Page 20 - Final_CBSO's 100th Birthday Celebration

Rattle: “Slowly but surely we will find a way of using the London Symphony Chorus”
OLIVER HELBIG
This Sunday evening, before any of the LSO’s own promotions get under way, Rattle and his

orchestra make an appearance at the BBC Proms in an eerily empty Royal Albert Hall. Nothing

to do with this week’s shenanigans over Rule, Britannia. Rattle is much too canny to get

involved in that sort of nonsense. Indeed, as he told BBC Radio 4 today, he has avoided

conducting Rule, Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory for 40 years. No, Rattle has
characteristically turned this year’s Proms’ limitations — the lack of a live audience and the

need to socially-distance the players — into a creative opportunity. He has programmed an

eclectic range of music, spanning four centuries, that requires the orchestra to fan out across that

vast space.

“The very first idea was to do Mahler’s Second Symphony, with performers spread over the
entire building,” he says, laughing. “Of course, we then came to our senses. So we are doing

pieces such as Giovanni Gabrieli’s Sacrae symphoniae of 1597, and Gyorgy Kurtag’s . . . quasi