Review: Sir Simon Rattle

Oct 3 2008

Simon Rattle

IT HAD to be one of the longest-awaited homecomings. Sir Simon Rattle had come to the Phil with his Berlin orchestra – probably the most famous, if not the best, in the world.

But that was not good enough for Scousers: he had to conduct the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. After all, that’s where he started. And, maybe, that was why he told the ecstatic audience, on their feet and applauding wildly, that they should “cherish this orchestra”. Remember that, Liverpool audiences, in the dark days of 2010, 2011 and the rest . . .

So what of this concert?

Incredible, surely, has to be the adjective. Rattle chose two excerpts from Wagner’s music- drama Twilight of the Gods – the Journey to the Rhine and Siegfried’s Death and Funeral March.

The opening piece was somewhat shaky: the brass were not at their best at the outset, but they warmed as the piece progressed. In many ways, this is a piece constructed with vast blocks of sound, which worked well. Rattle coaxed the RLPO into a vast, mellifluous combination of almost exotic orchestral sounds.

The same was true for the Funeral March – a huge statement marred, once again, by messy brass. The four Wagner tubas were, for the most part, ineffectual, though the piece progressed to a fine conclusion – eventually.

There was a world premiere in this programme – Songs of Joy, by the Australian composer Brett Dean.

Baritone soloist Peter Coleman- Wright was in command of this complex score, though the dense orchestration rather swamped his line: it was hard to hear, for much of the piece, what he was singing. And the piece felt rather derivative. The first movement was pure Britten – Peter Grimes or Billy Budd – while the second movement was theatrical: Kurt Weill at his best. The finale owed much to Ives in the multiplicity of keys and tones.

The high point – and certainly the emotional apex – of this concert was Rattle’s interpretation of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, the piece which launched his meteoric career. Conducting without a score, Rattle drew out every last ounce of emotion from the RLPO. He brought a sense of urgency to the first movement and drew out some delicate woodwind sounds in the slow movement.

But what a delightful last movement: every inch the professional, Rattle bonded perfectly with the RLPO.

Let’s hope he this perfectionist of a musician makes it back to Liverpool soon.