It's only six months into the Rattle tenure, and the Bavarian Radio Symphony is almost the exact opposite ensemble of what it was five years ago. I'm sure some will view that as a tragedy - and I would number myself one of them except that the Bavarian Radio Symphony of old was a product of its master, and the new one is the product of its master too. If it weren't Mariss Jansons in front of them, the discipline would sound drilled and cold, and if it weren't Simon Rattle now, the lack of discipline would be irritating. Both, however, share a warmth that makes their decisions irrelevant, they are just the outward manifestation of a personality. Jansons was raised in the postwar USSR - born to a Jewish mother in hiding and his musicmaking reflected the drilled nature of his world, Rattle comes from the same Liverpool as Lennon and McCarthy, and his musicmaking reflects the free spirit of his, but in both cases, the warmth of soul is what matters.
I have to imagine his performances are extremely different on successive nights. Rattle is like a surfer who rides the musical wave or a gardener who grows a musical plant. He issues very few 'don'ts' from the podium, he simply listens and paints as he goes - the moment he spots something interesting in the balance, he encourages it and brings it out. Watch the strings and you realize that there is almost no attempt to blend sonority. Some players throb with vibrato, some barely vibrate at all. It always seems he would rather have a collection of 100 soloists than an Orchestra with a capital O.
Rattle is not particularly interested in structure, and as much as he zeroes in on details, there are musicians who bring out far more (I'm sure we'll talk about Kirill Petrenko before long). What interests Rattle is atmosphere. Music for him seems a series of extraordinary moments, and his mind is always in the present. It can result in a kind of interpretive attention deficit disorder in which one phrase has nothing to do with the next. If he thinks the present can be more extraordinary with a sudden change in tempo, he'll change it with little regard for how it affects the form or the harmonic rhythm, but within those moments are the most extraordinary things: eliciting the most extremely varied dynamics, balancing lines to bring out the inner voices, balancing harmonies to get the most luminous colors, and consistently encouraging the orchestra to give their warmest sound. Is there any conductor in my lifetime who gets a sound that warm? There was at least one, his name was Mariss Jansons.
On the drive home from tonight's extraordinary Pastoral I tried playing through the piece in my head to remember all the wonderous things Rattle did with them. A few of the things he did were absurd, many were mannered, and yet the vast majority of them were so extraordinary that a truer music I've never heard. I couldn't possibly remember everything. When I heard Jakub Hrusa the other night, there was far more obvious excellence. If anyone had said five years ago that the Bamberg Symphony would sound objectively better than the Bavarian Radio Symphony, they'd be laughed out of the hall, but the Bamberg Symphony sounded better blended and more precise. The excellence was completely consistent from piece to piece. Yet it's no criticism on Hrusa - still near the beginning of his career, to say that Rattle's concert had far more music in it.
Music is not simply a checklist of tasks successfully completed, music is those moments when extraordinary possibilities take place. These moments can be recorded but they'll never sound quite the same, then again they don't sound the same depending on where you're sitting in the hall. But these extraordinary musical moments can only happen when you put the critical facility down. Certain lovers of the arts, certain critics of the arts, want excellence above all else, but excellence is boring. Excellence is predictable. Excellence can't surprise you, it can't challenge you, it can't change you. Excellence is, ultimately, a forgettable experience, because when experiencing a revelation, the last thing you can be is objective. You know exactly what you're getting with excellence, and you can hear it in your head any time you want.
And that's why Rattle is great. It's rare that every moment of a Rattle performance is true music, and let's face it, a lot of Rattle performances aren't even good, but when Rattle is good, which is often, these moments are so abundant that were you to walk among them you'd have to be careful not to step on them.
Rattle is as true a musician as there is, almost too true. Occasionally even the freest spirits among us listeners find ourselves longing for a podium musician who cares a little bit about keeping the whole thing together (as we did in the Tristan Liebestod - whose climax was dampened by a complete muddle about where the peaks were). Rattle left the Berlin Philharmonic in worse technical shape than he found it, and seems to have devolved the Bavarian Radio Symphony even more quickly, but what he does can only be done by a great orchestra. He takes great orchestras and wrings from them their whole capacity for musical moments. I doubt any conductor had an ability quite like this since Leonard Bernstein.
I've always understood why people dislike Rattle. It's amazing he was chief in Berlin for as long as he was because his whole ethos was a rebuke to Karajan and all those who love the mid-century aesthetic. He wants to play something other than the same 50 pieces, he doesn't jet around the world unless it's a tour with one orchestra, he doesn't seem to worry about recorded sound, he doesn't worry about precision, he doesn't worry about blend, he doesn't worry about clarity, sometimes I even wonder if he has a conception of the pieces he plays; he simply takes things as they come and whatever comes, he grows from them atmospheric gardens of meaning.
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