Simon Rattle - interview from April 1983

The trouble with interviewing Simon Rattle, most animated and questing of conversationalists, is that you are liable to end up far exceeding your commissioned column space. When we met over afternoon coffee in a South London restaurant last January, the principal subjects in hand were to be Britten and Weill (the War Requiem and Seven Deadly Sins – the latter reviewed on page 1187). Yet, somehow, the conversation immediately struck out with Rachmaninov, whose Symphonic Dances the CBSO have recently recorded with their 28-year-old Principal Conductor (to be released at a later date). "We had absolutely no plans to record it. Earlier this year in Birmingham we completed something like our eleventh or twelfth performance of the piece within about five months (we'd taken it on tour to Frankfurt and Amsterdam, and played it a great deal in England). As time went on we all got to love it more and more, and to appreciate how even more wonderful it seems when you know exactly what's going on inside—even just playing the notes is difficult enough; the rubato has to be just right. And so once it had got to the stage when they could judge that as one person with me sitting in the auditorium, I had a crazy idea. I rang up EMI and said that we were playing this piece in Aldeburgh next week and why didn't we record it there? Well it was worked out to be rather expensive, so we came up with an even more crazy idea! That we should have one hour's rehearsal before the performance, and that hour should be the recording session. Then the orchestra agreed to stay behind briefly after the concert and do one or two 'patches'—and there were very few. And so we have what I would call a real record, an accurate reflection, of how we do the piece"



The success of the arrangement is a tribute both to the orchestra, as Rattle readily agrees, and to its Principal Conductor's enterprise and adaptability. He talks glowingly of the opportunity—not to be taken for granted in the London musical environment—of being able to return to a work often enough within a short period for it to be thoroughly assimilated into everyone's musical bloodstream. The CBSO's new familiarity with Kurt Weilt's Seven Deadly Sins is another case in point: only 24 hours before the EMI sessions early last September, the orchestra, Rattle and his wife (the soprano Elise Ross) were involved in a BBC TV production ("Warholesque and slightly punky"), with actors, of this extraordinary mixture of song cycle and ballet. The orchestra's familiarity meant that after just 20 minutes' balancing, EMI were able to take a complete performance, which, says Rattle, "makes up more or less the end product—at least four sins'-worth! Most of the patches were for language correction. We had a fantastic coach called Geraldine Frank who worked with me on Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne, and is one of those marvellous mid-European, Viennese characters with left-wing sympathies, who loves the music and used to sing it. Elly and she worked for weeks together. And the German in Seven Deadly Sins is so tangy and so alive, that it made all the difference."



No one who has heard the London Sinfonietta's fresh and idiomatic approach to Weill over the past decade will have failed to think again about the waspish sprechgesang manner of those early fifties recordings with the composer's widow Lotte Lenya (CBS electronically reprocessed stereo 73657. 9/77) and, says Rattle, from those discs has arisen much misconception. "Everyone has very much in their head those recordings. made with a very bad orchestra and Lenya past her best and no longer able to sing the original versions—not only were the songs transposed down, but the orchestration was also changed to make things easier for her. And Seven Deadly Sins sounded very different, more like the sort of Threepenny Opera band one is used to instead of a symphonic ballet written for an orchestra playing properly. There are vast stretches of music in Seven Deadly Sins which are very much related to his symphonies and other works which he wrote before his collaboration with Brecht. One of the problems about people's responses to Weill is that they tend to treat Brecht's reactions as his reactions. They tend to see the music as being an extension of Brecht, and responses to Brecht tend to be very much coloured by Hollywood versions (you know that Brecht and Weill had a very uneasy collaboration, and it was Seven Deadly Sins over which they finally fell out, because Brecht was very angry that Weill had written so much music and made it paramount – Brecht really believed that he'd trained Weill out of that). People have been amazed to hear us playing this piece with a proper orchestra which plays in tune, and even occasionally, God forbid, makes a beautiful sound. And with a singer—a soprano—singing it as Weill wanted. Obviously there are still the slightly bent rhythms which the text demands, but they are the bent rhythms of Viennese music rather than jazz It needs to be sung (as indeed Lenya did in her earlier days). not sprechgesang. There's the most enormous difference between The Threepenny Opera which was written for actors to 'speech-sing' and works like the symphonies—the second of which Bruno Walter took on tour a great deal—Mahogonny and Seven Deadly Sins; there's no low light and sawdust in those."



Similarly under the fingers and in the minds of the CBSO and its conductor by the time they recorded it late last February. was Brttten's War Requiem; it has also been announced for Aldeburgh this year, and London concertgoers will have heard Rattle's interpretation of the work at the Royal Festival Hall, London last December (the soloists on the recording are Elisabeth Söderström, Robert Tear and Thomas Allen). "I think it's an extraordinarily exportable piece—particularly the Owen settings which have a very far-reaching appeal. And after all, Wilfred Owen in translation is still one of the most popular English poets in many countries. Rather than dating, they have a quality which our peace-movement-conscious age will grasp on to more tightly than ever. Of course the music has always divided opinion— you know about Stravinsky's attack on it in the year it was written. Anything that has that colossal impact is likely to excite that kind of controversy. But if the work still holds more problems for people than many of the other, more recognizably 'Brittenish' works of the same period, I think it's because they find it harder to get on with the parts which set the Mass rather than the Owen poems. But even there I find it hard to appreciate the difficulty, as the two constituents fuse so incredibly well together, blurring at the edges. Theatrically the piece is brilliant—as brilliantly organized as any of the operas. It's interesting that there's a great deal of connection between the War Requiem and another Britten piece from the same period which is hardly ever done, and that's the Cello Symphony—an unjustly neglected masterpiece if ever there was one. That much has really come home to me since I've been studying the Symphony over the past months."



He is clearly delighted at the prospect of conducting the work in London with Colin Carr this summer ("1 also think I may have persuaded Yo Yo Ma to do it—we've just done the Walton together"), and one notes that, as in the case of the War Requiem (Decca SET252, 5/63), the composer's own recording continues to have the field to itself (Decca SXL6138, 12/64). The thought of a continuing recorded Britten project for the eighties is an exciting one: perhaps it has begun, with an impressive lack of predictability, with EMI's recording of four previously unheard works put together by the Britten Estate (HMV ASD4I 77, 1/83). "Canadian Carnival in particular is I think a glorious piece. Great fun? Yes—and more than that; there's also some magnificent music as well as the grotesquerie. They've recently discovered an occasional overture he wrote in America for the Philadelphia Orchestra. That was found in a suitcase in Newhaven. Then there's an Overture for the opening of the Third Programme which for some reason he withdrew, and which looks brilliant. All pieces which I'm looking forward to exploring."



Before we went our separate ways, I learnt that the War Requiem would be recorded in the Great Hall at Birmingham University ("difficult for precision but marvellous for opulence and large groups") in five and a half sessions—really no more nor less than might be expected for so ambitious a project. But before the basic complement of wind and strings were to pack up and go home. the Rattle/EMI Records adaptability would be at it again, recording Rachmaninov's Vocalise as a fill-up for the Symphonic Dances. Our conversation had started off relevantly after all.



ANDREW KEENER.