Time on our side

Transcendent Mahler from the LSO

Michael Shmith

My worst and best qualities are rashness: the good part of it is due to youth, which is of course why I’m not a great conductor … But now is the time to go slow rather than to rush ahead … I’ve got time on my side, but I mustn’t misuse it.

Simon Rattle, interviewed by the Guardian, February 1976

Throughout his long, prolific, and fulfilling musical life, Simon Rattle has never misused time; rather, he has relished it, always with the same energetic sense of purpose and clarity of execution that has made him such an extraordinary musician. The modesty of his early declaration that his rashness got in the way of his being a great conductor is hardly surprising: he had just turned twenty-one, was highly regarded as a Wunderkind, and was perhaps careful of saying too much too early. Also, he was only days away from making his début at London’s Royal Festival Hall.

Only five years before that interview, Rattle was a new student at the Royal Academy of Music, studying piano and percussion. At eighteen and realising his real passion – as he put it, ‘I wanted to carve’ – he was conducting. In March 1973, he directed an orchestra of RAC students. As Rattle told the Guardian, this was part of his ‘lifelong predilection for forming orchestras, groups, getting people to play, preferably by blackmail’. On the program was Mahler’s Symphony No. 4. A couple of years later, Rattle also conducted Mahler’s Symphony No. 1.

It is tempting to suggest that Mahler has been Rattle’s calling card, especially in his chief conductorships with the City of Birmingham Symphony (1980–98), the Berlin Philharmonic (2002–18), and the London Symphony (2017–23), in all of which Mahler has bulked large. Overall, however, Mahler is but a component of the complex machinery that drives Rattle’s inner creative being and certainly does not determine his diverse repertoire. He goes back to J.S. Bach but also charges forward through Romanticism, the New Vienna School, and well beyond. He has championed an astonishing array of contemporary composer compatriots, including Thomas Adès, Mark-Antony Turnage, and Harrison Birtwistle. It’s always worth bearing in mind that one of Rattle’s early mentors was Pierre Boulez (‘a formative experience’).

Mahler, though, is Rattle’s centre of gravity, and his performance of the Symphony No. 7 at Hamer Hall was an epiphany, especially for a work that can be notoriously difficult to fathom. In less capable hands, this eighty-minute symphony can be sprawling, problematic, messy – ‘a bag of pleasant tricks’, an early reviewer dismissively wrote – but Rattle deftly sculptured something that was as expository as it was lyrical, beauteous, and magnificent. Likewise, the lengthy final movement, with its nods to Wagner and Viennese operetta and its abrupt timpani flourishes and horn fanfares, more or less deciphered as much as we are ever going to be able to understand. But that’s down to the composer more than the conductor.

Even more remarkable was the constant freshness and vitality of the playing across all sections. All the orchestra’s fabled hallmarks were on display. I think particularly of the lustrous, piercingly clear first and second violins and violas (fine solo work from the LSO’s guest leader, José Blumenschein) and mellow, often growling, deep cellos and double basses. The brass, horns, and woodwind were impeccable, as was the battery of percussion (nine players), right down to that beguiling clatter of cowbells in the closing bars. But there was delicacy, too, for example in the two Nachtmusik movements, when balance was never muddled or obscured, but mysteriously evanescent and translucent.

This, the final concert of the orchestra’s brief but hectic tenday Australian tour, which also included works by Bruckner, Debussy, Ravel, and John Adams, sounded as if were the first. But then, Mahler works are an enduring part of the LSO’s heritage, as one would expect from its association with Willem Mengelberg, Leonard Bernstein, Claudio Abbado, Michael Tilson Thomas, and, of course, Rattle himself.

Wisely, I think, the Mahler was a stand-alone program. Well, apart from four other works. At the outset came Long Time Living Here, the MSO’s ‘musical acknowledgement of country’, composed and sung by Yorta Yorta woman Deborah Cheetham Fraillon. Afterwards, came no less than three encores, introduced by Rattle in his delightfully idiosyncratic way. The first was a glowing performance of Fauré’s Pavane. The third was a zestful belting of Dvořák’s Slavonic Dance No. 7 in C major, from book two, which whirled an already ecstatic audience out of the hall and into the pouring rain. The middle encore (a musical gift to an audience member who had told Rattle he was turning twenty-one that day) was the most interesting and, at fifty-five seconds, by far the shortest: Stravinsky’s mischievous setting of Happy Birthday, composed for Pierre Monteux, the conductor of the notorious world première of The Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913, and himself a former chief conductor of the LSO, from 1961 to 1964.

The present LSO music director is on the move. Next season, Rattle moves to Munich (taking German citizenship in the process), as chief conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony. There can be no doubt that his time with the LSO has been of great and lasting benefit, and the affection in which Rattle is held by his musicians was certainly clear on the night. Their association is to continue, with Rattle in a new role as conductor emeritus. He is also a renowned voice of conscience. Last month, following a concert at the London Barbican Centre, Rattle addressed the audience from the podium on the decline of political support for classical music. The problem is universal. Let Rattle have the last word:

So many of the problems are rooted in a political ignorance of what this artform entails, and more worryingly, there seems to be a stubborn pride in the ignorance. Up and down the country, the situation is similar. What we hope is that over the next weeks and months, many more of these stories will be told. We are in a fight, and we need to ensure that classical music remains part of the beating heart of our country, of our country and of our culture. g

Vale Barry Humphries

The great comedian’s love affair with Weimar

Peter Tregear

Barry Humphries loved telling a story concerning a visit he and the painter David Hockney made to an art exhibition held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991. What drew them there was a reconstruction of the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition the Nazis had assembled in Munich in 1937 to help validate and promote their racial ideology. The crude argument it promoted was that the distorted forms typical of much modern art of the time somehow demonstrated the corrupting influence of the artists (often Jewish) who had painted them. Humphries recalled asking Hockney how it was possible that, even when so many of the artists themselves later perished, much of the art work had survived. Hockney replied, ‘Because somebody loved them.’

We have, of course, many reasons to celebrate the life of Humphries – actor, author, painter, and comedian. To that list we should add his love for the music and theatre of the Weimar Republic (1918–33). It, too, has been a love of some consequence.

Some forty years earlier, Humphries had stumbled across a copy of Nicolas Slonimsky’s Music Since 1900 (1937) in his high school library. Within its pages, a kind of annotated chronology, he read tantalising descriptions of operatic rarities such as Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf (1926), Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Dreigroschenoper (1928), and Max Brand’s Maschinist Hopkins (1929), and of the impact they had on their native audiences. He was hooked. Soon he was ordering 78s of recordings and collecting vocal scores that had made their way to Australia in the suitcases of Jewish refugees.

Although he had been born into a comfortable middle-class family, Humphries had a pre-conscious sense of being an outsider. He quickly recognised how a Weimar theatrical sensibility, its heady mix of cutting-edge social critique and Dada-inspired irreverence, could be repurposed for use in (or, more accurately, against) the social and aesthetic complacencies of suburban Melbourne.

He also recognised that the cultural loss that accompanied the political and humanitarian catastrophe of the Nazi era had been profound. Very few recordings were available. Many musical scores may have survived the war, but they required significant renewed advocacy and investment in order to be experienced once again as a living heritage, and there was precious little of that to be found in the decades after World War II.

Humphries decided that he would, when his burgeoning performing career allowed, assist in redressing this lack. Although he had not studied music, he had an acute sense of musical judgement. In his autobiography, More Please, for instance, he describes his first encounter with a recording of excerpts from Jonny spielt auf as ‘at once an exciting and disappointing experience’. He noted that the score sounded rather like something by ‘a pupil of Mahler played by Paul Whiteman’. ‘But,’ he continued, ‘the curdled harmonies, the curious dragging rhythms and the air of melancholy that lay behind even the more sprightly episodes captivated me.’

Humphries would eventually convince the management of the forerunner to Opera Australia to consider letting him direct what would have been the Australian première of Jonny spielt auf at the Sydney Opera House. He even travelled to Palm Springs to discuss the work with its composer. Alas, the company’s management lost their nerve and decided to remount The Pirates of Penzance instead.

Humphries had more success later, when living in London. He noticed that a few doors down from his dentist’s surgery there was a doorbell with the label ‘Spoliansky’. Being aware that a Mischa Spoliansky had written numerous cabaret and film scores in Weimar Germany, Humphries knocked on the door and discovered that the composer was indeed living there, though largely forgotten. The two struck up a friendship that lasted until Spoliansky’s death in 1985.

By the time I first met him in 2000, Humphries had developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the music and musicians of this era. Through his direct support, and that of the Jewish Music Institute in London, the following year I was able to mount the UK première of Maschinist Hopkins. The speech he gave on stage before the performance served as a powerful statement of advocacy not just for this and other forgotten musical works, but also for the lives of the forgotten musicians who had created many like it.

In more recent years, Humphries would also develop significant stage partnerships (and close friendships) with Melissa Madden Gray (Meow Meow), and Richard Tognetti and Satu Vänskä from the Australian Chamber Orchestra. All four collaborated on a concert of Weimar-era music they called ‘Weimar Cabaret’, which toured the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia to great success.

I was fortunate enough to see Humphries about two weeks before his death on 22 April. I suspect he knew he was fading, yet he was keen to tell me about his latest musical discovery, Emil František Burian (1904–1959), and also to discuss how we might one day get a production of Erwin Schulhoff’s Flammen (1929) up in Australia. This enthusiasm was typical of all our encounters. His love for this repertoire was indeed profound and abiding. Long may it continue to resonate in us. g

Peter Tregear, a performer, academic, critic, is the inaugural Director of Little Hall at the University of Melbourne.