Many Rattle Returns

Birthday celebrations for the London Symphony Orchestra's conductor emeritus

Serene, dynamic: Simon Rattle conducts Tippett, Turnage and Vaughan Williams with the LSO Picture © Mark Allan

Simon Rattle turns 70 on January 19. He is a musician whose performances I have attended since my student days almost half a century ago. In the autumn of 1975 - he was 20, a year younger than me - he conducted the celebrated John Cox/David Hockney production of The Rake’s Progress on Glyndebourne’s Tour, and a year later he championed the young Willard White in a Chelsea Opera Group Porgy and Bess - a full decade before their landmark Glyndebourne production.

Rattle became chief conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1980, and it was their developing partnership that made possible the building of Symphony Hall, with arguably the best acoustics of any large concert hall in the UK. Although the music directorship of Glyndebourne had beckoned when Bernard Haitink moved on to Covent Garden, Rattle demurred, preferring to focus on his work in Birmingham. His final decade there, from 1989 to 1998, was especially memorable for his ‘Towards The Millennium’ concert series, with each year’s programme devoted to a decade of 20th century music.

Rattle has never looked back. He was music director of the Berliner Philharmoniker from 2002 to 2018 - an era not without controversy. His performances of Austro-German classics sometimes displeased local critics as well as players resistant to change, as the “professors” of the Berlin orchestra undoubtedly were. But Rattle’s legacy in the German capital included a broadening of the repertoire: one of the first concerts I heard him conduct there was of Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass, a Rattle party-piece in Birmingham, but one which severely taxed the Berlin brass and strings. He was also responsible for community projects and the employment of more female musicians in the orchestra.