Page 65 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

great immigration crisis, this is the only place I can be undisturbed for three hours.’” Did he ever

see a British prime minister? “Thatcher,” he remembers. “She came to Porgy.”

Rattle lasted 16 years at the wheel of the orchestral Porsche before he walked away again. “As a

conductor in Berlin,” he explains, “it can be friendly, it can be polite, but you are not a member
of the guild. They are the Mastersingers. They are the ones who remain. Conductors come and

go.”

His successor, Kirill Petrenko, is an introvert who never gives interviews or makes recordings.

Rattle is delighted. “They have a great conductor to work with who is totally uncompromising in

areas where I compromised. Kirill never gives up, and I’m sure it drives them completely crazy,

but he’s made them an orchestra that’s … much easier … for the rest of us to conduct.”

Rattle conducting nearly 3,000 young musicians in Birmingham Symphony Hall, 1991
DAVID JONES/PA/ALAMY
Battered by Berlin, he got talking to the London Symphony Orchestra. “These were a bunch of
friends of mine from the [Royal] Academy, or earlier. It felt like something where we could

simply make music and see where it would go.” The LSO asked him to help it secure a new hall.

“I said, ‘I hope this doesn’t become the single subject that we talk about for the next few

years,’” he recalls. But it was. And then Brexit and Covid killed the scheme, along with his