of London nearby. The design by architects Diller Scofidio and Renfro includes a 2000-seat concert hall with the audience seated around the stage, housed in a light-filled, pyramid-like structure. Rattle was a chief proponent of the project, but the funding for it couldn’t be found, and now it seems the site will be redeveloped as office blocks instead.
He explains that the Barbican, the brutalist arts centre that opened in 1982, was designed in consultation with the Royal Shakespeare Theatre but not with input from the LSO, another major user of the venue. The result was less than optimal.
“The Barbican was designed without real input from the orchestra, or indeed any musicians,” Rattle says. “It was extraordinary: the theatre was built with the total co-operation of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which is why it turned out to be one of the state-of-the-art theatres. But the musicians of the London Symphony Orchestra were never allowed to see the plans, in case they interfered with them or things got leaked.”
He adds that the Centre for Music would have provided more of the facilities that a modern symphony orchestra is expected to have, including a hall capable of presenting different kinds of performances, and rooms for education and other activities.
“What a concert hall is now has become so much more than just an auditorium: it’s to do with sound systems, to do with lighting, to do with different possibilities, to do with different types of staging,” he says.
Evidently, Rattle is disappointed that the Centre for Music is not going ahead, although he can understand that economic circumstances have changed. He insists that the shelving of plans was not a deal-breaker and didn’t prompt his decision to leave the LSO. His accepting the Munich post with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra has more to do with his family being in Germany: he and his wife, Czech mezzosoprano Magdalena Kozena, have three children, and live in Berlin.
Still, he observes that the political will to support the arts is greater in Germany than in Britain.
“I really enjoyed working in Germany alongside of Angela Merkel, who would be just as happy to come to hear a Bruckner symphony as she would be to watch a football match,” he says. “She was passionate and knowledgeable about both. This was not a problem. The politicians there both support and enjoy classical music. That’s considered very normal. I suspect the politicians who support classical music in England often have to kind of hide, and are worried that they may be tarred with being elitist or fat cats. This also doesn’t help the art form, because it’s about as far away from elitist as you can get.”
The end of Rattle’s tenure at the LSO is not goodbye. He’ll take the title of conductor emeritus, while the baton of music director is handed over to Antonio Pappano, currently at the Royal Opera House. Rattle’s contract in Munich is for an initial five years. He succeeds Latvian conductor Mariss Jansons, who died in 2019, before the conclusion of his term.
Having traversed so much of the repertoire with some of the world’s most esteemed orchestras, what is it that ultimately satisfies Rattle about a performance? He refers to a predecessor at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Czech conductor Rafael Kubelik.
“I actually watched him rehearse the LSO years ago,” Rattle recalls. “He said, ‘Gentlemen,’ – because actually they were only gentlemen – ‘can I just ask you one thing? Why do you think that precision is perfection? Could you not just give me a perfection of atmosphere? Or perfection of phrasing? Why does perfection have to be lining the notes up correctly?
“And I just think it’s a wonderful thought. Of course, we all try to make a performance as accurate as possible. But this is only the beginning of music. That misses the 5 or 10 per cent where truth lies.”
And that’s the exciting thing about a concert with Simon Rattle. The notes are just the beginning.
Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra give concerts at QPAC, Brisbane, April 28 and 29; Sydney Opera House, May 1-3; and Arts Centre Melbourne, May 5 and 6
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