Simon Rattle (1955-)

[Roasted Swan]

Lovely story!  I love it when we hear of musician jokes from orchestras.  Here is one I heard about, Andre Previn had just taken over the LSO I think in the late 1960's.  The orchestra was going to haze him because he was very young, American, and mostly known as a jazz pianist/film composer at that point.  The oboist detuned their A up to a B flat and the whole orchestra tuned incorrectly.  Previn walked to the podium, raised his hands about to give the downbeat, paused then asked the whole orchestra to transpose the piece down a half step.  Everyone laughed because he caught the joke/trap they had set.

When I was at the Guildhall School in London (early 80's) Previn came in to conduct the main orchestra (I wasn't playing).  He had this famously acute hearing so a horn player decided to play a note (or short phrase - I can't remember) wrong to see what he said.  The first time he let it go, but when it was repeated he stopped the orchestra and in a perfectly pleasant manner asked the player in question to check his part.  He really did know every single line of the orchestra and he could hear it.  Previn was an extraordinary musician I reckon......

[Karl Henning]

Cross-post:

[ultralinear]

Cross-post:

Interesting.  I saw him conduct this as part of a mixed program spanning several eras, and thought it very convincing and by far the best part of the evening.

[Karl Henning]

Interesting.  I saw him conduct this as part of a mixed program spanning several eras, and thought it very convincing and by far the best part of the evening.

Nice!

[Number Six]

Rattle's Berlin Mahler 2 was the first Mahler that spoke to me. I had tried M before, but it never got through.

This one did, and it opened the floodgates of the composer's work. I will always love Rattle for that. Another day, I suppose it might have been Bernstein or Solti or Fischer or Chailly or Haitink or Vanska or Walter.

But it was Rattle who did it for me.

[lordlance]

Interesting.  I saw him conduct this as part of a mixed program spanning several eras, and thought it very convincing and by far the best part of the evening.

It's his "thing" -- programming works consecutively without pauses.

A common one is Ligeti Atmospheres+Wagner Lohengrin Prelude to Act I.
Another is Sibelius 6-7.
The 'pieces' trilogy together - Webern, Berg, Arnold - for a giant single Pieces - 

During rehearsal, he and the orchestra had come to realise that the sets by Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg were best understood as one great, eleventh symphony by Mahler.