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The instruction was straightforward: “10.30am at home. Coffee and croissants.” Since timing, at least in part, is a conductor’s priority, a visitor feels the pressure – especially with the siren call of coffee – to be prompt. Simon Rattle lives on the edge of Grunewald, the expanse of forest and lakes to the west of Berlin, a haven for the prosperous who built villas there at the end of the 19th century, and a green lung for all Berliners today. I arrive a few minutes early – long enough to take issue with Christopher Isherwood who, in his Berlin Stories, complained about the “expensive ugliness” of the properties here, ranging from “the eccentric-rococo folly to the cubist flat-roofed steel-and-glass box”. Gables and turrets turn suburban houses into small castles, a reminder of Germany’s romantic folklore past. Fairy lights – we meet shortly before Christmas – accentuate that impression, with Rattle’s own front garden entering the spirit, complete with illuminated Bambis and skeins of bulbs winding round railings, gate and shrubbery.
Rattle is on the steps to greet me. Somewhat awed by the exterior’s gothic grandeur I jest: “Mad King Ludwig II?”, referring to Wagner’s patron, famous for building fantastical fortresses inspired by the composer’s operas. “Exactly!” Rattle agrees, chuckling. “Magdalena [Kožená, the Czech-born mezzo-soprano, his wife] and I laughed in disbelief when we first saw it – many years ago now. But it’s quite different inside.” He is right. This light-filled family home is indeed a welcome and informal sanctuary for the couple and their two sons and daughter. Two are still at school, one is a student in Milan. (Rattle also has two older sons from his marriage to Elise Ross, one a professional musician, the other an artist.) Children’s drawings are stuck on walls; a pinboard overflows with family photos. A fire, stoked by Rattle, roars in the hearth of an open-plan kitchen-dining room. When anyone wonders why Rattle continues to live in Berlin, this refuge is the answer. He has now taken German citizenship. “The three children have grown up here. School is here. Music lessons and football club and friends and forest are here. It’s all they’ve known.”
One impetus for our interview is Rattle’s Barbican concerts this month with the London Symphony Orchestra, at which he will launch the composer-conductor Pierre Boulez’s centenary year. Now conductor emeritus, Rattle was the LSO’s music director from 2017 to 2023 (his successor is Antonio Pappano). The other reason is his 70th birthday on 19 January. I suspect, correctly, that Rattle has little to say about that. “Well…” he finally pronounces, with incontrovertible accuracy. “It’s a number with a nought at the end!” When his daughter is 21, he adds, a little ruefully, he will be 80, and he wants to be there. We all hope that. Conductors who work into advanced years are almost commonplace. No doubt studies exist on the health-giving properties of all that upper torso jigging and arm waving.
As likely for longevity is the passionate mental engagement that being a conductor requires. (Check out the likes of Toscanini, Stokowski, Klemperer, Boult, Haitink.) From 2002 to 2018, Rattle was music director of the Berlin Philharmonic. I mention that the night before, I heard his old orchestra play at its home base, the Philharmonie. The concert was conducted by Herbert Blomstedt, who is 97 and still, as Rattle observes, capable of marvels. Rattle himself embarked on a new job last season, which he is attacking with all his customary energy. He has become chief conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Munich – musicians he first heard, and by his own account fell in love with, as a teenager in Liverpool.
Rattle’s early departure from his LSO job puzzled some observers but hardly needs much analysis. The austere economics of British artistic life mean that orchestras are forced to rely on a heavy concert and touring schedule for survival. “The LSO – all London orchestras – work harder than any in the world,” says Rattle. “Yet still, in spite of all the impossible pressures, they produce fantastic playing. I adore working with them. But it wasn’t doing myself or the family good, long term.”
Contrary to hearsay, neither his decision to take on the LSO, nor his departure, had anything to do with the Centre for Music – a proposed concert hall to replace the Barbican, which was then axed. “I supported the idea when it seemed a possibility. You can perform music in all sort of spaces. But audiences do, I think, expect a central lighthouse, out of which the arts will broadcast. London could still do with a 21st-century, state-of-the-art concert hall. But that would imply a care taken, a centrality of the art form. I hope they’ll do a good job of repairing the Barbican. Let’s hope at least the sewers won’t ever overflow again backstage, as they did three times when I was there.”
Rattle’s post in Munich – also, incidentally, a city in need of a new concert hall – arose after the death of the Bavarians’ former conductor Mariss Jansons. One of the world’s leading orchestras, it was a natural choice for Rattle: arguably more porous and welcoming than the fiercely brilliant Berlin Phil, and an easy train commute away. Why did he leave the Berlin orchestra? After a bumpy start, he was rewarded with a long period of warm acceptance and achievement on many fronts (including the pioneering Digital Concert Hall streaming platform). “I felt it was really time enough. They needed someone else. A lot was difficult, and it would not have got any easier. But I would not have missed that experience for anything. They are absolutely fantastic players.” Alex Ross, writing in the New Yorker last month, struggled to identify the Berlin Phil’s singularity: “I’ve compared it, over the years, to a Rembrandt interior, a Russian men’s choir, and deep-focus cinematography.” It’s a fine way to sum up the inexpressible.
In one of his two BBC radio Desert Island Discs appearances, the first when he was 23 years old, Rattle compared the conductor’s role to that of being the person who always orders for everyone in a Chinese restaurant. The dictatorial style is, mercifully, a thing of the past, but nor can you be too democratic. His approach is broadly collaborative, always based on deep and precise knowledge. His Berlin successor, the fireball Russian Kirill Petrenko – unknowable, publicly, as he does not give interviews – is more surgical, analytical, uncompromising. Either approach can work, but finally the orchestra, the collective star, may go its own way in performance. “In Munich there is a possibility of a symbiotic relationship between conductor and players,” Rattle says. “Over the past 30 years, orchestras have improved astonishingly. There are now many wonderfully virtuosic bands, but so few poetic ones. That’s what I’m living with so happily now in Munich…”
Rattle was born in Liverpool in 1955. An academically able and precociously musical child, he was soon playing “anything they would allow me to play” – in the Merseyside Youth Orchestra at 10; putting on his own concerts and, still very young, joining the National Youth Orchestra as a percussionist and pianist. Were his parents in any sense “tiger parents”? “No. Absolutely not.” Nor, it would seem, is he. One of his children arrives home from school while we are talking. In a brief exchange about that morning’s end-of-term school concert, he is relaxed about the admission of shaky hands. “That’s exactly what I get when I play the piano,” he says, reassuring, affectionate.
“When I look back on my own musical development, I’m sure I was doing my father’s musical career for him. It was never spoken, but I could feel how invested he was.” Denis Rattle was a jazz pianist, leading a popular dance band when he was a student at Oxford. He decided a future as a businessman might be wiser. “He told me he wanted to be a professional, but he was worried what it would be like trying to make a living, with a young family.” Instead, Rattle senior became a pioneering importer and exporter of goods from China, including cheap Chinese-made violins, complete with bow and case, that were a gamechanger for schoolchildren learning the instrument at that time, including Rattle himself.
“My first violin was one of those. But what I really remember was all the plastic flowers and fancy goods and ridiculous toys…” Both parents were southerners, ending up in Liverpool through his father’s naval connections. “Every time anyone spoke scouse my mother would say [adopting mock genteel accent]: ‘Excuse me, would you speak a little slower. I come from Kent.’ She was a good working-class girl but she reinvented herself, quite wonderfully, as the duchess of the north. I wonder if perhaps that’s where a little bit of the acting part of being a conductor comes from.”
The childhood home was full of records: from classical to big band to popular music of his parents’ time, including all the Frank Sinatra songs with Burt Bacharach. His mother had run a record shop in the seaside town of Broadstairs. His debonair father bought a record from her every day for a year until she yielded to his charms. “And my father took me, when I was six, with my sister, Susan, to hear Duke Ellington. I basically sat underneath the piano.” Rattle’s highly gifted sister, nine years older, brought home scores from the library and soon showed her little brother, when he was about seven years old, how to read them. Her role in his career was formative. “She was probably the only sister in the world who would have thought: ‘Well, I think he’ll like Schoenberg’.” She listened to every possible concert on the radio and had total recall of what, when and by whom things were played.
The siblings were close – “as close as you could get to someone who was so locked in on herself. As Greta Thunberg says, being autistic is not a handicap, it’s a super power. And she’s right.” No one knew much about autism at the time. “The theory then was that it was caused by cold parenting, and was a reaction of the child to the environment. People could have applied many adjectives to my parents. Cold would never have been one of them.” Susan was not diagnosed until far into adulthood. “I suppose I must have been in my 30s. I’d seen Rain Man, and recognised so much in it. I’d read everything Oliver Sacks wrote, and one description of autism made me see, with absolute clarity, that this was Susan.” It took loving persuasion on his part to reassure his parents that the old belief – that family circumstances were to blame – had been wholly disproved. “And now we know that so many gifted figures from the past – including composers such as Prokofiev, Martinů – had this condition.”
Rattle took his A-levels early and left home at 16 to go to London and the Royal Academy of Music. He was surprised to find the fame his home city had acquired thanks to the Beatles, who had not much impinged on his teen consciousness. By 19 he had finished his studies and embarked on a professional career. “I was desperate to get started with music, but I was aware that I hadn’t really finished my education. I thought that at the end of the academy I would go to university. But life intervened.”
He won the John Player International Conducting Competition in 1974, and was appointed assistant conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. “I soon realised that this was a very strange occupation. Interesting, exciting, fascinating, lonely, depressing… all those things.” He decided to study English literature, for one year only, at St Anne’s College, Oxford, in part to find out who he was without “the drug of music”. He concentrated on the metaphysical poets, James Joyce and WB Yeats, and kept away from music “except on the alarm clock”. But the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra had already offered him the job of music director – a post he would hold from 1980 to 1998, and which would indelibly shape his own career and transform musical life in Birmingham. The experiment of a life away from his “junkie” vocation was over.
A question often asked of great musicians is how they maintain their interest when repeatedly performing the same repertoire. The symphonies of Gustav Mahler and the operas of Leoš Janáček have been constants in Rattle’s life since his teens. He quotes a close friend, the late Vic Firth, who was principal timpanist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 46 years. “People used to say how can you do these pieces, again and again, with such passion. Vic was also a canny art dealer. He’d say: ‘Look, if I have a great painting on the wall, why would I not be looking at it every day, to get whatever I can out of it?’” Most of the time, Rattle conducts from memory. “You can never quite tell what stays and what doesn’t. Some pieces are tattooed on my brain in a way that can never be lost. Others you look and think, somehow I don’t seem to know this. It happened recently with [Richard Strauss’s opera] Der Rosenkavalier, which I did so much in my 20s at Glyndebourne. Even if you know a piece, you can be blindsided by aspects you’d never noticed. I suppose that’s the definition of great art.”
One of his friends, the actor Simon Callow, recently told me how Rattle’s parents once took him to one side to ask a favour. “They were very anxious,” Callow recalls. “We want you to talk to Simon about a sensitive matter that we really can’t raise with him.” Callow’s imagination ran riot as he pondered where this was leading: “We want you to ask Simon to get his hair cut.” Rattle’s hair, framing his face Botticelli angel-style, has made him recognisable far beyond the confines of classical music. There are entire social media sites on the topic. He finds the Callow story very funny but also indicative. “My mother wanted me to have straight hair. She thought it respectable. She sent me to school each morning with a side parting, having combed it straight and flattened it with water. Of course within minutes it went back to nature.” We fall to discussing the origin of his curls, a topic that was definitely not on my checklist but, as with everything Rattle says, proved innately interesting.
Our allotted time is running out. We reflect, in a spirit of seasonal optimism, on the positives that have enriched musical life since Rattle started out. Early music – anything before JS Bach (1685-1750) – has become part of concert repertoire. Female composers, past and present, have shaken up a newly diverse canon. Rattle has always been an advocate of the new. Two British composers, George Benjamin and Mark-Anthony Turnage, have written new works for Rattle’s birthday. He regrets, however, the sharp decline in support for musical life in the UK.
“I don’t know how many times I’ve done interviews over the years in which I’ve said this is a really tough time for the arts. Even in Germany now, there’s a financial crisis.” In November, the Berlin government approved a €130m (£108m) cut to its cultural budget for 2025 – a reduction of 12%. Last week the city’s Komische Oper cancelled a forthcoming production citing funding. “There is, here, at least, a basic belief in the art form – that is, classical music. But these are very troubled times. In Britain, I see how hard it is. The country has been used to making do with so little, and doing extraordinary things. But there is a tipping point, a crisis point, where you can’t go beyond. You simply cannot do more with less.”
Rattle is shocked, above all, at the systematic dismantling of the UK’s opera companies. “I’m horrified to think that there are those who believe, without any concept or understanding, that you can just break down this art form and make it again. We watch it from here and feel terrible, and helpless.” Can he explain, in simple terms, why an opera company needs a permanent chorus and an orchestra? “How can I put this in clear English. This is one art form. It’s not singers with random accompaniment. Everything goes together. The shared knowledge within an orchestra and chorus, built up over years of experience, is a treasure beyond price. If you want something to work as an organic art form, all the pieces have to be there.”
Back to his birthday. “It’s a total cliche to say music keeps you young. I still feel like a teenager, though my knees may have a different opinion. I always thought there would come some mythical time when wisdom settles on you. This is absolutely not true. I’m still learning new things. It takes longer. I’m about to do Janáček’s The Excursions of Mr Brouček to the Moon. It’s completely nuts. I’m finally getting the hang of it. And there are still things I feel are beyond me. Bach’s B minor Mass, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis…” You’ve never done these two epic masterpieces of the repertoire? “No. Not yet. Will I? I’ll have to see… They’re scary.” Daunting they may be. First, Rattle has the arguably scarier prospect of the latest series of Squid Game, the South Korean dystopian survival thriller – promised viewing with his children on Boxing Day. He knows where his duties lie.
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Simon Rattle conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Tippett, Turnage and Vaughan Williams at the Barbican, London, tonight, 7pm. The concert will be broadcast on Radio 3 on 20 January
Seven at 70: essential Simon Rattle recordings
Mahler: Symphony No 6
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, 2024 (BR Klassik)
Rattle is a Mahler master – choose any recording, but this latest is with his Munich players.
Beethoven: The Complete Piano Concertos
Krystian Zimerman (piano), Berlin Philharmonic, 2021 (DG)
Great orchestra, great soloist – as good as it gets.
Czech Songs
Magdalena Kožená (mezzo-soprano), Czech Philharmonic, 2024 (Pentatone)
Rattle is principal guest conductor of this fine orchestra, here with his wife as soloist.
Janáček: The Cunning Little Vixen
London Symphony Orchestra, 2020 (LSO Live)
One of Rattle’s all-time favourite works, by a beloved composer.
Thomas Adès: Asyla
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, 1999 (Warner)
Rattle’s exploration of the new is a mainstay of his career.
Gershwin: Porgy and Bess
Glyndebourne cast, London Philharmonic Orchestra, 1988 (EMI)
A turning-point recording.
And as pianist:
Soirée: Magdalena Kožená and friends
2019 (Pentatone)
Rattle’s debut recording as pianist, in chamber music by Janáček, Brahms and more.
On Rattle’s cultural radar
Books I finally read Beowulf, in the Seamus Heaney translation. On tour I’ve been reading Mick Herron. For when you need something to grab you: The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk.
Films Magdalena and I watched Tampopo last week: surreal heaven. And on tour I watched Killers of the Flower Moon – gruelling and extraordinary.
