The English don’t actually care much for music,’ said Sir Thomas Beecham, the great 20th-century conductor and noted wit, ‘but they love the sound it makes!’ This week the sound that has filled our concert halls and all the spaces where music-lovers gather has been of loud cheering. When it was announced on Tuesday that Sir Simon Rattle will be coming home from Germany in 2017 to run the London Symphony Orchestra, whoops of delight could be heard all the way from London’s Barbican Centre, where the LSO play, to Menlove Avenue,Woolton, the middle-class suburb of Liverpool where Rattle was born 60 years ago. The most remarkable English classical musician since the celebrated Beecham, Rattle has scaled the highest peaks. Appointed CBE at the ripe old age of 32, he was knighted seven years later, and elected principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, the world’s most formidable orchestra, at 44. Conductor Sir Simon Rattle is to join London Symphony Orchestra as music director . In an age of overpaid footballers and gruesome shows like The X Factor, an age when the mediocre wear garlands tossed by dullards, here is a man who has truly earned his laurel crown. When he received the weighty badge of the Order of Merit last summer (‘Don’t try conducting with this thing on!’ the Queen told him at the investiture) it was formal recognition that he belonged to the best of the best. Now the man who conquered the world is coming home to join our leading orchestra and, what’s more, he sees his role not just as a conductor but as an ambassador, an educator, whose duty is to boost musical talent wherever he can. ‘Frankly,’ he says, ‘what goes on in the primary school is going to be just as important as what goes on in any concert hall.’ Knowing Rattle as I do, this was no throw-away remark. Talk of greatness is usually misplaced. There are never many truly great performers in any field. So when they do come along it is our duty to recognise the special gifts that lift them above the pack. We could call it the Federer distinction. Roger Federer is a great tennis player, perhaps the greatest; Andy Murray is merely very good. In the performing arts it can be difficult to describe what greatness looks like because, unlike in sport, there are no clear winners and losers. Over time, however, you have a sense of those who achieve it. Laurence Olivier, for instance, was a great actor. Rudolf Nureyev was a great dancer. Frank Sinatra was a great singer. And Sir Simon Rattle is unquestionably a great musician. Born on the same road in Liverpool as John Lennon, Rattle was at primary school when The Beatles took off like a rocket. No magical mystery tours for him, though. The Rattler, as he is known, was a bookish child, who played the piano and was later a percussionist in the National Youth Orchestra. ‘I tried to interest him in cricket and football’, said his father Denis, ‘but he always seemed to have his head in a music score.’ Sir Simon (right), whose youngest child with Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená (left), 41, is seven months old, has directed the Berlin Philharmonic since 2002 . Denis Rattle, originally from Kent, was a businessman who taught English in his retirement. At Oxford University, where he knew Sir Edward Heath, he had played in a jazz band, so he did nothing to discourage his son’s enthusiasm for music. When Denis and Pauline Rattle took their son to see the comedian Al Read at the Liverpool Empire, the five-year-old stopped the show. So many members of the audience were amused by the sight of a curious little boy leaving his seat to peer into the orchestra pit that Read had to tell him: ‘Come on, lad. I’ve got a show to do!’ The young Rattle never set foot in Liverpool’s football ground Anfield or Everton’s Goodison Park as his father might have wished but he was a regular at the city’s wonderful Philharmonic Hall where, in 1966, his life changed for ever. Gustav Mahler’s mighty Second Symphony, the Resurrection, despite its challenging discords, made him realise even then, aged 11, that he wanted to be a conductor. And now he was determined to learn how. He studied music scores his sister brought home from the library; he pored over composers’ writings on orchestration. He would write down the percussion parts of big orchestral pieces, gather friends and family, and hand out those parts so he could conduct his impromptu orchestra while a record of the music played in the background. When he was 15, he cajoled enough musicians together to form a proper orchestra and stage a charity event at Liverpool’s College Hall. It was a resounding success. Rattle’s days as conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra are the stuff of legend. When he went there aged 25 in 1980 he was, musically speaking, barely out of short pants and the orchestra was at best lacklustre. When he left 18 years later as a knight of the realm, the CBSO was acclaimed as one of the world’s finest orchestras, and had a magnificent new home. Symphony Hall, which opened in June 1991 as a result of Rattle’s persistence and enlightened cross-party political co-operation, remains the best concert hall in Britain. So when people talk about the cultural development of Birmingham, and Rattle’s substantial part in it, they are not fibbing. The question is: what can he do for London and Britain? The signs are promising. There is a clear will to build a concert hall worthy of London’s unrivalled reputation as a city of culture and Rattle knows, for he is no fool, that his appointment can only assist the process. In the City they are no fools either. Everybody understands that, with Rattle at the helm of such a fine orchestra, the LSO could become world-beaters not only in public performances but also in the world of music education. Rattle sees his role not just as a conductor but as an ambassador, an educator, whose duty is to boost musical talent wherever he can . Rattle once described how moving it was to bring deaf children into rehearsals in Birmingham, and see how they responded through vibration alone to the experience of a Beethoven symphony. In Berlin he wasted no time in working with children from the city’s less well-off backgrounds, involving them in dance collaborations with the Berlin Philharmonic. Some musicians, brought up in the old school, were sceptical but not for long. ‘What Simon wants’, musicians used to say, ‘Simon gets’. Which is why his return to London is so thrilling, and so important. In a world of show-offs and halfwits, here is a man with the faith and willpower to move mountains: not on his own behalf but for an art form itself. He believes that great music can transform lives. Describing Leonard Bernstein, the great American conductor and educator, who wrote West Side Story in his spare time, a musician once said: ‘Lenny reminds you why you wanted to become a musician in the first place.’ That is Rattle’s talent too but how he achieves it is hard to pin down. It is the conductor who makes all the difference as to whether a performance sinks or swims. What you see as he steps on to the podium, is the tip of a vast iceberg of activity involving planning, preparing, rehearsing, managing schedules and endless background work to understand the music. This is what helps make Simon Rattle one of the world’s greatest, says his biographer Sir Nicholas Kenyon: ‘He is a meticulous planner, has a fantastic insight for the right combination of pieces in a concert programme and is a brilliant pacer and galvaniser of rehearsals, knowing exactly what he has to achieve and motivating his players accordingly.’ But it still fails to explain his achievements. When his performances take off, musicians and audiences alike would rather be nowhere else. It isn’t so much a matter of his technique with the conductor’s baton, or bringing in the trombones when they’re feeling left out as something undefinable. In 1999, a critic memorably described him on the podium: ‘Sometimes he bent to his knees, puffed his cheeks and mimed a straw-chewing yokel to encourage a proportionate rustic attitude in his players. That was especially during Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony...During the pizzicato interlude in Mahler’s Second Symphony, he dropped his hands to his sides and encouraged his band just to pluck ’n’ swing.’ What audiences see in Rattle is a man who feels that, for as long as he is conducting it, that piece is the most important thing in the world. Musicians, hardly sentimental, are happy to follow him because every concert is an adventure. As Rattle says: ‘Always the journey, never the destination’. His genius, as it always will be with the greats, is that he possesses an alignment of mind and heart that cannot be taught. ‘Simon can achieve things in a performance,’ a Berlin musician said last week, ‘that can never be learnt.’ Now he is coming home for what he calls ‘one last challenge’. To which we can only cry: ‘Hurrah!’
Sir Simon Rattle to join the London Symphony Orchestra as music director . 60-year-old was born on the same road in Liverpool as John Lennon . By 15 formed his own proper orchestra that performed at charity event . Sees new role not just as a conductor but as ambassador and educator .