Why ‘the only conductor politicians have ever heard of’ is leaving the UK
Sir Simon Rattle has been the most successful champion of orchestral music and opera for more than three decades. His departure strikes a chord across both politics and media, writes David Lister
At the height of a pandemic, the fact that a classical music conductor is leaving a London orchestra shouldn’t count for very much. Frankly, even in normal times the departure of 99 per cent of conductors would barely make a headline. But when Sir Simon Rattle announced he was leaving the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), it not only made headlines, it stunned Britain’s musical world.
To add insult to injury, Sir Simon wasn’t just swapping one podium for another. He was leaving the country, moving to a German orchestra and, perhaps most striking of all, taking out German citizenship.
OK, the tempo is slow in classical music and the move from the Barbican-based LSO won’t actually happen until 2023. Nevertheless, the shock waves were palpable. Norman Lebrecht, veteran classical music writer and critic, and founder of the Slipped Disc classical music website, says: “British music has just lost its most effective voice. He has been, for three decades and more, the most successful champion of orchestral music and opera at the summits of politics and media… whenever a voice was needed to champion a musical cause, Simon Rattle would get on the phone to Whitehall or sign a letter to The Times and the wheels of redress would start rolling.
“He was effective because he was fresh-faced, intelligent, committed to regional issues in an authentic regional accent, charming, persuasive and, above all, one of us. Simon Rattle was British to the roots of his mop of white hair.”
So why is the charismatic Scouser going, and why is his loss so significant? After all, the one-time wunderkind of British music left once before. In 2002 he left the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, which he had put not just on the national but the international map, to take over the Berlin Philharmonic, arguably the most famous orchestra in the world. The streets of Berlin carried banners saying “Welcome Sir Simon!” Believe it or not, the Sun ran an editorial on him.
But he came back in 2015 to lead the LSO and campaign vigorously for a new, state of the art concert hall in London, niftily getting the then chancellor George Osborne and mayor of London Boris Johnson publicly onside. Rattle was adamant that London lacked a first class hall, once saying of the Royal Festival Hall, with his canny grasp of a good headline: “The will to live slips away in the first half-hour of rehearsal.”
Now long before there is any sight of the concert hall that he had been raising funds for, he is leaving his London orchestra for one in Germany, Munich’s Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, a renowned outfit, even if it doesn’t carry quite the clout of the Berlin Philharmonic, and will take German citizenship. Rattle’s wife, the opera singer Magdalena Kozena, and their three children already live in Germany, and in a statement he said : “My reasons for accepting the role of chief conductor in Munich are entirely personal, enabling me to better manage the balance of my work and be close enough to home to be present for my children in a meaningful way. I love the London Symphony Orchestra. I remain committed to the LSO, and we have plans for major projects in the coming years. I am thrilled that we will be making music together far into the future.”
The Munich orchestra plays a part in the Rattle story. It came to Liverpool in 1970 and the teenage Rattle was at the concert. He said: “Attending this concert changed my life … the orchestra’s visit to Liverpool made a profound impression on a teenager who wished to be a conductor – to experience such a symbiotic relationship between conductor and players, and the unanimity of concept and philosophy was as evident as the sheer pleasure the musicians emanated. This concert became a kind of benchmark for me, a goal towards which musicians should strive.”
So there’s sentiment, and there’s an understandable wish to live in the same country as his family. But it’s also hard to avoid the conclusion that Rattle, an avid European, sees problems for classical music with Brexit, and is disillusioned with the British government’s attitude to the arts generally.
When questioned at a news conference if he had followed other EU-based Britons in applying for the citizenship, Rattle responded: “My passport is on the way. Like for many, this was an absolute necessity.” He also said: “The fact that musicians and artists in general suddenly have to get visas for Europe is absolutely not the Brexit bonus we were talking about. We will have to fight it.”
The fact that any new concert hall in the City of London would have needed substantial funds from the City, whose own post-Brexit future is much debated, may also have played a part in his decision.
What is certain is that his departure will mean a dramatic diminution in his effectiveness as a campaigner over here. Lebrecht says: “Like many others he has been pushed by Brexit into getting a second passport, as is only sensible for a widely travelled person. But as a German citizen who lives in Germany and works for a German company, he can no longer speak truth to power in Britain. He can try, of course, but it won’t work as it did in the past. They’ll just bat him off with ‘it’s not your problem, son. You’re a German, now. And he’ll have no comeback to that.’
“The loss to British music is considerable. Just how great we will see in the coming year as UK musicians struggle for lost rights to perform freely in Europe and London orchestras hit the insolvency buffers. Sir Simon Rattle, once their knight, now has other priorities, other loyalties.”
If so, that is a crying shame, because Rattle is a rarity among classical musicians – he knows how to be political.
When I first met him in the early 1990s, he was campaigning for better music education and had just come back from a bruising session with Margaret Thatcher’s then education secretary Ken Clarke. “The man is a street fighter,” Rattle exclaimed to me in shock. Perhaps he stored the experience away. For he, too, was to become a fighter. In Berlin he won his orchestra a new concert hall. Back in London in 2015 he forged contacts with the chancellor and the mayor.
They knew of the regard and affection the public and his peers held him in. Perhaps they had also seen him on the concert podium looking intensely at individual players, suddenly whirling around, the now white mane threatening to take flight. He can make one hear famous pieces as if they are fresh. I saw him once conduct Beethoven’s ninth symphony. He took a key passage much more slowly and quietly than is usual, and gave it an unforgettable, haunting, revelatory quality.
There is, too, about Rattle an almost tangible charisma, and not just for audiences. The violinist and virtuoso Tasmin Little told me: “Playing with Simon conducting has often left me on a complete high and unable to sleep. There is an immense energy and depth of intensity.
“Some conductors seem to let the orchestra do the work occasionally, even for a bar or two, but Simon is fully present every second of performance. Every nerve, every fibre of his being is involved. And in rehearsal with him I have learned the most enormous amount. He would get each set of people working together in a way that made me think of music in layers and textures. He could bring out such detail in one bassoon line. He kept bringing out details I had never heard before.”
Rattle is a Liverpool boy and a supporter of Liverpool FC. Brought up in the affluent suburb of Sefton Park by his father Denis, a naval commander, and his mother Pauline, a city librarian, the young Rattle was, in his own words, “a weird duck … an uncomfortable, overweight, intense boy with this huge passion”.
Even at the age of 11 he was pleading with his father to take him on a school night to hear a Messiaen symphony. “I met Messiaen and got the autograph. I still think it was one of the most thrilling moments of my life,” he remembers. Rattle attended Liverpool College. He was a percussionist in youth orchestras and then studied at the Royal Academy of Music before joining the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra as an assistant conductor.
Soon he was on his way to Birmingham, where he gave a definitive performance of Mahler’s second symphony and rapidly forged an international reputation.
He is remembered as little short of a genius in his early days, but as a young man he was also a bit of a hustler. One orchestra manager recalls that he was always trying to book concert dates for his singer wife, the American soprano Elise Ross. They divorced after 15 years of marriage and two sons, and in 1996 Rattle married the screenwriter and novelist Candace Allen, the first African American female member of the Directors’ Guild of America. That marriage, too, was not to last. He went to Germany but did return from time to time to conduct opera. And at Glyndebourne he met and fell in love with the Czech mezzo-soprano Kozena. Suddenly, he was tabloid fodder, with his subsequent split from Candace Allen. Rattle and Kozena and family settled in Berlin. Their home was described by one visiting journalist as “an eccentric architectural fantasy that they have made their own with a cornucopia of Czech carpentry”.
But the building work that will soon desperately need to be done is the rebuilding of the whole arts landscape after the financial traumas caused by closures because of Covid, and the difficulties surrounding visas and Brexit. The arts is not currently blessed with that many spokespeople and advocates with the necessary public profile and charisma to make the case for culture.
Sir Simon Rattle possesses these qualities in spades; and his voice is going to be sorely missed just at the time it is most needed. And, while one can point to his track record in acclaimed concerts and recordings, his international success and his personality to illustrate his unique value in this regard, Norman Lebrecht puts it more succinctly.
“He was,” says Lebrecht, “the only conductor most politicians had heard of.”
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