London Times: Sir Simon Rattle on whether Classical Music can survive the lockdown
Sir Simon Rattle with the London Symphony Orchestra in January 2020 (Photo credit: Mark Allan)
Simon Rattle interview: the LSO director on whether live classical music can survive the lockdown
By Bryan Appleyard
The Sunday Times
June 21, 2020
A few years ago Simon Rattle was conducting Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in New York.
The staging of the show meant he was surrounded by the orchestra and much of the time he was facing the audience. One night he recognised the great singer Jessye Norman. “I will never forget it as long as I live. Her face was streaming with tears and she was mouthing the words as they all went by. It’s these shared things that we have. This is no luxury, this is not something that we can say, ‘Oh, that was part of a previous civilisation.’ We’re going to need this more and more. And we’re going to have to make sure that somehow or other we can still give this to people. And that institutions survive through to the point where that’s possible again.”
The classical concert with a big orchestra and a packed hall is at present dead, killed by Covid- 19. This is not an experience that can be replicated by streaming or virtual reality, by AI or fancy software that detects your mood and plays appropriate music. This happens only when you are surrounded by warm bodies and facing a stage packed with musicians.
“This is a matter of direct communication. And this we must not lose. Of course people can say, ‘Well, I’ll sit at home with my record collection.’ This is one answer, but the basis of what we do is actual communication. And we need to be in the same space to do this.”
The economics of classical music has already been disrupted by streaming. The main streamers — Apple, Spotify — are next to useless for classical and the small specialists are, well, small. Now the real, warm-bodied thing is also under threat. Either there is a national will to save it or, even in the post-pandemic world, it will shrivel and die. So is there such a will? Apparently not.
“I think the British government has an enormous amount on its plate at present. I fear there is no one who knows about the performing arts. When I look at the taskforce that the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has put together — they’re all good people, but there’s nobody who knows about performing. It worries me that the performing arts aren’t at the top table.”
Rattle is 65, he has a sense of history. He obviously remembers the days when the arts cried wolf continually about money. It wasn’t attractive. Now they tend to be more tentative. But this time the wolf is real.
“People in the arts are terribly scared of just kind of shouting for special favours. Everybody is needing support. Everybody is needing money. But I think people are going to need the arts and culture more than ever before. We will have to face the new world all together. But we’re going to need all types of arts. Particularly in our country, where it is such an amazingly vivid and vital industry. This would be a tragedy to allow it to be lost.”
So now he is out campaigning in the open, writing letters, appearing on television. He is the best man to do this. He has no detectable Liverpool accent, but he retains Scouser charm and a certain sharp clarity when he speaks. His hair, once the signifier of the crazed, possessed maestro, is, perhaps, on the wane — “It’s not as much of a wild garden as it used to be” — but, by conducting standards, he is a toddler.
“Herbert Blomstedt is the ‘youngest’ conductor I know and he’s 92. If I look as good as that tomorrow morning, I’ll be thrilled. He sent me a message on my birthday, on my 65th, saying, ‘Oh Simon, I want you to know that 65 is the new 30!’ Therefore 92 is the new 65. It may become physically hard to do — for so many of us it’s our ears. But we do tend to have a fairly long run of it. Like many conductors at the moment I just feel like a teenager with bad knees.”
Rattle led the Berlin Philharmonic for 19 years; he’s now back in Blighty in charge of the London Symphony Orchestra. And he’s worried about them. Unlike the Berlin Phil, the LSO is an orchestra of freelancers — no play, no pay. Also, 45% of earnings come from touring.
“Next season had a completely mind-boggling and probably, under any circumstances, unsustainable 99 days of international touring work. Under any normal time that would be way over the top. I mean, now it looks beyond science fiction.”
He is in Prague when we speak. He still lives in Berlin with his wife, the Czech singer Magdalena Kozena. He is conducting her with the Czech Philharmonic — “They’re not distanced because they’re much further on than we are. We were all tested this morning.”
Elsewhere distancing is a huge issue — and not only for the audience. Players sitting two metres apart reduces the possible size of the orchestra, changes the acoustic and plays havoc with conducting.
“People are having to get used suddenly to playing at an enormous distance. Orchestras are more like football teams than they are like art galleries. We really need to train to play together. And we also need to find out what it is to play together under completely different circumstances like this ... it’s not easy. Part of it is just that sound takes time to travel. And if you’re really used to using your ears this can be dangerous if there are not people close to you. On the other hand, at least people can say, ‘My God, actually maybe we do need a conductor sometimes now’ — thank God for that! ‘Oh, finally we’ve actually found some use for you!’”
Sound travels very slowly compared to light, so the ears, in this new world, may be less important than the eyes. “The thing is you use your ears. You encourage musicians to use their ears all the time. But then with distance you have to find really a different way of doing it. You have to do it all so much more by eye with each other. And you have to trust, you have to try and make it swing in a different way.”
His first experience of locked-down music was in early March with the Berlin Phil. It was broadcast, there was no audience. They played what was probably Bartok’s last work, the Concerto for Orchestra.
“There was this sense of everybody telling their own story in a very intimate and very candid way. And somehow plugging into this music by a dying refugee, which Bartok was. He was the first non-combatant to be given penicillin so he could complete this piece. And so, in a way, the dislocation involved couldn’t have felt stronger. It was deeply moving. All of us were wondering, ‘When will we be together like this again?’”
So when will they be together like that again and, more importantly, how will they be together? Concert-hall building, especially in China, has been bordering on manic. They seem to have replaced modern-art museums as the great cultural urban gesture. It all came to a weird climax with the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg — great hall, fabulous acoustic, but the cost! (Almost €1bn.)
“It is a completely magnificent building, and has transformed the city, but it is not anybody’s idea of what would be best practice. It’s a real warning signal about how costs can get out of control. There’s also the extraordinary example of the replacement Tonhalle in Zurich. This was put in a large empty warehouse and prefabricated and put in, at a very low cost. It’s a very temporary solution, but also a solution that works.“
Rattle has, of course, his own concert hall scheme in the City of London costing £270m. He emits a rueful laugh when I bring it up — “Let’s say this hasn’t been the first problem on everybody’s mind.” But the City has handed over another wad of cash so it is by no means dead.
“This is something they really want. Whatever is happening, this new area of London will grow. And they need something at the centre of this. Exactly how it will turn out at the end, how long it will take — who knows? I’m not exactly holding my breath, but this is something that we will keep on working on while there’s a chance to work on it. This is not going to be only a time of gloom and doom.”
Covid-19, he is convinced, is not a pause, it is a full stop. He is sceptical — rightly, I think — about hopes for a vaccine and living with the virus for a long period will change everything. “To think things will go back to business as usual is to take optimism to an incredible degree. I think we will be living with this condition for some years yet and things will change very gradually and we will have to be ready and prepared to do whatever we can at whatever moment.
“I think everybody will be looking at another model. But another model will take time, not only to imagine, but to put into practice. And we will need some bridge to get there. I think we will all be more local in future. And I think in many ways this will be a good thing. But we need a lot of time to see: how do we make this work?”
In the end it all comes back to Jessye Norman crying, the intensity of the warm-bodied, big orchestra experience. The conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt once said something dear to Rattle’s heart: “It’s not what the music says, it’s what the music means.” If, as some say, music is the highest art, it is because it doesn’t have to say anything, it just is.
“At the end of it all it’s a search for meaning. And I’m sure through all the difficulties of this time we will also get closer to the meaning. And certainly it appears more important and more personal than ever . . . This is such a difficult thing to talk about in every way. And we’re all kind of groping in the darkness towards the future.”
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