Simon rattle

Two summers ago, the BBC were offered a Proms visit by the Bavarian State Orchestra with its music director, Kirill Petrenko. The conversation went something like this. BBC: ‘Petrenko, isn’t he the chap that conducts Liverpool?’ Munich: ‘No, that’s Vasily Petrenko. This one is Kirill.’ BBC: ‘Well, we don’t really know about him over here. He won’t sell at the Proms.’ Barely was the snub delivered than Kirill Petrenko was elected music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, the most coveted orchestra on earth, and the music biz had a good laugh at the BBC’s dumb insularity. But let’s not be too beastly to the BBC: its ignorance was universally shared.

‘Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!’ wrote Elgar, quoting Shelley, at the top of his Second Symphony. He should have listened to more Haydn. Sir Simon Rattle certainly has. Rattle becomes music director of the London Symphony Orchestra in September, and for the last concert before their union becomes official, he’d trawled through Haydn’s immense back-catalogue to assemble an unbroken 55-minute sequence of orchestral movements from Haydn’s symphonies, oratorios and half-forgotten operas. ‘This is an adventure,’ he declared, in that slightly goofy way that gets audiences instantly onside even while it infuriates those who, after four decades of achievement unsurpassed by any British conductor ever, still fail to understand

For much of the past half-century, London has been the world’s orchestral capital. Not always in quality, but numerically without rival. Five full symphony orchestras and twice as many pint-sized ones kept up a constant clamour for attention. Each month brought new recordings with premier artists. Every orchestra had its own ethos, history and thumbprint. The Philharmonia was moulded by Karajan and Klemperer, the London Philharmonic by Boult and Tennstedt, the Royal Philharmonic by Beecham, the BBC by Boulez and the London Symphony Orchestra by its high spirits. Tales abound of maestros departing with a punch on the nose and beer bottles rolling in rehearsal. All of which added greatly

Brahms didn’t always have a beard. The picture in the London Symphony Orchestra’s programme book showed him clean-shaven, and rightly. The beard didn’t reach its final imposing form until 1878, around the time Brahms started sketching his Second Piano Concerto. (‘Prepare your wife for the grisly spectacle,’ he wrote to his friend Bernhard Scholz, ‘for something so long suppressed cannot be beautiful.’) But this concert opened with the First Piano Concerto, premièred in January 1859 when the composer was still a few months short of his 26th birthday. Younger, in fact, than tonight’s conductor — the 26-year-old Alpesh Chauhan — and not much older than the soloist, Benjamin Grosvenor. Age

This week the Southbank Centre began its ‘Belief and Beyond Belief’ festival — a series of concerts and talks claiming to explore the influence of religious inspiration on music. Last summer, after reading its miserably right-on publicity material, I wrote in this column that ‘Beyond Parody’ might be a better title. Jude Kelly, the Southbank’s artistic director, accused me of jumping to conclusions before the programme had been finalised. Well, now it has. In addition to concerts with no discernible connection to their composers’ faith, we’ll be treated to ‘How to be a Shaman’, ‘Mindfulness’, ‘What If God Was A Woman?’ and ‘Right to Die?’. Plus speeches from Mona Siddiqui,

Tristan und Isolde Met Opera Live I am sick to death of productions of Tristan und Isolde which leave me bewildered, alienated, distracted from the work and its significance, unable to concentrate on the music. I haven’t seen a Tristan which didn’t do all these things for many years, and had vowed never to go to another, until the Met advertised its new production, with a starry cast and with Simon Rattle, a conductor who at his best, as he has been recently, is quite wonderful, even revelatory. My hopes were soon dashed. Musically, because the Prelude was so restrained, and turned out to set the tone for the whole

You don’t have to be a follower of Liverpool Football Club, or football at all, to spot the difference. Two months ago the Reds were running about headless as a newly wrung chook; today they are putting the fear of perdition into the best teams in the land. Or take Leicester City. Last season they were locked in an epic, desperate small-town struggle for Premiership survival. Today, they are top of the League. What changed? Both teams have the same players as before, same strip, roughly the same formation. The only new face is the manager’s. Change the boss and — presto — the mood picks up, tempi get faster,

Let’s face facts. Kirill Petrenko was no-one’s first choice as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. His name came into the reckoning only after 124 orchestra members split fatally down the middle in an all-day election on May 11, half of them voting for the German favourite Christian Thielemann and the other half for the blazing young Latvian, Andris Nelsons. By nightfall, the players were at each other’s throats and wiser heads knew they had to seek a third candidate, a compromise. But who? The Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel, who set the orchestra alight last week, had ruled himself out. So had Daniel Barenboim, Mariss Jansons, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and other

On 8 March 2013, Gustavo Dudamel stood by the coffin of the Marxist autocrat Hugo Chavez and conducted the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra in the Venezuelan national anthem. He assumed, like everyone else, that the coffin contained a fresh corpse: the president of Venezuela was reported to have died from cancer on 5 March at the age of 58. Not so, it is now claimed. According to his former head of security, Chavez died on 30 December 2012. The news was kept secret while his lieutenants panicked. The funeral — covered with ludicrous sycophancy by the BBC — was, at least in part, a masquerade. Whatever the truth, Dudamel —

Not long ago the great conductors of classical music were general practitioners. They expected to give satisfactory interpretations of music written from the beginnings of symphonic composition to the present day, and audiences took it for granted that, if they knew what they were doing with Mozart and Beethoven, they could be trusted with Handel and Stravinsky. Their orchestras adopted the same approach and, within a narrow definition that bespeaks a more innocent age, everyone was content. There was little concern that Handel would not have recognised the sound that the instruments of the modern orchestra was making; and no one was disturbed that the big hero figure out front