Page 63 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

Having crammed his way through A-levels, Rattle went to the Royal Academy of Music at 16. It

was there he pulled together a performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony. “The powers that be

felt we were not mature enough to be playing Mahler,” he recalls. “It was very hard to find

players … we did rehearsals with one viola. I was just happy that I’d found enough singers and
they were hitting the right notes. Let’s not be mystical, but there’s something extraordinary

about discovering this music. We felt we could fly, but I’m sure we only just made it.”

He was then spotted by an agent and went to the BBC Scottish Symphony and the Bournemouth

Symphony as assistant conductor. At 25 he was offered the principal baton at the City of

Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Others might have grabbed it with both hands; Rattle took a

year out and read literature at Oxford. “I wanted to see if I could live without music,” he

reflects. “I’d been guest conducting abroad — sometimes loving it, sometimes feeling more
lonely than I could ever imagine. I wanted to know what I was if I was not a musician.”

Rattle did three terms at Oxford without hearing a concert. “And when I came back to it, the
first music I saw was John Carewe with the Brighton Philharmonic doing [Beethoven’s] Eroica.

John said, ‘It’s a pick-up orchestra, it’s not going to be any good.’ I didn’t care. I sobbed right

through it. I sobbed so hard that a couple of audience members moved a few seats away.”

Birmingham was an apotheosis, “one of those moments when all the stars align”. A Liverpool
mate, Ed Smith, had come in as manager and appointed Rattle as the music director [of CBSO].

The relationship was tight: “We were Gilbert and George,” Rattle quips. Smith then won a

million-pound Arts Council grant and was given the green light to construct a concert hall,

which would go on to become the best in Britain. “I don’t think we knew how lucky we were,”

Rattle says. “The players in the city had been through a terrible time. They said: ‘We haven’t
been to the dentist for years.’ The city wanted a rebirth. Europe got involved. To this day

nobody knows what the Symphony Hall cost. Jacques Delors and Keith Joseph dug the first

hole.”

One summer he electrified champagne quaffers at Glyndebourne with Gershwin’s Porgy and
Bess. Auditions were held in America. “Some were a bit suspicious of this very young white

guy. We had a bit of a standoff over the speed of one of the spirituals. One of the older members

said to me, ‘Simon, we’re really enjoying working with you. But every now and then we can tell