Simon Rattle: my message to Keir Starmer

“Happy at last?” I ask.
Simon Rattle shoots me a guilty look. For two hours on a Munich sofa he has talked, no holds barred, about his struggles with the world’s best orchestras. Finally he’s looking a bit contented.
We are having our first media session in 40 years. The timing seems apt: Labour have just won the election; Rattle was once seen as the musical counterpart of the young Tony Blair. I ask if he will be getting in touch with the new government.
“I will write a letter to Keir Starmer. I will write a letter to Lisa Nandy,” Rattle says, frugally.
“What will you tell them?”
“Congratulations. Please look after it.”
Rattle is heartbroken by the state of Britain’s music. He tells me about trying to find freelance string players for Michael Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra. “Many people said, ‘This would have been wonderful, but I’ve changed profession,’” he reports. “Or, ‘I’m retraining as a teacher. I’m working for the NHS. We need to feed our families.’ My heart bleeds to think what people are having to get through.”
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And that’s the top end of music in Britain. The entry level, he believes, has all but vanished. “Think what people have to do just to get to stage one,” he says, sighing. “I had it all when I was a kid.”
When he was growing up in Liverpool, Rattle read scores that his sister brought home from the library. “My sister was autistic. The reason I knew the Schoenberg Five Pieces for Orchestra when I was eight or nine was because Susan thought I would like it. And I did. Is there still a public library that does that?”
His parents let him listen to the Radio 3 nightly concert at 7.30pm. “My mother was a working-class girl from Kent who reinvented herself with a posh accent. My dad took me to jazz. I heard [Duke] Ellington play when I was six. I sat literally under the piano. I heard Buddy Rich, Maynard Ferguson. A bit later I heard the Liverpool poets in pubs.” So much was going on that he never heard of the Beatles.
“Liverpool had these huge personalities: Fritz Spiegl, an Austrian who played flute in the Phil [Liverpool Philharmonic], composed music for Z-Cars and wrote a seminal work called Lern Yerself Scouse; next to him was [the flautist and TV musical motivator] Atarah Ben-Tovim.” The conductor Charles Groves let him attend rehearsals. “He felt it was part of his work to look after the young musicians.”
Having crammed his way through A-levels, Rattle went to the Royal Academy of Music at 16. It was there he pulled together a performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony. “The powers that be felt we were not mature enough to be playing Mahler,” he recalls. “It was very hard to find players … we did rehearsals with one viola. I was just happy that I’d found enough singers and they were hitting the right notes. Let’s not be mystical, but there’s something extraordinary about discovering this music. We felt we could fly, but I’m sure we only just made it.”
He was then spotted by an agent and went to the BBC Scottish Symphony and the Bournemouth Symphony as assistant conductor. At 25 he was offered the principal baton at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Others might have grabbed it with both hands; Rattle took a year out and read literature at Oxford. “I wanted to see if I could live without music,” he reflects. “I’d been guest conducting abroad — sometimes loving it, sometimes feeling more lonely than I could ever imagine. I wanted to know what I was if I was not a musician.”
Rattle did three terms at Oxford without hearing a concert. “And when I came back to it, the first music I saw was John Carewe with the Brighton Philharmonic doing [Beethoven’s] Eroica. John said, ‘It’s a pick-up orchestra, it’s not going to be any good.’ I didn’t care. I sobbed right through it. I sobbed so hard that a couple of audience members moved a few seats away.”
Birmingham was an apotheosis, “one of those moments when all the stars align”. A Liverpool mate, Ed Smith, had come in as manager and appointed Rattle as the music director [of CBSO]. The relationship was tight: “We were Gilbert and George,” Rattle quips. Smith then won a million-pound Arts Council grant and was given the green light to construct a concert hall, which would go on to become the best in Britain. “I don’t think we knew how lucky we were,” Rattle says. “The players in the city had been through a terrible time. They said: ‘We haven’t been to the dentist for years.’ The city wanted a rebirth. Europe got involved. To this day nobody knows what the Symphony Hall cost. Jacques Delors and Keith Joseph dug the first hole.”
One summer he electrified champagne quaffers at Glyndebourne with Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Auditions were held in America. “Some were a bit suspicious of this very young white guy. We had a bit of a standoff over the speed of one of the spirituals. One of the older members said to me, ‘Simon, we’re really enjoying working with you. But every now and then we can tell that none of your relatives worked in cotton.’” He still holds regular reunions with the original cast.
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I met Rattle around this time. We both ran off to collect kids from school. Any other maestro, I thought, would have sent the nanny. But Rattle was a new kind of conductor, never happier than when bucking the rules. After 18 years he walked away from Birmingham with no job in sight. In 1999 the Berlin Philharmonic fell vacant as Claudio Abbado battled cancer. Daniel Barenboim was the clear favourite for the job, but in a secret ballot Rattle won the players’ vote. The pair continue to share their baton wounds. “Barenboim still says to me, ‘Look, Simon, I think I would have been a better person for them,’” Rattle confides.
“And what do you reply?”
“I say, ‘Daniel, I thought that then … I think it now.’”
Berlin proved a brutal awakening for the music director. “At Claudio’s last concert, [his predecessor] Herbert von Karajan’s widow, Eliette, came over to speak to me, not entirely sober but very intense. She said: ‘Simon, good luck with this. Just be aware: the orchestra is great, but they killed my husband and they nearly killed Claudio. Be careful. Of your health, of your sanity.’”
There was a hard core of resistance in the orchestra, some from reactionaries or from others who were just bloody-minded. How did he face them on a Monday morning? “You try lots of things,” Rattle says, shrugging. “Eye contact doesn’t always work. And it’s difficult to keep your confidence. I certainly struggled at some times. One of the older players said to me: ‘We had James Levine last week. He said good morning to me. How am I expected to play for a conductor who says good morning to me?’ Another old-timer said: ‘If we are to play Elgar, we might as well play — sniff — Mahler.’” The Birmingham can-do attitude was a thing of the past.
The best parts were those nights when music took over. Rattle introduced Berlin to living composers — Ligeti, Gubaidulina and Widmann, Adès and Turnage. He’d look up to the right as he came on stage to see if Angela Merkel was in her seat. “She’d say, ‘In the middle of the great immigration crisis, this is the only place I can be undisturbed for three hours.’” Did he ever see a British prime minister? “Thatcher,” he remembers. “She came to Porgy.”
Rattle lasted 16 years at the wheel of the orchestral Porsche before he walked away again. “As a conductor in Berlin,” he explains, “it can be friendly, it can be polite, but you are not a member of the guild. They are the Mastersingers. They are the ones who remain. Conductors come and go.”
His successor, Kirill Petrenko, is an introvert who never gives interviews or makes recordings. Rattle is delighted. “They have a great conductor to work with who is totally uncompromising in areas where I compromised. Kirill never gives up, and I’m sure it drives them completely crazy, but he’s made them an orchestra that’s … much easier … for the rest of us to conduct.”
Battered by Berlin, he got talking to the London Symphony Orchestra. “These were a bunch of friends of mine from the [Royal] Academy, or earlier. It felt like something where we could simply make music and see where it would go.” The LSO asked him to help it secure a new hall. “I said, ‘I hope this doesn’t become the single subject that we talk about for the next few years,’” he recalls. But it was. And then Brexit and Covid killed the scheme, along with his tolerance for tours. The players needed more than he could give. He was done with being a music director.
Just then a friend in the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra sweet-talked him on to a high-speed train for a couple of concerts. He remembered its sound from his boyhood in Liverpool. In Munich the players gave him a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “You’ll never walk alone” in Bavarian dialect. “A bit like Scouse,” he says, laughing.
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In 2021 Rattle announced that he would leave the LSO to be chief conductor with the BRSO. His two concerts with the orchestra at the Proms this month will be his first appearance at the festival as the group’s chief conductor.
Once again the orchestra’s hall in its home city is a problem — the BRSO shares one with the Munich Philharmonic. A new hall was promised, but it has been postponed to 2036. “You’ll be 81,” I point out. “My job is to persuade them to move more quickly,” Rattle maintains diplomatically. “But I am perfectly fine carrying the process on for whomever my successor might be.”
Rattle had his cataracts done during Covid and he mentions deflecting one of my questions to his shrink. I tell him he looks happy and he thinks for a long moment (our cappuccinos have long since gone stone-cold on the coffee table). ‘“I love working here. The orchestra is like a family, it’s very easygoing and yet they play like demons. I feel a truly lucky man being here.”
The Lebrecht Interview with Simon Rattle is on Radio 3 on August 24 at 9.45pm. Rattle conducts the BRSO on September 5 and 6 at the Royal Albert Hall, also broadcast on Radio 3
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