You have to talk to Simon Rattle for quite a time to be confident that his apparent modesty and self-denigration is completely genuine. Modesty, somehow, is the last quality one looks for in a young man who carries the high approval, and the still higher hopes, of a growing number of discriminating musicians, and who on Sunday – less than a month after his twenty-first birthday – conducts his first Festival Hall concert with a major London orchestra, taking the New Philharmonia through a programme of Berlioz, Mozart, and Shostakovich.
If success hasn’t spoiled Rattle, it has surprised and slightly bewildered him; half of him remains the boisterous student while the other half has had to age fast and painfully. At one point he refers to “my friends at school, in the real world.” He admits that the hardest thing has been the changeover from being a student to being a professional: “ It’s the loneliness. . . one’s a nomad.” When we meet he is lumbered with about three armfuls of scores which he’s wondering how to get back to the flat in Ealing where he has borrowed a temporary bed.
Rattle was a precocious and versatile musician as a boy in his native Liverpool. At eight he was playing in a concert “dressed as a bluecoat boy in a pair of trousers that went about six inches below my shoe-level.” At 13 Fritz Spiegl gave him his first professional job, playing timpani in Handel’s Fireworks Music: at this stage he was already building a reputation as percussionist and pianist. The following year, though, he decided that what he really had to do was conduct.
He was helped in this particular intent by what he calls “my lifelong predilection for forming orchestras, groups, getting people to play, preferably by blackmail.” This came in handy, too, when at the age of 16 he went to the Royal Academy of Music. “I went there as a pianist and a percussionist, trying to make it as clear as possible that I wanted to carve. You’re not supposed to carve until your second year, but one has to make opportunities. By the time I got out I had conducted a lot of operas, and even more bits of operas.” He had also given performances, still talked about, of two of Mahler’s biggest symphonies.
In the year before going to the Academy he had played in the National Youth Orchestra (“I didn’t want to join until then – I wanted something with a more adventurous social life”), which gave him the chance to meet and work with Pierre Boulez. Not often, I imagine, would Boulez be prepared to enter into lengthy discussion of Le Marteau sans Maître with a 15-year-old, but his assessment here proved precise as ever.
“Boulez really was a ‘formative experience’,” says Rattle, responding in spirit to the cliche-question. “I then went through a terrible Boulez patch, trying to conduct like him.” He also talks, perhaps with even greater enthusiasm, of John Carewe, a conductor whose thorny intellect has probably prevented wider acceptance: “I go to him with increasing respect. He’s saved me five years of professional experience.” And yet, swinging to the farthest possible extreme: “For me the greatest musical influence among all the conductors is Furtwängler, and the only conductor who carries on his school today is Giulini. Spontaneity is the great thing. One’s admiration for Boulez is something else altogether – admiration rather than love, which as Barbara Cartland will tell you is very different.”
In 1974, when he was 19 and already a sort of part-time staff conductor at the Academy, he went in for the John Player International Conducting Competition. The opposition was numerous and gifted, all of it older and more experienced. Rattle won, sensationally. “People do plan their lives, you know, and I had my life well planned, I had the money to do a fourth year at the Academy. I just went into the competition for fun, for the experience of conducting a professional orchestra. I didn’t think I had a chance, and I almost didn’t want to win anyway. I was surprised rather than elated: I had to grow up all of a sudden.”
The competition established him, providing a contract with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra as a working base. Since then he has been busy, inheriting the Hockney-designed Glyndebourne Rake’s Progress from Bernard Haitink, directing the English Chamber Orchestra in Spain, conducting the London schools Symphony Orchestra in Mahler and Ligeti in an outstandingly successful Festival Hall debut, and much else. Orchestras generally have taken to him, responding to the sharply perceptive musicianship, the sheer vivacity, and respecting him for respecting their greater age and experience.
With one orchestra, he says, it took a long time to work out a viable relationship. And one distinguished brass player, in the north of England, greeted him with a little baby’s rattle – but the same player, the previous week, had thrown birdseed at the pianist in a work by Messiaen, so maybe it wasn’t really personal. He is even in the position of refusing invitations. He has recently turned down the chance to conduct Tchaikovsky (“works I’ll never be at home with”) and also certain pieces of Brahms and Mozart, which he simply doesn’t feel up to yet. In the case of the classical masterpieces he says he would prefer a run through with amateurs – “then I can sit down and learn the works properly.”
“My worst and best qualities are rashness: the good part of it is due to youth, which is of course why I’m not a great conductor.” He doesn’t add, or even imply, the word “yet,” but it seems to hang in the air. “But now is the time to go slow rather than to rush ahead and capitalise on what is, quite honestly, only the same sort of reaction that Shirley Temple produced. It’ll be all right providing I’m given time to study. I’ve got time on my side, but I mustn’t misuse it.
“At the moment when I approach Mozart, for instance, I feel I’m on foreign territory. I adore Mozart, but I find it very difficult. I’ve done all the worst performances of Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony – including a dreadful one with the ECO in Spain, and they played so well, bless them.” Knocking still further, he says: “There is very little interest in a conductor under 50” (demonstrably, and happily, untrue). Yet he does fight against letting the age thing obsess him. Is he worried about breaking out of the whizzkid image? “I see that being a problem for a man of 40...”
Nor is there any problem in his mind about his musical likes and dislikes; here indeed is the confidence of youth. “Mahler and all the related composers – the most obvious are Berg and Maxwell Davies – and also in this century, Ravel and Stravinsky; in the nineteenth century, Dvorak and Berlioz; in the previous century, Haydn.”
He wants to conduct a lot of other music besides: those massive full scores he was dragging around were of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, of which he is shortly giving a rare concert performance. Plans and hopes are numerous: he has ideas of making music-theatre a much more complete experience than usual. It seems a fair bet that in the course of time he will become the youngest conductor ever to do a Sunday’s NPO concert is, be agrees, “exciting; terrifying, and yes, just a step along the road.” As he says it he is, once again, on the outside looking in slight bewilderment at the phenomenon called Simon Rattle.
View all comments >