A thoroughly Rattle-d state

By Mark Swed

Dec. 11, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Tokyo —

JUST before Thanksgiving, the Berlin Philharmonic completed an Asian tour with a concert in Suntory Hall, the Tokyo venue with acoustics reminiscent of Walt Disney Concert Hall but programming closer to Carnegie Hall’s. Suntory sees a regular succession of the world’s great orchestras. But the Berlin Philharmonic, which shows up most years in Tokyo, is always an especially hot ticket.

This time, ticket prices exceeded $300, even more than tickets for the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual visits to Suntory, but the venue had long been sold out. Huge blowups of Simon Rattle, the Berlin orchestra’s music director since 2002, were prominent in Tokyo’s many record stores. For the Japanese, who are among the world’s most avid classical music consumers, the Berlin Philharmonic remains the same gold standard in orchestras it has been for half a century.

Other places in Asia proved wildly enthusiastic about the Berliners as well. Concerts on Taiwan in Taipei, another capital with a huge appetite for Western classical music, attracted such overflow crowds that loudspeakers had to be set up outside the hall. For the first concert, 20,000 listeners gathered in the night air; for the second, 25,000. Rattle and some players went among the crowd after the concerts and were feted, according to an orchestra spokesman, like rock stars.

This is hardly surprising. The Berlin Philharmonic gained its reputation as the world’s most brilliant orchestra in the postwar years, when the glamorous Herbert von Karajan directed it, and the British Rattle is, in his own right, an international arts celebrity, if one with a less polished image and more unruly hair than Karajan’s. The orchestra under him clearly retains its star power.

Still, Rattle -- or “Sir Simon,” as the Germans love to call him -- is revolutionizing Berlin, both the orchestra and the city’s musical life. The brass may gleam as brightly as ever, the winds glisten and the strings shine. But after three Rattle seasons, the Berlin Philharmonic is a different band than it has ever been, with a less defined sound, a much broader repertory, a new relationship to its community and a new spring to its step.

Not everyone is happy. “While Rattle romps expressively on the podium,” one Berlin critic wrote last year in Welt am Sonntag (as translated by the Guardian in London), “the Philharmonic musicians sometimes tend to play as inconsequentially as if they were a wife reaching to the fridge to get out a beer for her husband.” During a visit to the German capital around that time, I heard regular echoes of the same sentiment.

Change doesn’t come easily in traditional cultures, and the Berlin Philharmonic has always stood for Berlin’s non-lascivious side, as a mighty symbol of German High Art. Under Karajan, that meant monumental performances of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Wagner and Strauss. In the decade after Karajan’s death in 1989, the elegant Italian modernist Claudio Abbado helped move the orchestra into a more contemporary mode while trying not to ruffle too many feathers.

Rattle, on the other hand, ruffles, if with a broad smile. He’s got the orchestra playing new music, some of it way out. He has involved his Berliners in controversial avant-garde film projects. He has brought the players into schools and prisons, making outreach a priority.

Even though the organization now has to get out and raise money -- under Karajan, a flush West Berlin happily supported it as a showpiece for West Germany -- the Berlin Philharmonic appears exceptionally healthy, given all the expensive projects and tours it embarks upon. The orchestra not only has retained its international position but is positioning its name brand with new energy.

As the Asia trip proved, the Berliners also remain as much an attraction touring under Rattle as they were with Karajan. New York is next. At Carnegie in January, Rattle and Berlin will begin a several-year project of concerts and workshops. The orchestra, meanwhile, is making more commercial recordings with Rattle than any other major symphony is under its own music director. There are major releases devoted to Dvorak, Debussy and Benjamin Britten out in time for Christmas shopping, along with DVDs of Leonard Bernstein’s musical “Wonderful Town” in concert and a scary film version of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”

More are on the way. Angel released a two-CD set of Strauss tone poems in Asia to coincide with the tour’s effulgent performances of “Ein Heldenleben” (the discs will reach the States early next year). Japanese stores were also selling a dazzling Deutsche Grammophon Rattle-Berlin recording of Brahms’ First Piano Concerto with Krystian Zimerman that we won’t get until April.

The recordings and the Tokyo concert leave no doubt that this is not Karajan’s or even Abbado’s Berlin Philharmonic anymore. The playing no longer demonstrates the uniquely mesmerizing perfection that Karajan sought and remarkably often achieved. But to hear Berlin play Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” which began the Suntory concert as it does the orchestra’s new Debussy disc, is to hear rapturously beautiful, and truly expressive, playing indeed.

Expression is the real issue. Rattle has been asking for a more overt emotional commitment than I suspect either his musicians or his Berlin public were initially comfortable with. The iconic Karajan closed his eyes when he conducted, wanting to keep as much of the world out of his music-making as possible. Abbado can be a cool, clean customer. Three months into his job, Rattle -- who virtually conducts with his eyes -- performed “Wonderful Town” as a New Year’s Eve concert. He brought in Broadway stars Kim Criswell and Audra McDonald. The event was televised and can now be seen on DVD.

What a strange evening this was. The video ends with the cast pulling the audience into a huge conga line. The crowd whoops it up, almost guiltily. You simply didn’t do these kinds of things at Berlin Philharmonic concerts.

But how ill at ease the musicians look. They’re trying to swing, no doubt. And clearly there are less-uptight ringers, especially in the saxophone section, added to the roster.

Revelation in Tokyo

FOR me, though, the real evidence of how far this orchestra has come occurred in Tokyo with a performance of “Asyla” by the young Briton Thomas Ades. Rattle opened his first concert as music director in Berlin with this dazzling modern work, which includes a wild bit of tripping inspired by the drug Ecstasy.

A few months before that, he had conducted it with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Ojai, and the Angelenos had no problem with it. But the Berliners sweated bullets. It was decidedly not their music.

Now it is. The Tokyo performance had all the orchestra’s trademark brilliance. Fantastical orchestration sounded fantastic. The players demonstrated a new degree of rhythmic confidence. It was as if the orchestra knew a thing or two about Ecstasy yet remained the Berlin Philharmonic.

In Berlin, Rattle continues to shake things up. Along with radical new music, he brings a period-practice sensibility to early music and Mozart. In September, his contribution to the Berlin Festival was a concert performance of Janacek’s opera “Jenufa.” At Easter, he is scheduled to take the orchestra to neighboring Austria for a staging of Debussy’s “Pelleas et Melisande” in Salzburg.

Next summer, Rattle and the Berliners are to begin a “Ring” cycle in Aix-en-Provence in southern France directed by Stephane Braunschweig. But more striking by far is likely to be a Berlin version beforehand. In June, the orchestra will work with inmates from a local prison to develop “a parallel version of Wagner’s ‘Rheingold,’ ” as the season brochure puts it.

Nor does Rattle go easy on secondary students. His project with them last September was Shostakovich’s 14th Symphony, one of the brooding, angry Russian composer’s most pessimistic works. And given that Pamela Rosenberg -- whose uncompromising artistic dedication was such a shock to the San Francisco Opera when she took over four years ago -- will leave the States next year to head the Berlin Philharmonic, it seems inevitable that Rattle will be empowered to take even bolder steps.

Rosenberg will also have her work cut out for her. Not all the new ideas in Berlin have been good ones. The “Rite of Spring” project is a preposterously artsy silent film that begins with God (a black woman in a maid’s uniform) baking the three main characters in the oven and then dumping them onto the cruel world. A young woman, abused by her father, trolls the streets for bitter, dangerous, anonymous sex, graphically shown. An alienated brain surgeon acts weird. A grieving widow looks for salvation from a Cuban voodoo ceremony.

Much sentiment surrounded the film’s 2003 premiere, for which the orchestra performed live. Made by Oliver Herrmann, the son of opera stage directors with a bent for surrealism, this version was not quite finished when he died tragically at age 40. And then there’s the dig at Karajan on the back of the CD booklet, which quotes Stravinsky as saying, “I have always had a loathing for those who listen to music with their eyes closed.”

Of Rattle’s new CDs, one brings together large-scale Dvorak tone poems that are among the composer’s most vivid and least-recorded major scores, and they are given robust performances. The novelty of the Debussy program is the suite “La Boite a Joujoux,” which consists of piano pieces magically orchestrated by Debussy’s contemporary Andre Caplet, along with three recent and striking piano prelude orchestrations by the British composer Colin Matthews. But the highlight is a sonically engulfing “La Mer.”

The most extraordinary among these recent recordings, however, is of three Britten song cycles featuring the British tenor Ian Bostridge. He sings as if from inside music, as if he has found a way to produce pure, disembodied emotion. The Berliners play with exceptional finesse that captures the sheer strangeness of this music better than I have ever heard.

Three years ago, the venerable Berlin Philharmonic could never have done anything like this, nor would it have dared. But that was then. The unimaginable is taking place in Berlin. I call it progress.

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The sounds of Rattle

Some recent recordings of the Berlin Philharmonic:

Dvorak: Tone Poems

Berliner Philharmoniker. Simon Rattle, conductor (EMI Classics)

* * *

Debussy: “La Mer,” “Prelude

a l’Apres-Midi d’un Faune,” “La Boite a Joujoux”

Berliner Philharmoniker. Simon Rattle, conductor (EMI Classics)

* * *

Britten: Serenade for

Tenor, Horn and Strings,