78 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 28, 2018Rattle and the London Symphony seem to be in near-perfect alignment.MUSICAL EVENTSCONTROLLED EXPLOSION
Simon Rattle revisits Mahler; Heartbeat Opera reshapes “Fidelio.”BY ALEX ROSSILLUSTRATION BY BENE ROHLMANNO
n June 20th, Simon Rattle will end
a sixteen-year tenure as the prin-
cipal conductor of the Berlin Philhar-
monic—a post of quasi-papal authority
in the classical-music world. How Rat-
tle should be judged against predeces-
sors on the order of Hans von Bülow,
Arthur Nikisch, Wilhelm Furtwängler,
Herbert von Karajan, and Claudio Ab-
bado is for the musical sages of Berlin
to decide. From a distance, Rattle ap-
pears to have left a distinctive stamp on
the institution. He has promoted con-
temporary music with unprecedented
vigor; he has given new prominence to
French, British, and American fare; he
has presided over such staggering spec-
tacles as Stockhausen’s “Gruppen,” pre-
sented at Tempelhof Airport, and theBach Passions, as staged by Peter Sel-
lars. If any question mark hovers over his
legacy, it has to do with his handling of
mainstream nineteenth-century reper-
tory, where his quest for fresh-scrubbed
renditions has sometimes worked won-
ders—a darkly radiant “Parsifal” can be
seen at the Philharmonic’s Digital Con-
cert Hall—and sometimes had incon-
clusive results. Kirill Petrenko, Rattle’s
successor, is a conductor of more tradi-
tional cast: that turn will please some
and disappoint others.
Now sixty-three, Rattle is still a young
gazelle in conductor years—the Swedish
maestro Herbert Blomstedt is giving
revelatory performances at the age of
ninety—and the close of Rattle’s Berlin
tenure will almost certainly not mark theend of the major phase of his career. In-
deed, a series of Mahler concerts that
Rattle gave with the London Symphony
in early May made me wonder whether
he is arriving at a new level of mastery.
He became the music director of the
L.S.O. last September, and the orches-
tra is playing sensationally well for him.
You have the sense of a conductor and
an ensemble in near-perfect alignment.
The Berlin Philharmonic would un-
doubtedly prefer not to be considered a
stepping stone to greater things, but this
may turn out to be its role in the arc of
Rattle’s career—as was true for Abbado,
who hit his peak in his final decade, when
he was based at the Lucerne Festival.
Each of the L.S.O. concerts consisted
of a single late-period Mahler work: the
Ninth Symphony, “Das Lied von der
Erde,” and the unfinished Tenth Sym-
phony, in the realization by Deryck
Cooke. (I heard the Ninth at njpac, in
Newark, the others at David Gefen
Hall.) Rattle, a veteran Mahlerian, has
ofered this trio of colossal valedictions
before, in concerts with the Berliners at
Carnegie, in 2007. His ideas about Mahler
have not changed dramatically in the
interim. He avoids the sweaty transfigu-
rations that Leonard Bernstein estab-
lished as common practice for Mahler.
Where other conductors emphasize vo-
luptuous, post-Wagnerian sonorities,
Rattle prefers a leaner, tighter sound;
where others indulge in flamboyant ri-
tardandos, he keeps to a steadier tempo.
Rattle’s aversion to cliché can lead to
performances that seem like arrays of
contrarian insights rather than fully in-
tegrated interpretations. The 2007 Mahler
concerts never quite rose above the level
of the impressive. Eleven years on, Rat-
tle has found an ideal balance of preci-
sion and intensity. The opening section
of the first movement of the Ninth un-
folded in one great Proustian paragraph,
lucid yet impassioned. The music wasn’t
smoothed over or rendered inert: iso-
lated details—stray harp notes, scuttling
low-wind figures, a repeated two-note
signal in the horns—pierced the murk
with unsettling potency. (A horn-playing
friend who joined me at njpac mar-
velled at the musicians’ tonal control.)
Adam Walker, the co-principal flute,
brought an otherworldly sound to his
meandering solo at the end of the first
movement; Gareth Davies, the other