Ernst von Siemens Music Prize 2025

Sir Simon Rattle

Essay

What remains

by Alex Ross

What, in the end, do conductors leave behind? Their art is an evanescent one. However virtuosic their technique, however mesmerizing their personal aura, they have ultimately signed their names to an auditory mirage that vanishes with the fading of the last chord. They have presided over thousands of performances, yet they alone have heard them all; no objective ear can catalogue and assess the totality of what they have achieved. True, they can bestow libraries of recordings. Yet, as tastes change and technology evolves, such archives take on an antiquated air. Many storied conductors are associated with a nimbus of power, of authority. Their stern faces and commanding gestures are captured in images or on film. But these, too, decay into quaint artifacts, like sepia-toned pictures of orators holding forth in city squares. The power of the conductor is inseparable from impermanence and immateriality.

The conductors who make the most durable imprints are those who have participated in the expansion of the repertory and in the cultivation of a particular ensemble. What has been built, fostered, uplifted? What has been found or made new? According to these criteria, Simon Rattle should loom large when the history of our musical age is written. His repertory is vast, encompassing hundreds of works from every period. He has been active in the promotion of new music, refusing to limit himself to any particular stylistic dogma. And, at a time when conductors flit from one orchestra to another and hold down posts on multiple continents, Rattle has been notable for the single-mindedness of his focus. His career is a tale of four cities: eighteen years with the City of Birmingham Symphony, sixteen years with the Berliner Philharmoniker, six years with the London Symphony, and an ongoing tenure with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks. Few major careers can be summarized as simply as that.

With his famous mane of curly hair and his avid, wide-awake visage, Rattle is among the most instantly recognizable of contemporary conductors. In contrast to the stern bearing of maestros of old, his characteristic mood is one of anticipatory delight. His active, variegated, incisive gestures seem designed to jolt orchestras out of their routines and to urge a fresh engagement with each passing detail. Off the podium, he is an expert explainer and educator, ready with rhetorical gestures to match his physical ones. As a music critic, I would find it hard to improve upon his aphoristic description of György Kurtág’s orchestral masterpiece Stele as “a gravestone on which the entire history of European music is written.” Intellectual passion is Rattle’s signature trait: he makes music to discover more about the world.

His active, variegated, incisive gestures seem designed to jolt orchestras out of their routines and to urge a fresh engagement with each passing detail.

Rattle was born in Liverpool, England, in 1955. Avid for a wide range of music from an early age, he played piano, violin, and percussion, serving as the timpanist of the Merseyside Youth Orchestra. He began conducting around the age of fourteen, making his début, improbably, in Mödling, Austria, where he participated in a summer school for young musicians. He first won wider notice at the age of nineteen, leading Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges and Stravinsky’s Pulcinella at the Royal Academy of Music. Twentieth-century music was at the core of his activities from the beginning: already, in his early years on the scene, he conducted Ligeti’s Atmosphères, Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques, Peter Maxwell Davies’s First Symphony, and HK Gruber’s Frankenstein!! alongside modernist classics by Schoenberg, Berg, Stravinsky, and Bartók. He became a proponent of Deryck Cooke’s completion of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, convincing many skeptics of the Mahlerian qualities of that score.

Such an unmistakable talent excited interest from agents and orchestra managers around the world. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, among others, offered him a post at an early stage. Yet in 1980 Rattle made the crucial decision to settle in Birmingham, a hundred and twenty kilometres from where he grew up. The City of Birmingham Symphony was a hard-working regional orchestra without much an international reputation. Rattle transformed it into a globally celebrated ensemble, not least on the strength of the dozens of recordings he made with the EMI label. His programming was ambitious, with the music of the twentieth century at its century: the repertory included the complete symphonies of Mahler, Sibelius, and Nielsen, major works of the Second Viennese School, Messiaen’s Turangalîla and Des canyons aux étoiles, Stockhausen’s Gruppen, Boulez’s Rituel, Birtwistle’s Triumph of Time, and provocative premieres by Mark-Anthony Turnage and Thomas Adès. Expanding on the commitment to new music, Rattle launched the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. At the same time, he took an interest in Baroque repertory and historically informed performance practice. His début Berliner Philharmoniker program, in 1993, included a suite from Rameau’s Les Boréades.

I first saw Rattle in action in 1988, when he came to Boston with the City of Birmingham. It was a typical program, consisting of the final three symphonies of Sibelius. It carried with it an implicit thesis about the composer’s place in musical history. The intellectual consensus on Sibelius in that period was that he was a reactionary, not to mention, in René Leibowitz’s notorious opinion, “le plus mauvais compositeur du monde.” When an entire evening is devoted to Sibelius’s timbrally and texturally singular late-period language, with the orchestra serving as a medium of continuous transition and dissolution, one could easily hear how the composer was having a galvanic effect on the French composers who came to be associated with the “Spectralist” school: Hugues Dufourt, Tristan Murail, and Gérard Grisey, among others. Also typical of Rattle was his decision to abandon a mix-and-match approach to programming in favor of a sustained immersion in a particular zone of the musical universe: he would do the same in linking together the Orchesterstücke of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—Op. 16, Op. 6, and Op. 6, respectively—into a fourteen-movement super-symphony.

Rattle’s hair may have whitened, but he still wore the face of a young person discovering the full power that an orchestra can release—not his own power, but the power of the collective.

Rattle’s determination to balance the new and against the old was evident in his farewell program with the City of Birmingham, a decade later. It offered Adès’s Asyla, a dense, terse four-movement symphonic piece that incorporated broken echoes of Mahlerian Romanticism as well as discordant impressions of techno music. After intermission came Mahler’s mighty Second Symphony, which, in a surreal chronological inversion, seemed to deliver an affirmative reply to Adès’s critical vision. Rattle’s hair may have whitened, but he still wore the face of a young person discovering the full power that an orchestra can release—not his own power, but the power of the collective. Leading the Adès, he looked as though he was revisiting a canonical masterpiece. Leading the Mahler, he looked as though he is unleashing an avant-garde provocation. I observed the same temporal leveling at work in Berlin in 2001, when, in his début program as the Philharmoniker’s chief conductor, he paired Asyla with the Mahler Fifth.

The Berlin tenure recapitulated many of the themes of Rattle’s Birmingham period while introducing new themes. He continued to pursue a democratization of the orchestra’s social role, undertaking education projects that opened avenues to underprivileged audiences. His first season included a performance of The Rite of Spring in the Treptow Arena, with two hundred student dancers—a venture documented in the film Rhythm Is It! (I witnessed a New York version of this project.) In the following seasons, he promoted contemporary music with unprecedented vigor; gave new prominence to French, British, and American fare; and presided over various other off-site spectacles, which showed how much an orchestra can achieve outside the conventional institutional boundaries.

I travelled to Berlin in 2008 to see one of these—a presentation of Gruppen alongside Messiaen’s Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum in Hangar 2 at the now decommissioned Tempelhof airport. It was a site darkly resonant with twentieth-century history—rituals of the Nazi period, the Cold War airlift. Rattle did not stint on the monumental aspects of the scores, but, in his characteristically counterintuitive fashion, he also brought out more intimate, expressive aspects of Gruppen: the birdlike twitterings of upper-register winds, the semi-Romantic sound of a solo violin against the ensemble, the almost prayer-like rising major third with which the piece ends. We also heard a jazz energy in the wah-wah-ing brass, the squealing clarinets, the pounding tom-toms and wood drums in the percussion. There was an unexpected joy in the occasion: Stockhausen’s essential, if eccentric, humanity was revealed.

In 2014, Rattle and his Berlin forces occupied the similarly cavernous Park Avenue Armory in New York and performed the St. Matthew Passion, in a theatricalized conception by Peter Sellars. The production had previously been seen at the Berlin Philharmonie and at the Salzburg Festival, amid scattered protests against an operatic approach to Bach. (Critics tended to ignore the fact that any modern concert presentation of these works abandons the liturgical context that Bach would have expected.) Sellars devised dramatic roles not only for the vocal singers but also for each member the choruses and for a few members of the orchestra. Unforgettable was the sight of Daniel Stabrawa, then the Philharmoniker’s senior concertmaster, leaning against a white blocks, his body language casual, as if he were playing in an empty room. The great Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená, whom Rattle married in 2008, reached out to Stabrawa from a crouched position, at one point touching his shoe. He took no notice, and she was left sobbing on the ground. Such haunting touches not only serve a dramatic function but serve to divert the audience’s attention away from the conductor’s gestures and toward the musicians who are actually making the sound.

After leaving Berlin in 2018, Rattle took the helm of the London Symphony, with which he had a longstanding association. That tenure might have gone on much longer if the cultural and political conditions in the United Kingdom had not intervened. Plans for a new concert hall were delayed, budget cuts were imposed, and, above all, Brexit curtailed the orchestra’s European reach. In 2021, Rattle announced not only that he would take up his current post in at the BRSO but that he would apply for German citizenship. The concept of home—not just in the personal sense but also in the cultural, communal one—had always been of paramount importance to Rattle; that home was now German.

Although Rattle’s relationship with the BRSO is still in its early stages, one can already discern familiar contours emerging, as well fresh tendencies. There is a new emphasis on German and Central European contemporary music, with performances of Lachenmann, Georg Friedrich Haas, and Ondřej Adámek. There is a sustained exploration of Wagner, a composer who had had a low profile in Rattle’s early career. A complete Ring cycle is nearing its conclusion in München, drawing notice especially for the extraordinarily high standard of its orchestral playing. And live recordings of Mahler’s Sixth, Seventh, and Ninth symphonies are among the most formidably integrated of Rattle’s lifelong engagement with that composer.

Not the least of Rattle’s gifts is the candid eloquence with which he talks about his craft, and to him should go the final word. In a 1988 interview with The New Yorker, he said: “Almost all the great orchestras of the past have been built by conductors working away for many years, and it’s this tradition that appeals to me. It lingers on after the conductor has left. I mean, Fritz Reiner is still there in Chicago, Stokowski stayed on in Philadelphia for a long time, Szell’s ghost is alive and kicking every time the Cleveland plays Mozart, and Klemperer is still conducting Beethoven with the London Philharmonia, even though there’s almost no one left in the orchestra who ever played with him. A conductor can have an extraordinary impact on music if he stays in one place long enough, and I want to do just that.” That he has done, several times over.