The eyes truly have it

Anyone who thinks there has been a lot of hoopla for the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall should have been in Berlin on Sept. 7 last year, the day Simon Rattle led his first concert as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic. Britain’s most popular conductor had achieved the most prestigious -- and some would say most important -- job in classical music. Music insiders in London referred to it as the coronation.

Berlin itself felt under the spell of Rattle’s smile. And in a sense it was, what with the beaming conductor’s photo plastered on billboards and bus stops. One newspaper dubbed him “Sunny Sir Simon,” and the media couldn’t get enough of him. That first night, the Philharmonie, the yellow landmark in which the orchestra performs, glowed like a beacon, so bathed was it in TV lights.

Next weekend, then, hoopla meets hoopla, as Rattle makes his first appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic in both Los Angeles and Disney Hall. After all, we knew him when. He made his Hollywood Bowl debut in 1976 on tour with the London Youth Orchestra. Ernest Fleischmann was so impressed by the 20-year-old conductor from Liverpool that he immediately asked him back to appear with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “I was scared stiff,” Rattle later admitted.

In the 1980s, Rattle served as principal guest conductor of the L.A. Philharmonic. The city watched him grow from precocious to great. That didn’t happen overnight, as legend has it. But it did happen.

Now 47 and on top of the world, Rattle has turned gray, but prematurely so, and his silver curls take little away from his enthusiastic boyish nature. One of the first things he says as he arrives to meet for an interview at a small hotel near Lincoln Center is, “I hope you don’t mind if I have to leave at 7:30. It’s my only chance to give my Aunt Billie a big hug. She’s going to the theater.”

Aunt Billie -- actually his wife, Candace Allen, is her niece -- was in the original Broadway production of Leonard Bernstein’s “On the Town” and is the widow of jazz great Luther Henderson.

Rattle came to America for a couple of days late last month to visit his children by an earlier marriage, who live in San Francisco; to have dinner with the composer John Adams, whom he has long championed and from whom he has commissioned a new opera to be premiered by his orchestra in 2006; and to meet with the press in New York in preparation for his Berlin Philharmonic American tour, which includes three concerts at Carnegie Hall as well as stops in Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and San Francisco.

In conversation, Rattle sounds like someone who can’t believe his luck.

How’s Berlin? “Heaven. Hard work but absolutely heaven.”

Has the initially warm welcome cooled at all after a year? “I was expecting a lot more resistance, but they’re just curious about everything. It’s been extraordinary.”

Culture shock? “Less than I thought. The wonderful thing is that they’ve been up for everything. It just progresses and progresses.”

These are, of course, the kind of things a conductor says, but not necessarily with Rattle’s tone of glee or the sparkle in his eyes. He laughs as he notes, “Look, they just chose, one after another, the two conductors in the world who conduct with their eyes most open after this conductor who conducted with his eyes shut.”

In one sentence, Rattle encapsulated what the Berlin Philharmonic was, what it has gone through in the post-wall years, what it wants to become and just how radical his appointment was.

Under Herbert von Karajan, the autocratic, ex-Nazi, fast-living, race car-driving, airplane-piloting music director from 1955 to 1989, the Berlin Philharmonic became, in nearly everyone’s estimation, not only the greatest orchestra in the world but the greatest orchestra the world had ever known. Whatever listeners thought about Karajan’s slickness, the pretentious pietism of his conducting with his eyes closed or his scary quest for perfection, he inspired phenomenal playing.

After Karajan, the orchestra had a dozen rocky years under the Italian conductor Claudio Abbado, who does indeed conduct with his eyes and who attempted to open the players’ eyes to a broader repertory and a more varied sound. He hired younger, more flexible musicians. And although Rattle first conducted the orchestra 15 years ago, it was during the Abbado reign that he became something of a regular in Berlin.

Unlike the ever-friendly Rattle, Abbado can be a distant personality. Although he is well known for his liberal politics and lack of formality, he and the band did not easily find a common wavelength -- “We call him Planet Claudio,” Rattle fondly jokes. At one point, Abbado resigned and had to be coaxed back. It took his suffering a life-threatening stomach cancer for him and the orchestra to truly come to care for each other.

Rattle says that was a critical, humanizing moment in the orchestra’s history. “There was this huge change in the relationship. The orchestra realized that, ‘My God, we have to look after him. Otherwise he will die.’ ”

Abbado’s threatened resignation came as a big shock; no one had resigned from the Berlin Philharmonic before. But Rattle nearly followed suit as he was preparing for his first season.

He too threatened to quit if Berlin’s bankrupt government cut funding, as it had insisted it must. He also threatened to resign if the orchestra didn’t find a new administrative structure that would unite its lucrative media wing with the regularly functioning orchestra. The existing structure had led to musically compromising projects.

“It was really important to keep the pressure on the politicians,” Rattle maintains. “I refused to let the orchestra be a political football, so yes, I would have resigned. And what I said to the orchestra is that, ‘If you want me to come, we have to be all in one boat.’ I fought for them with the city, but I also fought them, insisting that you can’t have power without responsibility.”

Advocate of new music

But Rattle insists he is not fighting any of the battles he expected with players and audiences for making the musical changes he envisioned. Those changes have begun with an enormously expanded repertory. New music is a mission. His first concert as music director started with “Asyla” by the young British composer Thomas Ades. As if that wildly surreal piece, which ends with music evoking the spell of the drug Ecstasy, wasn’t enough, Rattle devoted another concert a few weeks later to Mark Anthony Turnage’s raw, drugged-out, jazz-inspired “Blood on the Floor” -- more work from the Brit brat pack.

Last season, the orchestra performed Bernstein’s musical “Wonderful Town” in concert and recorded Beethoven’s opera, “Fidelio,” in a colorful and exhilarating performance that found this flamboyantly rich-sounding ensemble adapting some of the techniques of the early music movement. That took a little doing and was not without controversy, among both the players and critics. Even when the recording was released in England, it got some decidedly negative reviews objecting to its juggling of frisky period-practice techniques and the slick Berlin sound. “Fidelio,” however, demonstrates that Rattle cannot be pinned down. His Beethoven is not one style or another but a combination that nods to both history and modernity. And Rattle claims that this flexible approach is slowly winning adherents in Berlin and within the orchestra. When he conducted Mozart’s “Idomeneo” in concert with the Berliners this summer, to his great surprise some of the string players showed up with Baroque bows and gut strings.

However, there was another recent battle -- this one with the Los Angeles Philharmonic management -- that Rattle does not sound quite so sanguine about. As a sign of his commitment to new music, three modern works -- Henri Dutilleux’s “Correspondances,” avant-garde German composer Heiner Goebbels’ “Aus einem Tagebuch” (“From a Diary”) and Ligeti’s Violin Concerto -- are part of his tour repertory. All three will be heard in New York. San Francisco has two. But only the Dutilleux is on the Disney programs.

“I couldn’t get the hall to accept the other two pieces. It’s as simple as that,” Rattle says. “It was really quite a fight, and it is a shame, because Heiner’s music is fascinating and the Ligeti is one of the great masterpieces.”

Rattle says it came down to money. The Philharmonic administration, which is presenting the two Disney concerts, worried about selling those pieces at enormously high ticket prices.

“I’m aware we are a very expensive orchestra, but there is relatively little we can do about that,” Rattle says. “The city is bankrupt. We have to come near breaking even on tour. At home, we are in a more populist position. We can keep our prices low, and lots of young people can and do come.”

Still, there is one attraction that is likely to entice Disney audiences to shell out record amounts for tickets: This is probably the only chance to hear Rattle in town any time soon. Berlin, he says, is all-consuming. He plans to maintain his connection with the period-instrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in London but will do relatively little guest conducting. An annual trip to the Vienna Philharmonic he finds a must, and he has developed a closeness to the Philadelphia Orchestra, which he wants to continue. He keeps in touch, but barely, with his former orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony.

Mainly, Rattle says, he and Berlin need time. Thinking back to his days of working at the Music Center, he recalls something that then-L.A. Philharmonic music director Carlo Maria Giulini said to him: “Hurry slowly.”

“It’s the essence of a conductor,” he says. He remained in Birmingham 17 years, turning down any number of important offers -- the L.A. Philharmonic included. He is in Berlin for the long haul.

“It’s a 10-year contract, but it’s only 10 years to start with. Everybody would like it to be longer. I think they’re out of their minds. But I’ve become resigned to the fact that I will now be more in Berlin than I am in London. Like a string quartet, you have to devote a good chunk of your life to it.”

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Berlin Philharmonic

When: Friday, 8 p.m., and Saturday, 2 p.m.

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave.

Price: $45-$175

Contact: (323) 850-2000