Page 61 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

“I will write a letter to Keir Starmer. I will write a letter to Lisa Nandy,” Rattle says, frugally.

“What will you tell them?”

“Congratulations. Please look after it.”

Rattle is heartbroken by the state of Britain’s music. He tells me about trying to find freelance
string players for Michael Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra. “Many people said,

‘This would have been wonderful, but I’ve changed profession,’” he reports. “Or, ‘I’m

retraining as a teacher. I’m working for the NHS. We need to feed our families.’ My heart

bleeds to think what people are having to get through.”

And that’s the top end of music in Britain. The entry level, he believes, has all but vanished.

“Think what people have to do just to get to stage one,” he says, sighing. “I had it all when I was
a kid.”

When he was growing up in Liverpool, Rattle read scores that his sister brought home from the
library. “My sister was autistic. The reason I knew the Schoenberg Five Pieces for

Orchestra when I was eight or nine was because Susan thought I would like it. And I did. Is

there still a public library that does that?”

His parents let him listen to the Radio 3 nightly concert at 7.30pm. “My mother was a working-

class girl from Kent who reinvented herself with a posh accent. My dad took me to jazz. I heard

[Duke] Ellington play when I was six. I sat literally under the piano. I heard Buddy Rich,
Maynard Ferguson. A bit later I heard the Liverpool poets in pubs.” So much was going on that

he never heard of the Beatles.

“Liverpool had these huge personalities: Fritz Spiegl, an Austrian who played flute in the Phil

[Liverpool Philharmonic], composed music for Z-Cars and wrote a seminal work called Lern

Yerself Scouse; next to him was [the flautist and TV musical motivator] Atarah Ben-Tovim.”

The conductor Charles Groves let him attend rehearsals. “He felt it was part of his work to look

after the young musicians.”