Rattle complains of Munich’s ‘lack of urgency’
OrchestrasIn a first interview with the Abendzeitung, he returns to his familiar grumble about the lack of a decent concert hall.
Q: In London, where your time with the London Symphony Orchestra is ending, you didn’t get a new concert hall. The same is now threatening in Munich. Is this deja vu?
SR: ‘I was once an expert at pushing the building of concert halls. Now it seems to be different. The cards are all on the table and we still have a lot of work to do. The only thing that really surprises me about Munich is the extraordinary lack of recognition of the need to come up with real solutions. That really leaves you speechless. But we have to find a solution, and that also affects the Gasteig . Even the start of restoration would be very welcome. The lack of urgency is really, really worrying. It’s a long game that we’re playing.’
Q: But time is ticking. What are your tactics in this game?
SR: ‘I have to say that Mariss Jansons was busy with this game for the longest time in Munich. In my experience, there’s never a good time for breakthroughs of this kind in the arts. Problems and crises are always emphasized, but: Now we really are in an unprecedented world crisis. And yet it is still possible to move things forward. We have to stay extremely positive.’
Q: In view of this situation, will you even want to extend your five-year contract with BR?
SR: There’s still the orchestra. With an ensemble like this, that’s a lot. This is a very positive signal, especially since there is a deep, emotional connection between us. I would really like not to have to deal with politics all the time in Munich. Of course that is a part, but what is important is our work. We have dreams and plans, yes, and this orchestra is made up of strong, idealistic personalities. To put it bluntly: what we would all like to do, we can’t do without a space of our own. This orchestra is actually always on tour, also in Munich, because it doesn’t have its own location. Even in the Herkulessaal we are only guests. Also theIsarphilharmonie belongs first and foremost to the Philharmoniker. They are extremely collegial, really very helpful. No other top-class orchestra in the world has such problems.’
Read more here.
Why didn’t you stay in the fabulous Berliner Philharmonie if you were so good?
exactly. why leave one of the worlds greatest orchestras.
there must of been a reason
He was there longer than von Bulow, Richard Strauss, Celibidache or Abbado. All second-raters, clearly.
must’ve
Yes,because he had the second longest tenure in the history of the BPO
please, we are are all happy he left….most overrated conductor around
Overrated? By whom?
Oh stop! He was there 17 years. You don’t stay around that long if they don’t like you.
Karajan stayed 30 years, was he liked by musicians?… it’s like with teachers, the bad ones want to be loved, the good ones respected….
Helmut Stern did not like him. He said
He never had regrets of joining the party
Ridiculous……Karajan stayed at least 10 years to long.Musically,he had nothing more to say,repeating his Mantovani like interpretations ad nauseam,and behaving like a spoiled brat..He didn´t realize his time was over.
Abbado and Rattle.
never had the following
like Karajan.
You’re not playing for musicians, you’re playing for the people out in the seats – you know, the ones who actually pay to be there. I say this a musician myself.
Did they respect Karajan after 30 years, or did they more respect the money he earned them? Berlin Phil musicians tend to respect nobody.
How were the musicians’ earnings affected by Karajan?
Oh, you don’t know? They know… Royalties and direct additional fees for studio recordings were a major addition to the already decent base salaries given by the public hand. Plus another nice check for the Easterfestival Salzburg, also Karajan’s invention.
They say, many paid their houses, and a summer house in the south on top, with that.
All were sad when the effective recording revenue salaries plummeted over Abbado’s reign and didn’t recover under Rattle either. And with media shy Petrenko no prospect to change that either.
The world has changed. Recording is just not what it was in the peak Karajan years. Not to mention those loopy video productions of Karajan.
if you just knew….Berlin has finally got a great Maestro
he still gets invited to play with Berlin Phil at least 2 concerts per year and gets to choose any piece he wants
Karajan? . . . I’d like to see that.
Because both LSO and BRSO are better orchestras.
Nah, stop that over-competitive nonsense.
I’am surprised that he’s not enthusiastic about the Isarphilharmonie. It’s maybe the first negativ thing I read about this new place.
Isarphilharmonie is a provisional gap solution. It’s built like a barrack. It lacks standard backstage facilities. For that, inside the hall, it is quite good, but it’s not a solution for the long run, and it never was intended to be.
Munich politics is really annoying. Wannabe big, “dicke Lederhose”, but deeply provincial and uncultured in its foundation.
Interisting so now Munchen needs a wrecking ball!
In opera Munich leads. There are FOUR good opera houses.
In concert halls it has NOTHING. Nor does Nürnberg, our state’s second city. Bamberg has a decent cheapie hall.
Simon should fly the politicos to Katowice to show them what a concert hall looks like. (Or Budapest or Lucerne.)
Or Paris or Rome or he has to move to move to Koln where there’s a good concert hall
He could fly them to Birmingham…
Such entitlement, such delusion.
You wonder about these negative hate speech commenters on a classical music blog, no less.
Of course he is right, and I think he is actually quite good the way he finds the delicate balance in his criticism to not offend the provincial politicians in Munich too much, but to also get the message across.
It’s not delusion. At the start of his career he successfully spearheaded a campaign for hall to be built which is still better than anything in many European cities, including London, Vienna and Munich.
And entitlement? He’s devoted a lifetime to what he does and transformed the live orchestral scene in ways that even now (see comments) leaves the haters and reactionaries foaming with frustrated snobbery. If anyone’s entitled to ask for decent facilities he is. But actually, the facilities he’s requesting will benefit generations of musicians and audiences for decades after he’s left the scene; they have the potential to transform whole cities. It takes a special kind of malice to see that as a purely selfish act.
The elephant in the room is that the hire of the kind of shiny new hall Rattle demands is unaffordable for the majority of professional activity in classical music. So, the beneficiaries are a small number of top performers/ensembles/orchestras presenting relatively ‘safe’ programmes in order to meet box-office imperatives (because mounting a concert in the shiny new hall is so expensive). If not already required at the outset, the shiny new hall is soon obliged to mount non-classical or even non-musical events to cover its running costs and maintain a substantial season, with serious classical music increasingly ‘squeezed out’ as time progresses (even a so-called ‘resident’ orchestra is not immune from the pressure to release as many dates as possible for lucrative external hires).
In other words, the shiny new hall becomes a white elephant in the context of supporting classical music, abstracting funding that could be put to better use elsewhere (such as paying musicians properly, increasing rehearsal time, mounting more concerts, or exploring the vast range of repertoire that is considered too risky in box-office terms).
If you do not believe me, take a look at the website and/or season brochure for almost any of the major concert halls, and see for yourself how much (or how little) classical music is on offer, and, of that, how much (or how little) involves anything ‘edgy’, innovative, or obscure.
Where are you based? You clearly haven’t looked at the programming of almost any major concert hall in a larger German city.
“…leaves the haters and reactionaries foaming with frustrated snobbery”
Couldn’t have said it better.
One is four families with children is struggling to feed itself in the UK.
I wish him the gift of self-awareness.
With that “logic”, mankind would still live on trees and in caves. There were always some people struggling.
And what remains as achievements of humanity from past centuries?
Mostly cultural achievements and science. Nothing else.
Yes you gotta eat and shit, but you also need to actualise your highest potential as humanity. One does not exclude the other, we need both.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
“One is four families with children is struggling to feed itself in the UK.”
Absolute claptrap.
Simon Rattle is a cautionary tale for Gustavo Dudamel: wunderkind and the promise of transformation, meteoric rise to the highest heights in middle age, mired in political game playing for personal legacy and relevance in old age.
The train has left the station for Sir Simon. You don’t leave Berlin and then expect the world to be your own personal Berlin. Hmm, let’s see, I want a new hall in London, no in Munich, no in…
I can’t see much else but him doing his job. People would actually be disappointed, would he not lobby for the promised new hall in Munich. It’s his job, it’s expected from the designated chief conductor. Get a life.
Rattle chose, and divorced, his post-Berlin orchestras based on their prospects for a new house for him (mark my words, he will do to Munich and to Prague what he did to London), he is going through orchestras like some men in mid-life crisis going through wives.
You sound like you have some axe to grind. London promised a hall to get him, and then scrapped the idea. Hardly his fault, and all the right to be disappointed? And Munich needs the hall, totally regardless of WHO is chief conductor there. Janssons lobbied for it, now Rattle. It’s part of the job description being chief of BRSO.
Your comment is not based in reality obviously.
The elephant in the room remains unmentioned. It is the war that is creating fear and uncertainty and causing donors and the government to withhold funding. The historical context is even more ironic. The Munich Phil’s hall was entirely destroyed in 1944 along with its massive organ. It took 46 years for the hall to be replaced with the Gasteig Konzertsaal in 1985. For 38 years since then the orchestra has suffered from the Gasteig’s poor acoustics, and now the renovations that had been planned are on hold due to another war with its geographic locus in exactly the same location.
We all thought Europeans wars were history, but the Balkan War with its acts of mass rape and genocide showed us otherwise. And now we have yet another war that has escalated to horror and is going to get far worse. W.H. Auden reminded us why the arts are an essential counter to our lesser lights:
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
Well, now think about the Berliners in the early 1950s, the streets still full of ruins, just after the post-war blockade by the Soviets, much of the industrial base destroyed or moved to the American and British sectors in West Germany.
And they had consensus to commission and finally build the greatest and most visionary concert hall for classical music ever.
Now imagine that. And compare that to the stuffy wealth of Bavaria today. And how uncultured and decadent the politicians there are in comparison.
One difference is that Berlin had virtually nothing left intact, but Munich still had spaces like the Hercules Hall and the Deutsche Museum. The need for new halls was thus not as urgent. Munich repaired the Staatsoper fairly quickly, all things considered, but it had no substitute.
Another big difference is that Berlin became a Cold War Symbol and the Berlin Phil one of its main megaphones. Culture in West and East Berlin became propaganda statements. After unification, Germany put massive amounts of money into Berlin which was once again expression of cultural nationalism.
We might also note that the all-male status of the Berlin Phil until 1983 was correlated with the patriarchal concepts of cultural nationalism.
Partially agree. But the concept for the new hall in Berlin was conceived long before the wall was built in 1961. Berlin Phil hardly was a megaphone of Cold War propaganda. More to the contrary. Karajan took them to Moscow and himself to the East repeatedly.
As far as your cultural nationalism and all-male pet peeve goes, that’s far out there on a tangent.
Really not comprehensible. “Patriarchal concepts of cultural nationalism”. Means what? Nothing really, except the construct you made in your mind. It probably makes sense to you.
If anything, Berlin Phil was a pan-national orchestra long before others opened to the global classical scene. Lots of immigrants from the East played in Berlin Phil. Piatigorsky and others.
Next the analogy with football and the car industry will be made, and some rich sponsor will step in to build a hall named after himself.
At least there are plans to build one in Prague, where he seems to have become a welcome guest. Still ten years before it’s done, though.
Rattle could be a leader here.
No matter where you are in the world, new concert hall projects always balloon into arts centers that are monumental architectural statements. And that’s why so many of these projects never get off the ground, or if they do, become highly controversial.
If I were Rattle, I’d organize my own contest for concert hall ideas which could be built for $150 million or less. Offer some cash prizes, open to all. The purpose isn’t to pick a winning design, but to simply demonstrate that you can build a new concert hall at a reasonable price.
I do like this idea; a concert hall as a relatively simple structure, not a grand edifice. It can even be architecturally significant; where’s the architect who can make this work? But the great halls – Musikverein, Symphony Hall, Concertgebouw – all seem to be rather simple buildings compared to many being built today. Granted, they were built before HVAC and indoor plumbing…
Today’s building standards and regulations, together with the public bidding bureaucracy, drive prices through the roof.
It’s not the architect’s fault. It’s risks of litigation and law making (politics) that create the hurdles.
A state of the art concert hall these days costs the equivalent of about 20 battle tanks. Or one to two large airliners. So in the bigger picture, why not spend that much money for a cultural hub and landmark?
What is wrong with the fantastic Herkules Saal? A good old rectangular shoebox, not the usual ” fancy” modern hyper-technocrap that cost taxpayers gazillions…
Oh, yes, it has to house too many orchestras in Munich…
It’s also a bit too small, not enough seats to sell. 1,200 seats.
It’s been done in the smallest incorporated town in Texas! It’s known as quite an accomplishment.
Like any respectable architectural firm or acoustician would waste their time submitting something to someone who has no money.
Frank Gehry and Toyota built the Pierre-Boulez-Hall in Berlin pro bono.
The question to the original poster would be: why should Bavaria, the richest state in Germany, and Munich, the town with the highest per capita income in Germany, built a low-budget concert hall?
They have money to the hilts. They just don’t see the priority to invest it into the arts. They are Bavarian farmers with money.
We in the UK are constantly told how much more efficient the Germans are and how they ‘get things done’.
We were in Bonn in 2019 and they were lamenting the fact that the Beethovenhalle hall refurbishment was running so far behind that it would miss the Beethoven’s 250th birthday. It’s now scheduled to finish in 2024.
However don’t ask about the delays to Berlin Brandenburg airport! HS2 is not the only project to run forever.
“…Musikverein, Symphony Hall, Concertgebouw – all seem to be rather simple buildings compared to many being built today.”
Actually, that’s why their acoustics are affected by the lack of things like rounded ceilings and interior wall areas – within and to the side of an audience – to bounce sound waves off (eg, Disney Hall in LA). Such older interior spaces are more analogous to the phrase of “your mother’s car.”
How many billions of £’s and €’s will it take to keep Simon from keep throwing his rattle out of his pram?
Read to the end. Simon gets a bit annoyed
“Do you really think I’m stupid enough to talk to you about my contract? And then you complain that we give vague answers or say nothing at all. “
Much of Europe, Germany included, is under threat of being drawn into a possibly widening war, and Munich’s priority should be on a new and expensive symphony hall. Whatever, Sir Simon. Should have stayed in London and fought the good fight there, as that’s the place that really needs a better sounding symphony hall.
Drat…. censored again!
I must learn to love Sir Simon Rattle, I guess.
Bad me! Bad, bad me!