Simon Rattle interview: happy to be home The Berlin Philharmonic conductor Simon Rattle talks about returning to his old stamping ground.

Simon Rattle interview: happy to be home

The Berlin Philharmonic conductor Simon Rattle talks about returning to his old stamping ground.

By Ivan Hewett
Published: 11:42AM GMT 04 Mar 2010

Bach in his blood: Simon Rattle Photo: EPA/CORBIS

This weekend Sir Simon Rattle is coming ’home’ – in two senses. He’s returning to Birmingham to conduct the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the orchestra he lead for 18 years back in the 1980s and 90s, for the first time in years. “I’m so looking forward to going back and seeing so many familiar faces,” he says, “and the orchestra is in such fabulous shape under Andris Nelsons. Last year in Lucerne they gave the best live performance of La Mer I’ve ever heard.”

The other home-coming is to Bach. People think of Rattle as most at home with new music, especially the pioneers of the early modernist wave – Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Sibelius, and above all Mahler. But it turns out that Bach was in his blood much earlier. “I was a harpsichordist in my teens, and there was a bunch of us in Liverpool who got together every week to play Bach.”

So why did he wait until his late 40s before conducting Bach’s music? He

hesitates. “When I started I just couldn’t live with the style that was current then. It was the end of that era when Bach was played in a way which was impassioned, but also grotesque. And then there was this huge transition in Baroque style just getting under way, so it was a confusing time. Also it was just lack of experience – I didn’t know how to do let Bach’s music just happen.” Is he saying Bach doesn’t need a conductor? “In a way. You don’t interpret, you have to help the flow. So, I thought well, I’d better just leave this alone.”

Rattle remembers with a laugh how one strong-willed Frenchwoman brought him round to Bach. “My dear friend Katia Labeque nagged me into it. She made me listen to all these wonderful Italian Baroque groups like Giardino Armonico, which bring such amazing colours to Baroque music. And other musicians inspired me too, like Nikolaus Harnoncourt, so I thought now it’s time to explore this great mountain, because really there is no greater music than Bach.”

But in recent decades Bach has been captured by the period instrument brigade, which poses a problem for a conductor like Rattle who leads ’standard’ orchestras like the CBSO or the Berlin Philharmonic. However Rattle feels this purist idea is now fading. “What really counts isn’t whether your instrument is Baroque or modern, it’s your mind-set. It’s having a sense of style, and also realising that there’s no right way to play Bach. Two of the Bach performers I most admire come at his music from opposite directions. Frans Bruggen always talks about the importance of diminuendo, and Ton Koopman always talks about crescendos!’

Are there particular crags in the mountain he’s climbing this weekend – Bach’s St Matthew Passion – which are especially dangerous? “Well, making sure the whole of the second part keeps its shape for 90 minutes is hard. And also the chorales are a challenge. They’re so short, like hymns, but each one has to have a different personality. You can’t just run through them in a routine way, like an English ’how do you do?’”

Talk of Englishman politeness naturally brings us on to his own status as an Englishman leading a very German institution. Rattle has been Principal Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic for seven years, and there have been some turbulent times. Not everyone approved of his crash diet of new music in the early days, or his individual way with the classics. Rattle isn’t upset by the German critics who’ve given him a hard time, but he doesn’t dismiss them either. “Look, being given a hard time comes with the territory. There was a sense among the critics that I and the orchestra weren’t exactly finding each other, and really I think that was true. If you receive a whole string of bad reviews, you have to say ’o.k, maybe there’s something here we should pay attention to.”

complete interview here.