Simon Rattle

Simon Rattle0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

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For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1978 and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

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This week our castaway is the young English conductor, Simon Rattle.

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Eight discs, Simon.

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If you had the choice, would you rather take scores?

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I think that's a part of my life that I would be trying to forget about.

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Why not? I would I would be trying to search.

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for perhaps a new side of my personality.

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And in fact, most of the scores which would be any use to me are are stuck firmly in my head. I hope. I wonder how long the forgetting process would take. Mhm. No, I'd be very happy to have

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Uh

Speaker 31:01

No, I

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Just the sensuous pleasure of being able to listen to these discs. Do you get time to listen to records in normal life? I do. I tend to listen to them for relaxation. And in fact, very few of these records are things that I would now listen to for.

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I do. What?

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Relaxation. I was rather surprised to find actually the choice of discs.

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Where do we start? What is the first

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Well, the first thing is an excerpt from Ravel L'Enfort et les sotelaige, which was the first large scale opera I ever conducted. It was when I'd just left the Royal Academy of Music, and I went back there for three months on the staff, which was a most strange ambivalent experience, I can assure you.

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But it has it has actually very strong emotional memories of me, of the time of

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attempting to change from being a student into a professional, which

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I had very, very little time to do it. It was rather an uncomfortable jerk.

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Which section are we going to hear? We're going to hear the foxtrot, which is between the china cup and the teapot.

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How's your mag?

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Rotten

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Better had it.

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Yeah.

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Black and costal, black and thick, black, black, black, turly, fellow, turly, fellow, black.

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Hi Bunsa!

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I punch on the horse.

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I punch, I knock out your st

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I'm driving bogus and drive bogus I bought you

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I box you high and bottom lady you

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Bangasa.

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An excerpt from Ravelle's L'Enfant ille Sortilage, conducted by Ernest Bour.

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You were born in in in Liverpool. Um do you mind if we get the age thing out of the way, because you are exceedingly young to have accomplished what you have accomplished. What was the year of your birth? It was nineteen fifty five. So you are, what, twenty three twenty? Yes, twenty three now.

Simon Rattle3:22

Yes.

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Was there a lot of music in your home? Yes, there was a great deal of music.

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What sort of music?

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Well, a mixture of

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Slightly old-fashioned jazz, uh, and classical music. There was a time when my father might have become a jazz musician of one type or other.

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And there were many, many seventy eights particularly which he'd which he'd collected over his courtship of my mother, who ran a record shop. Oh, so there was plenty of records to play. Yes, there's certain there th there were indeed.

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Development.

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Uh

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This

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Just myself and an elder sister.

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It was my sister actually whom I I realize in retrospect I'm most grateful for, because she taught me how to read a score. The process of actually learning to read a score I can't remember at all. She m obviously must have been a born teacher. I do remember going to the local music library with her and picking out

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the kind of pieces that I liked, which were then all pieces in bright orange and purple. I loved Bartock's Miraculous Mandarin. I loved, for God's sake, uh Schoenberg's five orchestral pieces. I think I adored them then more than I do now. How old were you?

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Well, I suppose I must have been seven or eight. I know it seems ridiculous. My musical taste worked backwards in a way. And you started to learn the piano. Were you put to it, or did did you take to it? Well

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It's strange because I'm not one of those people who can remember very, very far back.

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in their lives. Unlike a friend of mine who actually remembers being embarrassed while having her nappy changed. I can't I really can't remember very much before six or seven. I have seen pictures of myself sitting very happily at the piano strumming things out. My parents bought me a kit of drums when I was little, which I broke within about three days. I think that was the starting point.

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And I'd always really wanted to be a drummer.

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You did start playing percussion. In fact, you started playing in orchestras as a teenager. Yes, I did. I joined my first orchestra when I was ten, which is the Merseyside Youth Orchestra, which I'm actually everlastingly grateful for because it not only gave me that first experience, but also it gave me some of my first conducting concerts. And you were doing a lot. I mean, you were playing timpani and anything they'd let me play. I even played violin for a while, which must have been a fairly horrific experience for anybody around me. Let's have another record. What's your second?

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The second record.

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is just the very opening of Verde's Falstaff. It's one of the most extraordinarily optimistic operas I've ever come across, especially for a man

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At that advanced state of life. And I feel this is a piece that I know not very well now, but a piece that I could live with that would help me.

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No, not who I'm a

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Congratulations!

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Columbia responsible

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The opening scene of Verdi's Falstaff, conducted by Herbert von Carrian, with Tito Gobby as Falstaff.

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Now, you were playing everything in sight in the orchestra. What was the first occasion on which you waved a stick? Well, really.

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What does

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Apart from

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one or two very minor dabblings which were disastrous. I formed an orchestra with a couple of school friends when I was fifteen and we but we decided to put on a concert for the local Spastic Society. And it started as a small

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Understand.

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chamber concert, and then mushroomed into something

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Quite enormous and very successful actually.

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What works did you play?

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Played. The Vaughan Williams Thomas Talis Fantasia is nothing like starting with a difficult beast.

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The Mozart Clarinet Concerto played the unfinished symphony. Between my father and myself we mustered up more cheek than I could ever do again. I I remember going and talking to members of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and asking them if they would come and play for me for nothing. And I think

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Well, certainly five or six of them were so shocked that they agreed. There's absolutely no doubt that the orchestra probably conducted me on that occasion. Well, but then, you know, when you're bitten.

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Uh

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There's absolutely no

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But then

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Yeah.

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The bug gets you.

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and then a scholarship to the Royal Academy.

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How old then?

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I was sixteen.

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What subjects did you take at the Academy? Conducting, obviously? Yes, conducting was a a secondary thing. One can't take it as a principal study. I took.

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piano and percussion.

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And I had some marvellous teachers. I had Gordon Greene, who must have taught me as much about politics as he did about music and later John Streets, who actually turned out to be one of the most important of my musical influences.

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And also James Blades taught me Picashion, who is a wonderful man. Yes, wonderful man.

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I'm told that at the Academy you carried on with your organizing skill. You could get an orchestra together to play more or less anything, anywhere. Well, it was it was it was fairly necessary, actually. This is the only way one could get experience.

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And again, perhaps it was more an organising capacity than a conducting capacity. But things did get better. We did.

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We did a lot of Mala there. We did number two, number four and six.

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The time I was there. Some of the performances aren't bad. Certainly it was marvelous to learn those pieces together with friends.

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You entered an international competition in which you did rather well.

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Yes, this was...

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It is funny that actually because

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I own I didn't go in for it with any serious intent at all. It seemed a nice idea at the time. I I can't believe how I was so flippant about the thing.

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I I'd seen the advertisements for the competition, and I thought, well, I might as well enter. And just possibly, if I was to get into the last ten, I would then see what it was like to conduct a professional orchestra.

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which I did.

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And even that somehow I didn't take so seriously, because I remembered that very distinctly there were one or two of the pieces I had to conduct which I really didn't know.

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And I had to be persuaded by my girlfriend at that time to take the tales which were the dress for the finals of the

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I said, oh, this is absolutely ridiculous. I won't get past the first round.

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And I have the sneaking suspicion that if I'd thought there was any chance of winning, that probably I wouldn't have got past the first round. I just kind of.

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Blithely

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Like not well, not even confident. It didn't really matter. It was just a very pleasurable experience. Which.

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Pay it off. But before we talk about that, let's have another echo. This is a Sarah band from one of Bach's cello suites. And this is very largely tied up with the same girlfriend who had to persuade me to take the tales, as she was a cellist. And so this has its sentimental memories.

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The Sarah Band from Bach's Cello Suite No. V in C minor, played by Pablo Casals. Now that competition that you won didn't do any harm at all.

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Well, no, except it left me slightly horror struck, because

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I'd already managed to get the money for a fourth year at the Academy. It it wasn't in my calculations at all.

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And so it was a very sudden jolt from being a student.

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and I suppose thinking rather too highly of myself, to being

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somebody conducting a very good professional orchestra and realizing rather quickly that I didn't know very much. This was Bournemouth. Yes. Mm-hmm. And thank God the Bournemouth orchestras were so.

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Tolerant.

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particularly the Symphony Orchestra members, who made every effort to help.

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So many of them would come would come and talk to me and help and be en and and be encouraging, and perhaps tell me the things that I might try a different way next time. So it's always rather sentimental going back down to Lournemouth, because it's so much tied with a very

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Rapid, perhaps over rapid, growing up.

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And I suppose the accolade for any young conductor is to be given a prom, and that came very quickly.

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That did, yes, I conducted the first one with the London Sinfonietto, who are a group who I've also worked a lot with.

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Which is particularly nice for me because a lot of them have become good friends. Yes, which year was this? Let me see. It was it must have been

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Not last season, but the season before. And your first festival hall concert, another landmark?

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This was with the Philharmonia Orchestra.

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of which I conducted Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, which was one of the pieces I'd learnt on the Merseyside Youth Orchestra many years before. I have to say that I have never been more frightened in my life as before the first rehearsal for that. I was really quite ill. I mean the thought of facing that orchestra.

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What?

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This sent me into near hysterics. They proved, of course, to be the friendliest bunch of people you could imagine.

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I was almost more shocked by that than anything else. And you also conducted the London Philharmonic?

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Uh

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What was your first overseas engagement?

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Ah.

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My first overseas engagement was the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra, which was extraordinary because one didn't know that this orchestra was half amateur and that all the wind players were from the local police band and might be called off on parade duty at any moment. And you've conducted in Germany too? Yes. Of course, added to the language problem with these orchestras because my German is nearly non-existent and my French fairly eccentric. I remember the first time with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra when I pronounced one of the numbers correctly. This stopped the rehearsal. The entire orchestra cheered. Bless their heart.

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And next year the United States.

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Yes, for the first time to Los Angeles and Chicago, which will be a very exciting experience.

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Record number four, so I meant more to that.

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Record number four.

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is one of those pieces which is actually dearest to me, and I feel on the island would be the most use to me. It's Janicek's opera The Cunning Little Vixen. I've chosen here an excerpt which is While the Vixen Herself is Dreaming, and in which there is the most magnificent dawn music.

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This is the opera I conducted when I first went to Gleinborn to the season, and I lived with it for six months, and the opera just grew and grew in stature. I was very, very sad to lose it, I must say.

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An excerpt from Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen, Gregor conducting the orchestra of the Prague National Theatre.

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How important you is, opera

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How much did you work at Kleinborn?

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Well, Glindbourne, I started working at four years ago, so it was one of my first professional engagements. And since I've been back there every year in one capacity or other.

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Certainly, I don't th I don't think I would be without Kleinborn, with all the hilarious things that happen there, with with the bats that come flying into the orchestra. The the day that fleas invaded the pit after Peter Hall had decided to have a donkey on stage and

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In Don Giovanni, I remember very clearly conducting a score and seeing a little group of semi-quavers I'd never seen before and then watching these semi-quavers jump.

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Watching these semiclavers.

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Yeah, it's a splendid thing about opera. There's so many things to go wrong. Exactly. And they do, I can assure you. They really do. Now, you told us the kind of music you liked when you were seven or eight. Rather surprising too. Now, obviously, it would be ill-advised to specialise as early in your career as this. But what sort of music excites you most?

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This is very difficult to say. I think ever since I can remember, I've been tied up in music of

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of the twentieth century. Something that I find very directly appealing, particularly as my musical taste started from the twentieth century and only gradually worked back to Mozart and Beethoven. So there there are appalling gaps in my knowledge. I've never heard the Missus Solemnis, for instance, which is something I can't wait for, but I'm waiting for a performance.

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So many excitements still ahead. Well, exactly. It's a lovely thought.

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Another another record, number five.

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I I was introduced to this by an English pianist, Paul Crossley.

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who just played it to me, and asked me to try and guess who it was by. I had absolutely no idea, and it's since become one of the pieces I didn't think I could live without. It's Shimonovsky's Stab at Martyr. This is the beginning.

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Of the last movement.

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Certainly for warm bath listening.

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An excerpt from Shemenovsky's Stabat Matter, conducted by Vitold Rovitsky.

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Now, as is usual with conductors, you have certain fixed points. You've tied up with the B B C Scottish Orchestra. Indeed, yes, this is feeling like my second home, Glasgow. And uh you have an arrangement with the London Choral Society which has not yet begun, but is is going to happen. It looks very exciting.

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And you've been making some record?

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Yes, I've we we made a large selection of records with the Nash Ensemble of Contemporary Music.

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and also a record of the rite of spring.

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With the National Youth Orchestra.

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At which conductors of

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influenced you most, do you think?

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I've been helped by a number of people.

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When I was at the Royal Academy, I mean, my technique particularly and the job of

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Being an everyday conductor working was enormously helped by Morris Miles, who was an early influence.

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Then later I met John Carew, to whom I still go for lessons, and I find absolutely invaluable the discipline that he imparts.

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is most important, and in fact, musically he's he taught me most of what I know. He certainly made me take a long, cool look at myself, which is very important.

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And Sir Adrian bowed.

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Well, Sir Adrian I once shared a concert with when I was twenty two and he was eighty eight, which seemed poetic justice somehow.

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And I started to talk to him, and he said, Well, for goodness sake, um, Simon.

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Why did you just come and talk to me one day?

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By the way, when I'd met him

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I went up to him to shake his hand, and he looked me straight in the eye and said

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Ah, good evening. Bolt's the name.

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But he then, having given me this invitation, then a couple of days later I received a letter that really almost made me cry, because it was it was so sweet. It said, among other things

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Of course, when you come, you may just find that I'm talking a lot of rot about music, but in that case I'm sure we could find something else to talk about.

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A great man.

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And I f

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He most

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Most alert and amusing and helpful.

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Record number 6.

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Because I said earlier that my choice of records

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somewhat surprised me. In fact, I have no recordings of my own of any Beethoven string quartets. They're not the type of thing I listen I listen to now, because I don't really have the time to appreciate them. There's a there's a certain

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There's a certain type of mood which I think

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One needs to cultivate to actually appreciate these pieces. But they're the kind of thing which I think.

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I would like to get to know it's something that would would

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Again, help me there. The one that for me most immediately comes to mind is the enormous B-flat.

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String quartet, which is one of the great gems of Beethoven's later life. And I thought what I ought to play is this marvellous.

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In turn witty and vicious scherzo, which really sounds as though it was written yesterday.

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The Amadeus Quartet, the scherzo from the B flat string quartet by Beethoven, opus a hundred and thirty.

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A little interrogation on practical matters. How good are you going to be as a castaway? Absolutely hopeless.

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I don't seem to have any capacity for anything at all technical. I remember very well just in London having to

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ring up my mother in deep darkness to actually find out how to change a fuse. It's terribly embarrassing. It's one of these things I don't know what I would do. Certainly the the question of escaping would

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Never even occurred to me as I as I know that anything I built would sink immediately.

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Yes, you better keep off the record number seven. Record number seven.

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reflects perhaps the composer that's most important to me, who is Mahler, which I've lived with I mean, through the through the Academy days, and now I find of all the composers the most satisfaction.

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has been conducting Mala.

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All this last year, as it happens, I've been working on Das Lied von derde, which I've done many performances of.

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And I feel perhaps of all the Mahler pieces, this is the only one that I could live with full time, as there is

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There is some sense of real optimism in it.

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The closing passage of Marla's The Song of the Earth.

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Bruno Walter conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra with Kathleen Ferrier. And your last record?

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My last record is going to be by Dave Brubeck. This actually is one of the records that does reflect my listening habits,'cause I've I listen more and more now to jazz to relax.

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I was slightly twitchy about choosing jazz, because it's such a spontaneous thing. I wonder just how much it would live up to being repeated. But actually this has such artistry and such pleasure.

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Yeah.

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The Duke by the Dave Brubeck Quartet including Paul Desmond.

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If you could take just one disc, which would it be?

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Strangely

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Probably the piece that I know and understand least, it would have to be the Beethoven, because I think that has absolutely everything.

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Opus one hundred and thirty.

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and one luxury to take with you.

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I thought long and hard about this, and what I decided was that the luxury would be something that I would discover by chance on the island, which was to be

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A bottomless pit of German white wine. When I was happy this would just help me, particularly to listen to the jazz records. And when I was upset, I could drown my sorrows. And keeping it in that bottomless pit will at any rate keep it cool. Good Lord, exactly. Natural phenomenon. One book apart from the Bible, Shakespeare, and big encyclopedias.

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Very difficult this one. I finally decided that I should take the old Chinese book of the Ai Ching, which is something I've always wanted to investigate. Also it was something that I could consult, and it might just help me in this problem of what the hell to do next.

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The Chinese classic The I Ching. And thank you, Simon Rattle, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. That's a pleasure, thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Simon Rattle28:16

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.