I have to be out the door, but on Sir Simon Rattle’s 70th birthday, I thought I’d share this reminiscence from 2015 — with Rattle self-portrait sketched for me during a dog-walk in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square.
Ignore the outdated broadcast info. I no longer work at that station!
Every time I listen to Mahler, I feel like I’m in my 20s again. The whiplash emotional states, the seething, the intensity, and romance. Actually, it’s all right there still, just beneath the surface, but I try to keep a lid on it these days. Now that I’m in my 50s, I’m too old to be storming heaven all the time and hurling myself into volcanoes.
Even so, it’s nice to remember once in a while by revisiting the symphonies in concert, and last night Sir Simon Rattle brought one of the angstier ones to Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, when he led the touring Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s Symphony No. 6. Sometimes identified by the nickname the “Tragic,” this one has all the vertiginous highs and de profundis lows one expects from this composer – Mahler making good on his pronouncement (to Sibelius, no less) that a symphony must be like the world: it must embrace everything!
So we get plenty of foreboding and ardent love music and weird macabre passages, crashing cymbals, and eerie harps, and most notoriously, that magnificent hammer delivering the blows of fate. Of course, I’m not convinced it always has quite the effect Mahler intended, as he was savagely lampooned for it in his lifetime, and even last night it elicited big grins and conspiratorial nods from the audience. When you want to suggest something very serious, it’s probably a good idea not to have your percussionist solemnly ascend stairs to a riser to swing a five-foot Bugs Bunny style circus mallet. That said, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I’ve seen Rattle conduct Mahler before, of course, in the days when Philadelphia was trying way too hard to land him as its next music director. Back then, he was certainly an effective interpreter, if sometimes prone to mannerisms (which I understand he may not yet have fully shaken, though they were not on display in yesterday’s performance), in particular his obsession with bringing the music’s pianissimos down to a ridiculously hushed level.
None of that was in evidence last night, and it was satisfying to watch and hear the Bavarians rise to the occasion and ride a few killer waves, especially in the last movement. But for me, the ardent second movement was the most magically sustained, a passionate andante moderato played for all the sublimity it was worth. Rattle opted, as many do, for the composer’s original ordering of the movements, with the scherzo placed third. (Mahler had second thoughts after conducting the symphony’s first performance and decided to flip the scherzo and the andante.) In this movement, I swear, you can sense the love music for virtually every big budget fantasy movie of the 1980s – not quoted outright, necessarily, but completely in spirit. Back in the days when the movies were still wondrous and did wonderful things to your insides, much the way Mahler’s symphonies do.
Hearing Mahler in concert also reminds me just how important it is to experience these things live. The composer was a master orchestrator, and the 6th is full of unusual touches (the strange duets between Masque-of-the-Red-Death harps and leviathan brass, the bird of prey multi-cymbal effect at the end, and of course, that carnival hammer (ring the bell and you win a cigar!) that just won’t have the same impact when listening on record. Also, in these days of attention deficit classical radio, when’s the last time you heard a complete Mahler symphony, if it doesn’t turn up on a broadcast concert?
Bravo to Sir Simon, recalled again and again – at least five times – and his German musicians, who each embraced their neighbors as the applause finally began to subside in a kind of life-affirming group hug.
I would be dead by now if I continued to live my life as tightly-wound as, and at the fever pitch conjured in, Mahler’s symphonies. But it’s nice to remember once in a while what it was like to seethe and combust.
Beneath the authoritative gaze of Sir Simon: with fellow Mahlerite Robert Moran at the Kimmel – but who is that forehead-slapper photobombing us?
It’s official. Sir Simon Rattle will be the next music director of the London Symphony Orchestra (replacing Valery Gergiev), beginning in 2017.
Read the press release here:
file:///C:/Users/famul_000/Downloads/LSO_Press_Release_3.3.15_54f5746ab7c52.pdf
An analysis from the BBC:
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-31696988
In case you missed it, here’s Rattle conducting the LSO at the 2012 London Olympics – with Rowan Atkinson!
Sir Simon Rattle dishes on Sibelius. Hearing the Fifth Symphony was like a thunderbolt for me, as well.
PHOTO: “Symposium” by Axel Gallén (left to right, Gallén, composer Oskar Merikanto blacked-out, conductor and composer Robert Kajanus, and Sibelius, obviously wasted). The scene is actually softer-edged than the original study, which I’ve posted in the comments section below.
I once owned a secondhand bookshop located a block from Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square. Because of the nature of the business, and its location (around the corner from the Curtis Institute of Music and three blocks from the stage door of the old Academy of Music), I met a number of notable musicians over the years and dealt with even more online.
One day, I was out walking my dog in the park, when who should pass through but Simon Rattle. I hailed him, and though he was on his way to an orchestra rehearsal (as I knew from the time of day, the direction he was walking, and the fact that he was slated to guest conduct over the weekend), he stopped and took the time to chat. Apparently Rattle wasn’t overly concerned with punctuality. A friend of mine told me that a short while later, he saw Rattle taking a leisurely walk around the outside of the Academy, looking up at its roof.
Rattle is fairly gregarious and, I gather, somewhat of a dog lover. So a few days later, when I knew there would be another rehearsal, I was sure to have one of his recordings on me in the park, and he was kind enough to inscribe the booklet. At the time, he commented on how we had similar hairstyles, so he appended a quick self-portrait (see photo; you may have to click on it for a better look). I think I scored brownie points for selecting Nicholas Maw’s “Odyssey,” clearly a labor of love on Rattle’s part, and certainly not the popular choice.
Rattle had been guest conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra already for a number of years, and I heard him lead memorable concerts of Mahler, Sibelius and Schoenberg (the monumental “Guerrelieder”). The organization at the time was hot to make him the successor of Wolfgang Sawallisch as its music director. As I recall, he had not yet received his knighthood, and he had certainly not yet been named principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, arguably the most prestigious conducting position in the world. I can’t imagine that Herbert von Karajan would have walked to work, much less stopped to chat about dogs and hair (although, given Karajan’s immaculately sculpted coiff, I would have been very interested to hear his thoughts on the latter).
Some time later, I missed out on a third chance to meet Rattle. One of the many interesting figures to wander into my shop was the youngest grandson of Jean Sibelius. I know this, because by coincidence I happened to be playing the old Kajanus recording of the Third Symphony. His grandson was astonished (although if he knew me better at the time, he would not have been, since Sibelius happens to be one of my favorite composers), and I equally so. Who knew Sibelius’ grandson was an independent filmmaker living in Philadelphia?
When I noted that Rattle would be coming back to Philadelphia to conduct Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony, I was determined to get the composer’s grandson into the rehearsals. Why he couldn’t accomplish that on his own, I have no idea. Perhaps he lacked the self-confidence or had an inflated sense of my worth. At any rate, all it took was a phone call, and we were at the Academy watching Rattle put the piece together.
The rehearsal ran long, and I had to get back to open my shop, so that I could be there for all the customers who wouldn’t be coming in that day. Bad choice. Sibelius’ grandson was brought backstage afterward, and not only was he introduced to Rattle, but was done so at the time that a Vanity Fair photographer was busily snapping away to have something to illustrate an article for an upcoming issue. Somewhere there exists a photograph of Rattle planting a big kiss on Sibelius’ grandson – which would be especially funny if you knew the grandson.
Anyway, he told me about this, and of course I was disappointed to have missed out on this backstage love fest. He made it up to me a short while later by introducing me to Einojuhani Rautavaara, who was in town for the premiere of his Symphony No. 8. There is a photo of that meeting as well, but as this was in the days before cell phones and laptops, it is sitting in an envelope somewhere in my apartment with all my other old-style photos. Just as well, since, as I recall, I was grinning like a Tyrannosaurus rex.
I hope you’ll join me for “The Lost Chord” this week, as I celebrate the 60th birthday of Sir Simon Rattle (born January 19, 1955) with an hour of his recordings. The show is called “Simon Says.” You can hear it tonight at 10 ET, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6, or listen to it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.
PHOTOS: Rattle at Curtis in 1997 (top); signature with self-portrait
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