Not so long ago Simon Rattle appeared at a rehearsal of his City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra wearing an outrageously colorful Miro-inspired T-shirt. “Now I know,” a clarinetist exclaimed, “what the inside of your brain looks like!”
That says a lot about the easygoing, collegial relationship Rattle — Sir Simon, if you please — has enjoyed for the last 18 years with the orchestra in the English Midlands that he has built from a provincial band to an international ensemble. Now that he is leaving his post as music director to become a freelance citizen of the musical world, he will lead a farewell tour with the Birmingham orchestra that will take them to Symphony Center for concerts at 8 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday
But the remark also tells you a great deal about the musical polymath Rattle is. His head teems with music, his repertory spanning the spectrum from Monteverdi and Rameau at one end to Boulez, Stockhausen, John Adams, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Thomas Ades at the other. The sheer energy, personality and conviction he brings to this wide repertory have made him the Golden Boy (now graying) of British music. Also fueling the Rattle Express are recordings and wide television exposure in Europe, thanks to his seven-part series on 20th Century music, “Leaving Home.”
Since making his Chicago Symphony debut at the downy age of 23, in 1978, he has graduated from the younger to the middle generation of aging wunderkind conductors that includes the American Michael Tilson Thomas, the Finnish Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Russian Valery Gergiev. All three musicians are engaged in related missions: to make old music sound new, to make the concert experience fresh and involving for audiences and to save the symphony orchestra from becoming an anachronism.
Speaking by telephone from Boston, where he recently guest conducted the Boston Symphony, the 43-year-old, Liverpool-born Rattle accepts the compliment graciously.
“There is a whole group of us (conductors) trying to sort out our position in the new century,” he says. “Everybody wants to make the thing work in a different way. Obviously the day of the podium autocrat is over, but I also think the day of the peripatetic guest conductor is over as well. At some point you have to look at yourself: How much money do you need? We are, after all, very well paid.
“I don’t think the orchestra as an institution will survive into the next millennium if it goes on doing just the same things it always has done. We are all going to have to find a way to expand the audience that listens to us — not by playing down to them, not by doing silly MTV things, but by bringing people into the richness of the musical experience. I think we are all a bit foggy about how to bring that about. But you’ve got to try.”
And Birmingham, for Rattle, has proved a singularly receptive place for luring new ears into classical music.
When he took over that city’s orchestra in 1980, 60 years after its founding, he was 25, only six years away from winning the John Player International Conducting Competition, and younger than most of the players. The ensemble itself was far from a world-beater. The previous music director, Louis Fremaux, had walked out after the manager (who also happened to be his agent) received a no-confidence vote from the musicians. “Basically the players felt it was time to create a different type of orchestra,” Rattle explains.
He began reorganizing the ensemble, raiding the London orchestras of some of their best string players, adding female musicians, making the ranks more international. He also shook up the orchestra’s repertory, expanding it backwards to include Baroque music and forward to embrace the moderns. His talent and lack of pretension made him a natural pitchman for classical music (especially 20th Century music) on radio and television. The mop-haired Rattle was just the breath of innovative air British music needed.
Before long, the Birmingham city council got behind the idea of the orchestra as an educational tool that would be an integral part of the community. A major recording contract with EMI insured that the music director’s orchestra-building efforts and diverse musical interests would be well documented.
“I came to the orchestra not quite knowing what I was in for, certainly not thinking I would be there for a very long time,” Rattle recalls. “I was finding my feet and learning as I went along. We grew up together, the musicians and I.”
A milestone in the orchestra’s progress was the opening in 1991 of what is, by common consent, the best concert hall in Britain — Birmingham’s Symphony Hall, the CBSO’s permanent home. Freed at last from their antiquated previous hall, the musicians and Rattle warmly embraced the excellent acoustics and the acoustics embraced them. Londoners enviously watched the musical initiative straying from the capital to England’s second city.
When Rattle hands over the Birmingham baton this fall to his successor, the young Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo, his influence is likely to be felt for many seasons to come. Roughly two-thirds of the orchestra’s 100 players are his appointees. Median age of the musicians is 31, considerably younger than that of most leading orchestras. “And here I am, with my graying locks,” Rattle sighs. “The players look on me like this great survivor of the Boer War!”
Among other things, having so many young musicians in the ranks has helped give the orchestra a flexibility that allows them to play new music with precision and conviction, old music with much of the briskness and clarity we associate with period-instrument ensembles, he explains.
With respect to 20th Century music, Rattle is justifiably proud of the orchestra’s “Towards the Millennium” project, which began in 1991. Each year since then he and the CBSO have focused on a successive decade of the century, offering what he believes to be some of the most significant scores written during each period. The project will culminate in 2000 with a staggering series of 147 premieres — chamber and vocal music as well as orchestral pieces.
As a matter of fact, Rattle’s two Chicago programs — concerts he calls “a microcosm of what the orchestra does” — contain examples of both new and old. British composer Oliver Knussen’s Symphony No. 3 shares the bill with the Mahler Symphony No. 7 on the Tuesday program, while the Wednesday concert holds works by Rameau and Haydn along with Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony.
Which bring us to the central question: Why did Rattle choose to leave Birmingham now, when the musical marriage remains so happy, productive and successful?
Rattle cannot pretend that settling into a second marriage (his first, to American soprano Elise Ross, ended in a much-publicized divorce) didn’t play a part in his decision to step down, but he won’t discuss his personal life beyond that point.
Otherwise, he says his primary reason was a wish to experience more of life and the world than is possible when one works as intensely with one orchestra as he did for 18 years. “I need time to wonder about other things besides music. Time to think and time to grow. I’m actually going to be very happy having more time to reflect and be a free agent, rather than being this mother with 100 nipples,” he says, laughing.
“Also,” he adds, “I have seen how very long relationships between conductors and orchestras can stagnate. They might not necessarily turn sour but they can stay the same. I felt it was important that we should go out while we were still exploring.”
Rattle may be relinquishing his title, but he won’t be leaving Birmingham. “I’ll be working with the orchestra a couple of months a year, which is nearly as much time as some music directors give their orchestras now. An orchestra like this really needs and deserves looking after.”
Even with his new free-agent status, don’t expect Rattle to be returning to the CSO guest roster in the near future. CSO president Henry Fogel has invited him several times but he has declined the offers, as indeed he turns down most requests to conduct in the U.S. “I told Henry thanks, but I don’t really want to fall in love with another orchestra,” admits Rattle. For the time being, the orchestral objects of his affection include the Vienna and Berlin philharmonics and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the London-based period-instruments ensemble of which he is principal guest conductor. Future recording plans in Vienna include cycles of the Beethoven symphonies and piano concertos, the latter with Alfred Brendel as soloist.
When he does find time to nip across the Atlantic for symphonic engagements, it’s usually to Boston and Philadelphia. As a matter of fact, it has been reported that the Philadelphia Orchestra is actively wooing him as successor to music director Wolfgang Sawallisch when he retires sometime after 2000. But Rattle says he is in no hurry to take up a permanent position so soon after shucking off the shackles in Birmingham.
“Right now Europe is where my life is mainly centered. I’m going to be spending more time with the Vienna Philharmonic in the coming seasons. I’m learning a lot from them and I’m bringing them some new (ideas). There are no permanent plans anywhere else, and for the time being that’s good. I suspect that the time for another orchestra is in (the next) century. Offers come, but things move slowly. I’m not racing to fill up my life.”
