Rattle, Birmingham Symphony an Inspiring Team

On a recent trip to Vienna, I heard no end of outrage that this summer the Salzburg Festival will host the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, under its outgoing music director Simon Rattle, playing a cycle of the nine Beethoven symphonies. The Vienna Philharmonic considers both Beethoven and Salzburg its rightful province. Birmingham is, well, the sooty, industrial British province.

The Birmingham Symphony is currently on a farewell tour with Rattle, who has been with the orchestra for 18 years and who has, through recordings and a fawning British press, made it famous. Yet from the initial flubbed notes we heard Wednesday night, at the first of its two concerts at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Viennese contempt seemed understandable.

The opening piece, the suite from Rameau’s “Les Boreades,” is full of pitfalls, and the orchestra made that clear. The winds and brass sounded over their heads in the chirpingly fast and delicate ornamentation. This is not the kind of insecurity we are used to with major orchestras, even provincial ones on tour. And while the playing settled down later in the program for Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, there was hardly the polish of a Vienna Philharmonic.

Yet this “Eroica”--utterly fresh, original, vividly detailed, deeply probing and, in the end, just plain thrilling--demonstrated what might be the real reason for Viennese dismay. Still only 43, Rattle has become a great Beethovenian (as Hollywood Bowl audiences discovered last summer with his performance of the Ninth), and his may well be the most illuminating Beethoven cycle of our day. You can surely encounter Beethoven symphonies better played in any major city in the West these days, but I doubt if you can find Beethoven sounding so vital, so downright astonishing.

Angelenos think they know Rattle. We watched him grow up. He made his American debut here more than two decades ago, and he served as principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the ‘80s. And we may think we know the Birmingham Symphony from its recordings. Many are wonderful. The most recent, Bruckner’s Seventh and Mahler’s Fourth symphonies, contain fervent, expansive performances sweetly played and captured in luminous recorded sound. They are likely to wear well. But they are also a bit like glamorous photographs. Not inauthentic but carefully posed and controlled, not exactly real-world experiences.

Rattle and Birmingham is an inspiring partnership, and one best experienced live, warts and all. This is a very young orchestra with an average age in the early 30s, and the devotion the players have for their music director is palpable. A bit of a touchy-feely conductor who has to tone it down with some hard-bitten bands, Rattle can be his uninhibited, chance-taking self with Birmingham. Indeed, his gestures on the podium these nights rivaled Bernstein’s as riveting drama. Rattle seemed less interested in telling the orchestra how to play a phrase than in demonstrating why the phrase was astounding. He lives, on the podium, for the moment.

Rattle’s programs were designed to show off the orchestra’s versatility, and in this Birmingham may be in a class by itself. But they were also inventively made to tell us something about music. Tuesday’s covered a brief but radical period in music history, from the end of the Baroque era--with the suite to Rameau’s last opera written in 1764--to the height of the Classical period, represented by the “Eroica,” written only 39 years later. In the middle came Haydn’s Symphony No. 86.

This stylistic evolution at the end of the 18th century was remarkable, and Rattle here emphasized how each composer was interested in doing something new. Paying attention to period practice, such as reducing the vibrato on the strings for a flatter sound and keeping the orchestra small, Rattle micromanaged details in such a way that showed how close Rameau’s wild experiments with harmony and instrumental effects seemed close to the aesthetic of the late 20th century.

Again, by bringing out endless expressive details in Haydn and Beethoven, Rattle was able to almost make history fall away, producing a kind of collective amnesia that encourages one to forget punch lines heard hundreds of time. Even the roughness of the playing here worked to advantage. These did not sound like musicians re-creating works that had been in their blood for generations.

Wednesday’s program was more neurotic, containing Mahler’s Seventh Symphony and Oliver Knussen’s Third. The Mahler is a big work, an hour and a quarter in length, and the composer’s least popular symphony. Written at the beginning of the 20th century, it expresses both the exhilaration and the terror of a new age in one long nightmare. The Knussen, completed in 1979, is a compressed symphony in 15 minutes but is mad in its own way, haunted by visions of Shakespeare’s Ophelia.

Here Rattle was in more typically grand form. His orchestra was much larger, and he, while still offering any number of revelations with his marvelous sense of detailing, was much more concerned with the big picture. The Knussen, complex and full of captivating sounds, was compelling.

The Mahler, however, required compromises, though its magnificence completely won the audience. Rattle seemed just a bit too well-adjusted, and maybe a touch too sentimental for the music. Ever the consummate musician, he did not indulge Mahler’s modern insecurities or manic craziness. One instance was the way he dealt with the erratic optimism in the last movement, through an overwhelmingly powerful headlong rush.

But only Boulez and Bernstein (and only late in their careers) have ever really made this symphony work. Rattle is still young, and he is particularly exciting right now precisely because there is so much youth and experience in him at the same time. No wonder it seems every orchestra in the world is after him.