Page 16 - Final_CBSO's 100th Birthday Celebration

“You know these musicians will never give up,” the 65-year-old conductor says. “That’s what I
love most about them. They will not get depressed. Frustrated, yes. Very angry, sometimes.

Then they will turn round and say, ‘OK, it’s not ideal, but how can we make it work?’”

The main source of frustration right now is the government’s £1.57 billion bailout for the arts,

from which Britain’s most famous orchestra is unlikely to get a penny because it made the

“mistake” of building up a £9 million endowment over many years to fund its digital work. So

the Arts Council deems that it is in no immediate danger of going bust. “We tried to make

ourselves as self-sufficient as possible, as we were asked to do, and it’s now punishing to realise
that, my God, they really do expect us to run our reserves completely down,” Rattle says. More

of that later.

Rattle with the BE PHIL Orchestra
EPA
Rather than moan and do nothing, however, the LSO — in sharp contrast to some other pillars
of London’s classical music life — has somehow pulled together an extraordinarily imaginative

programme of concerts that will be both streamed internationally and performed to a live

audience, which will be small at first but potentially grow as social-distancing rules are relaxed.

These plans, announced today, are not for the semi-distant future. The LSO’s season kicks off

on September 2 with Rattle conducting a concert performance of Bartok’s chilling opera Duke
Bluebeard’s Castle.

A week later he conducts a bracing orchestral programme of Knussen, Britten and a Mark-

Anthony Turnage premiere, and on September 16 Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is paired