Beauty and the beast

I was going to start with a little moan. About the shouty marketing, the digital diarrhoea, the sycophantic drivel, which, like a bad smell, hovered over Simon Rattle’s ten-day coronation. But then came the most amazing Rite of Spring I’ve ever heard and to moan suddenly seemed criminal.

No masterpiece is harder to pull off than the Rite. So often it deflates midway and never regains its shape. Rattle made his name with the piece when he was at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, taming the brute, slowing it down, prising open its interior, allowing us to inspect its fangs, look straight down its snappy gob.

Here, the beast was unleashed. Rabid brass, uncontrollable winds, strings scything through the rabble behind. Key to the pungency was the bite of the percussion, allowed to go to such extremes my eyes began to water. The LSO can come across as a bit slick. Last Sunday they were monstrous. Before letting loose their inner animal, they delivered an invigorating Firebird and a Petrushka that sounded (in the best possible way) like they’d passed the vodka round early.

Still, I could have done without the big screens, the speeches, the Lord Mayor explaining how historic everything was. Left to our own devices, I dare say we could have figured this out ourselves. The Barbican website was a mess:

This is Simon Rattle…This is it…This is Helen Grime and Thomas Adès, Oliver Knussen and Elgar. This is Sir Harrison Birtwistle and Sir Simon Rattle…This is the LSO. This is Christian Tetzlaff. This is Sir Simon Rattle.

U ok hon?

‘This is Rattle’ also ingeniously offered a series of concerts without Rattle. Stuffed with work by Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle, Oliver Knussen, Helen Grimes and others, these became a chance to do an MOT on the state of new British music, some of which seems destined for the knacker’s yard.