Music
Director’s cut
Norman Lebrecht
Much fuss has been made of the title given
to Sir Simon Rattle on arrival at the Lon-
don Symphony Orchestra. Unlike his LSO
predecessors — Valery Gergiev, Colin
Davis, Michael Tilson Thomas, Claudio
Abbado, André Previn — all of whom were
engaged as principal conductor, Rattle has
been named music director, a position that
bears serious administrative responsibilities.
As Rattle put it recently in one of a dozen
media interviews: ‘Valery wasn’t interested,
nor Claudio. Colin loved them to bits, but
he made it very clear that he did not want
anything to do with the running or the audi-
tions or the personnel... I will be much more
involved with the day to day.’
But will he? Of all the erosions that
have affected orchestras in the past genera-
tion, among the most significant is the pro-
gressive degradation of the music director.
Once a towering despot who fired players
at will and treated orchestras as personal
fiefdoms — think Toscanini, Beecham, Solti
— the role evolved first into a chummy pri-
mus inter pares and latterly into some way
below par.
The passing of tyrants is not altogether
unwelcome. Boston players still tell of the
oboist who, fired in mid-rehearsal, stalked
out yelling, ‘Fuck you, Koussevitzky!’ The
Russian maestro, no master of English idiom,
replied, ‘Is too late to apologise.’ Despotism
of his kind was decidedly unappealing.
Leonard Bernstein, Koussevitzky’s pro-
tégé, pioneered a friendlier style, salting his
rehearsals with Jewish jokes and, on occa-
sion, dropping both hands to his sides and
conducting by expression alone — as if to
say that the conductor is a luxury item, to be
sparingly used and widely shared.
By the 1980s it was common for the top
maestros to be music director on two or
three continents, allowing each orchestra
a fragment of their golden attention. With
maestros away, their powers were usurped.
Musicians seized the right to choose new
members of the orchestra. In 1989, Herbert
von Karajan resigned from the Berlin Phil-
harmonic after years of acrimony, following
the players’ rejection of his choice of prin-
cipal clarinet in 1983, arguing that SabineMeyer — their first female candidate — did
not suit their sound. In 2005, Riccardo Muti
was ousted at La Scala by a players’ vote of
no confidence.
Further erosions followed. In the
absence of maestros, managers controlled
content. ‘I would never let a music director
tell me which soloists to hire,’ a US orchestra
president assures me. ‘Nor would I accept
his preferred guest conductors.’ Patron-
age used to be a maestro’s perk, giving old
codgers access to young talent that some
would shamefully abuse. Loss of patron-
age has all but disabled the role. Except for
Muti in Chicago and Barenboim at the Ber-
lin State Opera it is hard to name a musical
institution today where the dominant voice
belongs to the music director.
Take Covent Garden. Antonio Pappa-
no has kept the old ship running at decent
speed for 15 years but was powerless tostop cuts to his orchestra. Over 45 years at
the Met, James Levine has left no lasting
imprint. When his friend, Kathleen Battle,
was fired for being a pest, Levine was unable
to reinstate her. At the Vienna State Opera,
all Franz Welser-Möst could do when his
productions were cut by the general director
was to resign, stating that the music direc-
tor’s job lacked meaningful authority.
So what, exactly, can Rattle hope to
achieve at the LSO? He has told friends he
would like to see some changes in person-
nel, but hiring and firing are entirely in the
players’ hands. All the music director can
do is nudge and wink to his supporters and
hope for a desired outcome. Rattle opened
the season with a programme of all Eng-
lish composers, most of them living, but he
won’t be allowed to push programming any
further than the box office will bear — and it
won’t bear more than one such eye-catcher
per season.
What Rattle ought to do is abolish oti-
ose tours that exhaust his best players,
along with the recording dates at Abbey
Road with fourth-rate wannabees. But LSO
needs the dough from these dates and play-
ers would not tolerate a music director who
interferes with revenue streams.
In an ideal world, Rattle would tour the
LSO around its own country, instead of eve-
rywhere abroad, with a rallying cry to raise
standards. That won’t happen either, because
the Arts Council won’t fund anything that
treads on the toes of regional clients. All of
which leaves Rattle with a job title that has
less clout than a viscountcy, an honorific to
deceive the media into believing in miracles.
These inhibitions may help explain why the
incoming music director has set such store
on getting the public authorities to build him
a new hall. That, at least, could be credited as
a concrete achievement.Simon Rattle has a job title that has
less clout than a viscountcysecrecy, the encrypted language, the hush-
hush locations, the scent of power, and the
awareness that history itself is present at the
table. It becomes clear that the simple phys-
ical proximities, the sharing of waffles and
whisky, can help to break down the barriers.
Sworn enemies gradually move from mutual
suspicion to grudging respect and finally to
amity and friendship.
By the end the Arabs are laughing at an
impersonation of Yasser Arafat performed
by an Israeli wearing his jacket as a head-
dress. A melancholy truth emerges from all
this: if every Israeli and Palestinian were
forced to spend a month talking heart-to-
heart to his neighbours, peace would follow.
Terry Johnson’s new play charts the life
of Jack Cardiff, an Oscar-winning camera-
man, who worked with Hitchcock, John
Huston, King Vidor, and many others. We
meet the ageing genius in his dotage as he
dodders around a converted garage in the
care of his wife and a nurse. The set-up is
baffling. Cardiff is writing an autobiogra-
phy and he describes to his nurse the artis-
tic challenges involved in creating a great
shot. Yet Cardiff has severe dementia so
his vanishing vocabulary keeps undermin-
ing his ability to reminisce articulately. And
for some reason the nurse has a dual role
as a secretary. Her job is to annotate Car-
diff’s random thoughts and shape them into
a book. And yet she doesn’t own a computer.
She has to bang out his words two-fingered
on an old typewriter. It’s very hard to grasp.
Robert Lindsay seems content to play
Cardiff as a harmlessly dotty old twerp.
Claire Skinner, far too young for Cardiff’s
wife, potters around in mumsy clothes and
a hairdo like an electrocuted hedgehog.
It’s all rather dispiriting to watch. After
the interval we flip back half a century
and we’re in the Belgian Congo, where
Cardiff is filming The African Queen. We
watch him relaxing between takes as he
plays cards with Bogie and Lauren Bacall
and swaps catty witticisms with Katharine
Hepburn. A sex-mad Bacall drags Bogie
off for a quickie in the jungle and Bogie
lashes Hepburn with a caustic put-down.
‘No wonder Spencer drinks.’ This half-hour
section is so good it deserves to be extend-
ed into a full-length play.
Claire Skinner is utterly transformed as
Hepburn. Her wig and make-up deserve
prizes for their creator, Amy Coates. Skin-
ner brilliantly conveys Hepburn’s delicate,
prickly manner, and her punctilious dic-
tion is matched by the barbed fluency of her
prose. The entire scene is wonderful. Then
the action shifts again. Marilyn wafts in and
we watch Cardiff setting up a shot and eas-
ing her frazzled nerves. Then we’re back
to Cardiff pootling around in his garage in
extreme old age again.
There are great things in this flawed play.
Fans of Hollywood’s glory years will adore
it. But the blunders and missteps are puz-
zling. Terry Johnson has been allowed to
combine the roles of writer, script editor and
director. An extra pair of eyes would have
helped.If every Israeli and Palestinian were
forced to spend a month talking heart-
to-heart, peace would follow