Simon Rattle is already on his second cup of Starbucks' finest before he starts his rehearsal at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, for a production of Debussy's only opera, Pelleas et Melisande. After a run-through of the first scene of act three, he's not completely happy. "It's a bit early in the morning: we need to find our velvety sound; it still sounds too heavy." He wants more from the orchestra's cello section; one chord, maybe the most violent moment in the whole piece, needs to be played like a "small nuclear explosion."
What's miraculous is that in the space of an hour or so, Rattle transforms the sound of the Royal Opera orchestra. Instead of the lumpen playing at the start, there is shimmering, atmospheric brilliance. The singers grow in confidence as imperfections of ensemble are ironed out, and the performance blooms. It's an object lesson in how to rehearse, a revelation of Rattle's gifts as a communicator, verbally and gesturally coaxing the best out of his musicians.
Rattle's rise from UK-born wunderkind, to savior of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and, in 2002, to his assumption of the most challenging job in music at the age of just 47, is the stuff of legend. His has been a near faultless progress from teenage prodigy to elder statesman. During his time in Birmingham, from 1980 to 1998, Rattle could do no wrong. As a public advocate for serious music and music education, Rattle was classical music's most powerful and vocal ambassador. When he left the CBSO in 1998, he had the musical world at his feet, but the Berlin job was always going to be the most tempting. Ever since his debut with the Berliners in 1987 with Mahler's Sixth Symphony, they were the players that inspired him most. And, in June 1999, the orchestra voted for Rattle over Daniel Barenboim to replace Claudio Abbado as their maestro.
But it hasn't all been plain sailing. For the first time in his career, Rattle has faced a critical onslaught, from sections of the German media. At the same time, the British press have used his success abroad as a chance to put the boot in. "The Tony Blair of classical music" is a common epithet, to suggest spin and a tarnished reputation. But it's not a completely erroneous analogy. Like Blair, Rattle has tried to be all things to all people in Berlin, playing a huge variety of repertoire in his first five seasons, from Mahler to Mark-Anthony Turnage, Bernstein to Boulez, and inviting conductors such as French Baroque expert William Christie — whose early music style is a long way outside the Berliners' musical comfort zone — to train his players in a new musical versatility. After all, this is the orchestra that is the guardian of the central European tradition, the mighty Austro-German hegemony of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler, not Rameau or Ravel. What Rattle is attempting is a musical form of multiculturalism, in which the orchestra's brilliance lies not so much in their competence in one repertoire, but how the musicians can adapt to different styles of music.
The fact that Debussy is so far from the heart of the Berlin Philharmonic's musical identity is at the root of the criticism of Rattle's time in Berlin: in moving away from the center of what the orchestra does, he's in danger of losing its musical essence. Rattle sees it differently. "Of course there's a huge debate about what is our Spielkultur [playing culture], and whether we should be playing new pieces that aren't in our Spielkultur. I mean, the answer is, of course you should be, and the question is, what can the Spielkultur bring to this new repertoire?" He compares the various styles of music he asks them to play to "putting on different clothes: I don't ask them to change their body. And of course, just as there's a danger in too much specialization, there's a danger in simply flying all over the globe."
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