I first saw Simon Rattle conduct at Glyndebourne in 1977 – thirty five years ago. He was twenty two years old – a ridiculously young age for such an assignment. The opera was Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen.
Everything about the production was bewitching – the designs, the acting, the singing, the direction by Jonathan Miller. But most of all what sticks in the memory was the playing of the London Philharmonic under young Rattle.
Then two years later, there he was again, this time in one of Haydn’s neglected operas, La fedeltà premiata. He bounced into the pit, all youthful energy, and conducted a scintillating performance.
In the early 1990s I went to live in the country, half way between London and Birmingham, and I was lucky enough to hear him conduct quite frequently at Symphony Hall in Birmingham. Simon Rattle had already been Principal Conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra since 1980, raising the orchestra to worldwide prominence. As part of a re-negotiation of his contract, it’s said that he agreed to stay on if a fitting concert hall was built to house his orchestra.
And so, twenty one years ago, Symphony Hall was opened. For me it is not only the finest custom-built concert hall in Britain, but one of the best in the world.
In recent years, Sir Simon has moved on to be Principal Conductor of one of the leading orchestras in the world, the Berlin Philharmonic, but on Saturday evening in celebration of the hall’s twenty first birthday, he brought another great orchestra to Symphony Hall, the Vienna Philharmonic, who gave us Brahms’s Third Symphony, Webern’s Six Orchestral Pieces and Schumann’s Third.
It was a pretty special occasion.
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