There are three types of international conductors: hacks, who stand in front of an orchestra and beat time; real musicians, who inspire orchestras to produce performances which lift the notes off the page; and Sir Simon Rattle.
On 7th September Rattle lifted his baton to inaugurate one of the most eagerly awaited partnerships in music history when he conducted his first concert as Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic, the Rolls Royce of world orchestras. There was never any doubt that the concert (which is being shown on BBC2 on 21st September) would be a triumph: the combination of Rattle and the BPO has always seemed like a dream team, long before it became a reality when he when he was elected to the post three years ago by the orchestra"s musicians. Cynicism is the default option of the modern world, but Rattle is one of the few contemporary figures who disarms cynicism in an instant.
Last week"s concert had two works: Asyla, by the young British composer, Thomas Ades; and Mahler"s Fifth Symphony. Beginning his tenure with Asyla was a neat piece of programming, as it was the final piece he conducted as Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony, the orchestra with whom he earned the reputation which led to his Berlin appointment. Mahler"s Fifth, however, is typical BPO fare; typical in the sense that the orchestra has played it so often they must know it by heart. Yet nothing Rattle ever does is typical. As the conductor John Carewe, Rattle"s teacher at the Royal Academy of Music and still his mentor, put it after the applause had died down last week: "Tonight we heard the first authentic performance of this symphony. We were brought up on Bruno Walter"s recording with the New York Philharmonic, but Walter could never have dreamed of a performance like that. It has taken 100 years to come this far". If you think that is simply the hype of a teacher talking about his star pupil, you could not be more wrong. As one of the orchestra members put it: "I have never worked so hard since Bernstein".
Superlatives and Rattle tend to go together. In a profession, however, where hype is the norm, Rattle lives up to every word. Teenage wunderkinds are ten-a-penny; on the strength of one decent performance, a young conductor can be hailed as the new Karajan. But at the same time, musicians are perhaps the most difficult of all professions to impress. Orpheus himself would today be dismissed as having "too dated a sound". Sir Simon Rattle is an exception. It is difficult to find a musician with a bad word to say about him. When he took over the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1980 at the absurdly young age of 25, it was a decent, staid provincial orchestra, going nowhere. By the time he gave up his directorship in 1998, the CBSO was a world class orchestra, regularly wooing jaded critics and audiences in the world"s toughest venues: Vienna, New York and London.
In Berlin he is charged not merely with forming an orchestral partnership which most aficionados are already convinced will rank with the all-time greats, but with re-inventing the very notion of the symphony orchestra, taking one of the world"s greatest orchestras and charting it into waters it never knew existed.
Rattle is in many ways a throwback to another generation. The "golden age", especially in music, is an ever present commentary on the paucity of modern day greats. The pre-war generation of Willhem Furtwangler, Bruno Walter and Eric Kleiber had natural and obvious successors, the likes of Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein and Carlo Maria Giulini. But even the cream of the next generation - the Abbados, the Dohnanyis and the Masurs - lacked that final spark which propelled them into the musical stratosphere. For years it seemed we were condemned to live in an age where an ability to beat time properly was the best we could hope for.
That fear seems bizarre today. The likes of Valery Gergiev, Maris Jansons and, from the next generation, Christian Theilemann stand comparison with the best in history. Indeed, even a conductor such as Sir Colin Davis, who for years was taken for granted here in his home country, is now getting the recognition he deserves as one of the most transcendent musicians on the planet.
Yet even in such exalted company, Sir Simon Rattle somehow stands apart. For one thing, most conductors - even the true greats - specialize in one, maybe two, areas of the repertory. Rattle appears to have no limitations; whether it is baroque, classical or modern (he has even recorded Duke Ellington), he is utterly at ease, and equally outstanding. His very different musical self-education is in large measure responsible for his musical sweep. Most conductors begin with the classics - Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, perhaps Bach - and gradually move into later pieces - Mahler, and other twentieth century greats such as Bartok and Shostakovich. Rattle has developed in precisely the opposite way. As a precocious schoolboy he put together scratch performances of Mahler and learned first of all to love twentieth century music. As a young conductor he moved backwards, only very gradually gaining his confidence in the classical repertory of Mozart and Beethoven as time, and performances, went on. His first Beethoven symphony recording was, incredibly for a man of Rattle"s stature, only released last summer (with the Vienna Philharmonic - not a bad orchestra with which to begin). Yet it is precisely that sort of behaviour which is the measure of the man. He will not be rushed. For the past decade he has turned down lucrative positions with some of the world"s best orchestras because he felt he had more to achieve in Birmingham, and plenty of time left in which to do it. American orchestras offered him sums for which most other conductors would not dare ask. He would not have been taking the money and running: they all had outstanding artistic possibilities. Yet still he said no. His record company, EMI, have long wanted a Rattle Beethoven cycle for their catalogue; he refused until he had something to say about the symphonies.
But he also stands apart in another respect: whilst he is not the only conductor to work with both "authentic" and traditional orchestras, none other synthesizes the styles so well. Rattle"s ongoing work with the authentic instrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is more often than not sensational ("more often than not" being the operative phrase; in June he conducted the OAE in a performance of the St John Passion at the Queen Elizabeth Hall which was not so much disappointing as shocking - a poor Rattle concert is such a rare occurrence). Rattle"s gift is to bring the best of both worlds together -bringing to the refreshing, crisp, bracing sound world of authentic orchestras the benefits of a proper interpretation, rather than the glorified run through of the score which is the usual fare of the authentic brigade. His first experience of authentic instruments was a concert performance of Mozart"s Idomeneo in 1987. Those who were there remember it to this day, as one of the most sensational experiences of their musical lives, a revelatory experience which opened up previously unrealized musical and interpretative possibilities of such instruments. A recent Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, also with the OAE, is similarly eulogised.
Classical music audiences outside London (and often within, too) are famously conservative: anything after Mahler is considered far too modern for a hearing. Rattle set about building programmes which balanced the old and the new and mixed warhorses with rarities. He introduced living composers such as Nicholas Maw and Mark-Anthony Turnage, and showed the audience that they did not to be afraid of listening. He quite literally changed the musical tastes of a city. His Sounding the Millennium project, performing works composed in the 1900s in 1990, in the 1910s in 1991, in the 1920s in 1992 and so on, was the archetypal Rattle concert series: bold, tough - and popular. He has left Birmingham with a legacy which will outlast him for many years: a world class orchestra, possibly the finest new concert hall in the world (built almost single handedly by his force of will), and an audience willing to take risks, a precious commodity for any orchestra.
His impact goes well beyond the concert hall. When Rattle speaks, others listen. Last month he gave an interview to the German newspaper Die Zeit, in which he attacked British attitudes to culture and dismissed modern British art as "bullshit". Germany, he said, was willing to spend money on the arts in a way that Britain never could. He also dismissed the "anything goes" attitude of British so-called post-modernism: "That is the problem with Brit Art, with artists like Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin and the others. I believe that much of this English, very biographically-oriented art is bullshit." Dinos Chapman, one of the more talentless of a generally talentless group, responded with a remark which revealed only his own deep ignorance: "Simon Rattle is a twat and his music is boring. He's a very conventional person with very conventional ideas who simply believes that if something is new, it must be crap." There is, literally, no one on the planet who has done more for modern art, in his music making, than Sir Simon Rattle. Where he parts company with Chapman is that his criteria for support is excellence.
Critics who take up Rattle"s observation about the relative funding levels of Germany and Britain are, however, missing the point. Rattle has not moved to Berlin because of money. The BPO is paid less than some other German orchestras. He has moved because there is nowhere else where he could grow to a still higher plane. Rattle has already more than proved that he is capable of great music making, and he will carry on making guest appearances elsewhere (in December he conducts the world premiere at the Royal Opera House of Nicholas Maw"s Sophie"s Choice, directed by Sir Trevor Nunn and one of the most eagerly awaited new operas for decades). The German musical tradition is unparalleled, and the challenge of marrying tradition to the demands of modern audiences is uniquely powerful for an orchestra with the BPO"s history. Unlike most worthwhile challenges, however, there is no doubt whatsoever that he will succeed.

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