Page 66 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

tolerance for tours. The players needed more than he could give. He was done with being a

music director.

Just then a friend in the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra sweet-talked him on to a high-

speed train for a couple of concerts. He remembered its sound from his boyhood in Liverpool. In

Munich the players gave him a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “You’ll never walk alone” in

Bavarian dialect. “A bit like Scouse,” he says, laughing.

In 2021 Rattle announced that he would leave the LSO to be chief conductor with the BRSO.

His two concerts with the orchestra at the Proms this month will be his first appearance at the
festival as the group’s chief conductor.

Once again the orchestra’s hall in its home city is a problem — the BRSO shares one with the
Munich Philharmonic. A new hall was promised, but it has been postponed to 2036. “You’ll be

81,” I point out. “My job is to persuade them to move more quickly,” Rattle maintains

diplomatically. “But I am perfectly fine carrying the process on for whomever my successor

might be.”

Rattle had his cataracts done during Covid and he mentions deflecting one of my questions to

his shrink. I tell him he looks happy and he thinks for a long moment (our cappuccinos have

long since gone stone-cold on the coffee table). ‘“I love working here. The orchestra is like a
family, it’s very easygoing and yet they play like demons. I feel a truly lucky man being here.”

The Lebrecht Interview with Simon Rattle is on Radio 3 on August 24 at 9.45pm. Rattle
conducts the BRSO on September 5 and 6 at the Royal Albert Hall, also broadcast on

Radio 3