SImon Rattle - The CBSO Years

The transformation that Rattle wrought in Birmingham over an unprecedented eighteen-year tenure went beyond the artistic fortunes of one particular orchestra. Indeed, the CBSO’s prestige had transformed the economic prospects of the UK’s second city — planners talked of a “Birmingham Effect”. Rattle and his musicians had done this on the basis of a repertoire that had transformed the definition of a symphony orchestra in the late twentieth century. “Don’t expect me to conduct Beethoven symphonies and all the great works”, he told the CBSO’s chairman in 1978. In fact, Rattle performed the Austro-German classics throughout those eighteen years, often in radically imaginative contexts. Rattle and the CBSO performed and recorded the repertoire in which they felt they had the most urgent things to say. Sibelius and Mahler took pride of place, the starting point for a bright-eyed, open-minded exploration of those composers’ twentieth-century legacy. Messiaen, Stravinsky and the music of Henze, John Adams and the young Mark-Anthony Turnage began to attract sizeable and inquisitive audiences.