Page 64 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

that none of your relatives worked in cotton.’” He still holds regular reunions with the original

cast.

I met Rattle around this time. We both ran off to collect kids from school. Any other maestro, I

thought, would have sent the nanny. But Rattle was a new kind of conductor, never happier than

when bucking the rules. After 18 years he walked away from Birmingham with no job in sight.
In 1999 the Berlin Philharmonic fell vacant as Claudio Abbado battled cancer. Daniel

Barenboim was the clear favourite for the job, but in a secret ballot Rattle won the players’ vote.

The pair continue to share their baton wounds. “Barenboim still says to me, ‘Look, Simon, I

think I would have been a better person for them,’” Rattle confides.

“And what do you reply?”

“I say, ‘Daniel, I thought that then … I think it now.’”

Berlin proved a brutal awakening for the music director. “At Claudio’s last concert, [his

predecessor] Herbert von Karajan’s widow, Eliette, came over to speak to me, not entirely sober

but very intense. She said: ‘Simon, good luck with this. Just be aware: the orchestra is great, but

they killed my husband and they nearly killed Claudio. Be careful. Of your health, of your

sanity.’”

There was a hard core of resistance in the orchestra, some from reactionaries or from others who

were just bloody-minded. How did he face them on a Monday morning? “You try lots of
things,” Rattle says, shrugging. “Eye contact doesn’t always work. And it’s difficult to keep

your confidence. I certainly struggled at some times. One of the older players said to me: ‘We

had James Levine last week. He said good morning to me. How am I expected to play for a

conductor who says good morning to me?’ Another old-timer said: ‘If we are to play Elgar, we

might as well play — sniff — Mahler.’” The Birmingham can-do attitude was a thing of the
past.

The best parts were those nights when music took over. Rattle introduced Berlin to living
composers — Ligeti, Gubaidulina and Widmann, Adès and Turnage. He’d look up to the right

as he came on stage to see if Angela Merkel was in her seat. “She’d say, ‘In the middle of the