The Rattle Report

During rehearsal, the pianist Radu Lupu had a small question.

“Yes, dear?” the conductor replied, addressing one of the world’s most distinguished keyboard artists as if he were a sweet old acquaintance.

Moments later, the conductor paused to encourage his string section. Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, he decided, needed more orchestral oomph.

“A small nuclear explosion, please,” he urged.

In all his iconoclastic glory, this was Sir Simon Rattle, the boy wonder who bounced fully formed onto the world concert stage nearly a quarter century ago, while still in his teens. For years, with his flamboyant conducting style, his sinuous movements, eye contact with each performer and--it has to be said--his huge mop of dark, curly hair, Rattle reveled in the role of enfant terrible. Now that he is 43 years old and leaving his post as head of Britain’s City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra after 18 years, Rattle has mellowed not even remotely.

He still has the hair: gray, to be sure, but wild and frizzy as ever, and prone to flopping every which way. He still courts his musicians with his eyes: “Oh, absolutely,” he concurred. Rattle continues to conduct aerobically, so much so that his wife says he keeps trim with “the Mahler diet.” His interpretations persist in dazzling critics. “God’s plenty,” Richard Dyer music critic of the Boston Globe wrote recently, “and more.”

But what Rattle retains most of all is a delicious sense of mischief--an impish quality that makes it clear that at midlife, what he has become is a lovable, overgrown enfant terrible.

Finishing a rehearsal during a recent stint as guest conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he traded a sweaty red turtleneck for something more somber. But just to keep from appearing dull, he produced a toy dragon through which he ventriloquized. Why chat in the stuffy old conductor’s suite? he reasoned, via the dragon. Why not perch in the first balcony of Symphony Hall, the grand old auditorium that many music lovers consider to be this country’s finest.

“This is for L.A.,” Rattle teased, again through the dragon. “Let’s show them what a real concert hall looks like.”

Rattle dismissed L.A.’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as “not a concert hall. It never was a concert hall.” Down went the dragon as, more generously, he allowed, “it’s a great theater--a great theater for opera.”

Los Angeles, said Rattle, has a wonderful orchestra--one that Rattle has happily conducted on many occasions (he was principal guest conductor in L.A. from 1981 to 1994.) He returns to Los Angeles, in fact, for concerts Wednesday and Thursday as part of his farewell tour with the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

But he’s looking forward to when Disney Hall is a reality. “The orchestra desperately needs [it]. The Pavilion is actually stopping them from growing.”

So passionately does Rattle feel about the alliance between an orchestra and its surroundings that when Birmingham was commissioning its “miraculous” new concert hall, Rattle exercised executive authority to insist that the architect be subordinate to the acoustician. “The architect was not pleased,” he reported. “Which may be why the seats are orange.”

Fortunately, with his back to the audience, Rattle remains oblivious to such details. This is a position he longed to occupy beginning when he was 10 years old, and his parents took him to hear an all-Mahler concert in his hometown of Liverpool. It was a musical family of sorts, for his father had set aside dreams of a career in jazz in order to make some money in the import-export business. Probably just as well, his son figured: “Can you imagine a white, British jazz performer named Rattle?”

No worse, probably, than being a schoolboy or even a world-famous conductor named Rattle.

“It couldn’t be any more ridiculous, could it?” Sir Simon said of his surname. At one point in his youth, he investigated the British tradition of deed pole, through which a citizen can petition to change his name. His father was terribly hurt. When Rattle’s own sons came along, he struggled before settling on Sasha for the eldest, now 14, and Eliot for the 8-year-old.

“A name to go with Rattle is a real problem,” he said. “When you think about something like Ronald Rattle. . .”

In Liverpool, Simon dutifully took piano lessons. He studied percussion and was by his own judgment a horrid violinist. But at the Mahler concert, “it was St. Paul on the road to Damascus. I thought, I want to be in the middle of this. I wanted to be in the middle of the music. I wanted to be in the middle of the people. I didn’t want to spend my life practicing on my own.”

With a schoolboy’s brash temerity, a 14-year-old Rattle rang up local musicians--adult musicians--and assembled a small orchestra to conduct. The following year he was off to study at the Royal Academy of Music, and by 19, Rattle was distinguishing himself in international competitions. It was an amazing life fit, one of those rare occasions when talent and aspiration and opportunity merge.

“To think that you are actually being paid to do this, it’s extraordinary,” Rattle said. Then again, conducting is also “physically, emotionally and mentally tough,” he conceded. “There are a lot of days when the work is like dental flossing. But not many days when it’s root canal.”

With his opening concert program for Birmingham of Sibelius, Mahler and Boulez in 1980, the then-25-year-old Rattle leaped to international prominence at a time when conductors tended to be old, male and, on easygoing days, tyrannical. Luckily, he said, “I think the days of the dictator-conductor are over. By and large, there’s a much more simpatico relationship between conductor and orchestra.”

This shift fits with Rattle’s philosophy, and with his experience as well. “For me, I’ve always loved the conductors who seemed to bring the music out of the musicians, rather than imposing it,” he said. “Everything I am most interested in needs to come from within. Warmth, generosity, joy--any emotion has to come from inside. Also, I was 19 when I started. It simply did not work for me to march in and declare what a piece was supposed to sound like. The musicians were often two and three times my age. Self-deprecatory humor was a necessity. Nobody was going to take you stamping your feet and telling them what to do.”

As it turned out, foot-stamping would not have been Rattle’s style anyway. From the beginning, critics have consistently lauded his fluid, emotion-packed delivery. Once, a reviewer went so far as to praise Rattle for seeking out “the intimacies of Mozart.” This assessment made the conductor chortle.

“Sounds vaguely pornographic, doesn’t it?” he remarked.

Salacious or otherwise, Rattle said the inner feelings of the conductor, the composer, the musicians, “everybody” are what shape a performance. “I don’t think you can fake much in this business,” he said. Those impulses in turn do not transpire in a vacuum, said Rattle. In advising musicians, he often borrows from Brahms, who counseled: Practice one hour less every day and read one more good book.

“Because it’s all got to be about something,” Rattle elaborated. “Music has got to be content-driven.”

Personally, it’s no different, he said. Life is content-driven--or so he hopes--and some days, at an age when an earlier generation of conductors were still considered neophytes, this veteran of 25 years at the podium feels he has evolved greatly since his teeny-bopper debut. Other days, he sees himself only as a grayer version of the boy with the baton. And every year, he marvels at how much growth still awaits him. “I wonder how I got away without what I just learned,” he said.

Again, this revelation squares with Rattle’s theory that “all the good conductors are over 60.” He may be internationally acclaimed, but he hasn’t yet ascended to the conductors’ pantheon. “It does take time,” he said. “It keeps on going, and everybody keeps on changing. It’s such a mutual thing.”

Rattle’s CBSO farewell tour has turned into a worldwide, yearlong celebration. Glowing reviews wherever he has mounted the podium have only added to the festive feeling. But as he leaves CBSO, Rattle has been mentioned in connection with any number of other orchestras, many of them American. Rattle himself has expressed interest in inheriting Ozawa’s baton here in Boston, but after 25 years, Ozawa shows no signs of leaving. A West Coast conductorship would make sense for Rattle, since his two sons live in San Francisco with his first wife. He demurs, however, insisting that: “I have no plans to take any job of any type for the next few years.”

After 18 years in Birmingham, he is beat, he said. Besides, guest-conducting has him booked up, “to my horror,” through the year 2002. He and his second wife, writer Candace Allen, have recently moved to a new house in London. Rattle is a voracious reader and an avid student of popular culture. “What I have now is the chance to take a little time to mull,” an indulgence, considering the breakneck pace he has maintained.

One question he might pause to ponder is why American audiences are so different from their European counterparts. “In America, it’s, ‘Amuse me!’ That’s the problem here,” Rattle said. “You have to realize that in Europe, that’s not true. In America, classical music is off to the side of peoples’ consciousness. You go to someplace like Vienna, classical music is a necessity, not a luxury.”

Conductors in America are always challenged with bringing an audience in, he said. “In some ways I think that’s why I’m a little wary of an American position,” he said.

There is competition on this continent, too, particularly from sports. Rattle rejoins that “music is exercise for a different part of the soul. We’re talking aerobics of the emotions.”

And there is Sir Simon’s deep and abiding belief: music is not about transcendence. “Oh, come off it,” he said. What music says is: “Look, you are not alone. That’s why music is for me the most inclusive of all the arts. It gets to the places that are hardest to speak about. It’s dealing with things that are sometimes too important for words.”

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Simon Rattle and the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. Wednesday, 7:30 p.m.; Thursday, 8 p.m. $6-$63. (213) 850-2000.