The Berlin Philharmonic,
conducted by Simon Rattle.
Carnegie Hall, New York,
November 2007.
Whenever a conductor lifts his arms, points his finger, or gestures with his head, he is actually controlling thousands of body parts. These include (among others) the right arms and left fingers of the string players, the hands and lungs of the woodwinds, the lips of the brass section, the wrists of the percussionists, and the eyes and ears of all the musicians performing under him. But the body parts also include the eyes, ears, lungs, and hands of those of us out there in the audience: we too are watching his characteristic movements, listening for the notes, catching our breaths, bringing our palms together in applause. This control can never be perfect, in regard to either the bodies onstage or those off it, and that is a good thing, because robots can neither play nor appreciate excellent music. But to the extent a conductor’s control approaches perfection, in a Zeno’s Paradox–like fashion, without ever getting there, we in the audience stand to benefit. Listening to the Berlin Philharmonic perform under Simon Rattle, one has a sense of what that near-perfection might sound like.
I got my first hint of this the night before the fabled Berlin orchestra began its latest series of performances at Carnegie Hall. On that Monday night last November, Rattle served as the guest conductor for the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, a two-hundred-strong group of energetic, extremely talented, somewhat raw young people who were performing Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. This was only the second Carnegie concert of their lives (the first had been the previous afternoon), and from my box seat directly over the stage, I could actually see both the excitement and the nervousness in their faces; I also got a clear view of the filled-up Carnegie auditorium—the same view that was facing the musicians as they looked out—so I had some sense of what was causing that excitement and nervousness. Under their own young conductor, the phenomenal Gustavo Dudamel, they performed the Bartók vibrantly and thrillingly, though if pressed one would have to say that the loud, fast parts were better than the quiet, slow ones. This is natural for a young orchestra, so it was rather amazing that they could do something else when Simon Rattle took over in the second half. In his, and their, rendering of the Shostakovich symphony, even the delicate bits of near-silence and pensive andante were played beautifully.
If he could accomplish this with a group of relatively untested young musicians (the Bolívars range in age from sixteen to twenty), imagine how much more he could do with one of the greatest, if not the greatest, orchestras in the world. In the course of its one-week stay in New York, the Berlin Philharmonic played three full-evening concerts at Carnegie Hall, each one featuring a major Mahler piece matched to a much shorter, much more modern composition. In terms of the modern works, the progression was definitely upward, from Magnus Lindberg’s serviceable Seht die Sonne, to Thomas Adès’s impressive but finally ornamental Tevót, to György Kurtág’s already classic, deeply moving Stele. As for the Mahler works, it was a toss-up: few if any listeners could ever have heard more stirring, terrifying performances of the Ninth Symphony, the song-cycle Das Lied von der Erde, and the Tenth Symphony, so which you preferred depended largely on your prior feelings about the music.
Simon Rattle is, above all, a dramatic conductor. I don’t mean just in the way he moves his own body (though that, too, is grippingly stageworthy), but in the way he thinks about and shapes performances. He can bring out the theatricality even in a Haydn symphony, and with a composer like Mahler—who specializes in the interior drama, the romantic-agonistic feeling inside or behind the music—Rattle is in his element.
As I could see during rehearsals, his method of heightening the drama often lay in toning down the musicians rather than stirring them up. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it is clearly right: those quiet parts of Mahler are where we listeners most often forget to breathe, where we feel our life seeping away from us or perhaps coming back to us in unrecognizable form. To produce this unearthly effect, Rattle repeatedly got his performers to play in the palest, most delicate tones. “I know everybody thinks his part is the most important here,” he said during one rehearsal, “but that means it suddenly gets too loud.” Elsewhere he warned them against speeding up too much: “I’m the one who likes this movement played very slow,” he reminded them. And he would constantly test their sound—honed in the acoustically perfect auditorium of Berlin’s Philharmoniker Hall—to make sure it worked in the Carnegie’s different (if equally sound-friendly) environment. “This space is excellent for pianissimo,” he told his players, “but it makes our piano sound too strong. So let’s try that passage again, but more quietly.” Sometimes he said these things to them in English, and sometimes in German (over the four years I’ve been watching him, Rattle’s command of German has increased enormously, which makes it harder for a non-German-speaker like me to follow all the twists and turns of a rehearsal); but in every case the effect on the orchestra was immediately apparent, and he rarely had to get them to repeat a passage more than once. If he did have to go over something too often, he would realize that his instructions were becoming unhelpful. “First I tell you to play it slower, then I tell you to play it faster, and now you’re completely confused. Just play the music,” he said at one point, essentially asking them to fall back on their own tremendous musicianship. This, too, is the sign of a masterful conductor: understanding the limitations of his own control.
One of the things Rattle had occasion to mention to his musicians, during the course of their rehearsals, was the limits of his control over the audience. He had already alerted them, during their previous visit in 2006, to the fact that the New York audience would leap to its feet and rush for the subways immediately after the last note sounded. This is not normal behavior for music audiences anywhere else in the world, and it might be taken as downright rejection if the musicians were not warned about it in advance. (Even with the warning, the behavior still seems, and is, incredibly rude.) But this time he also had to mention the coughing. “Be careful how you play this bit,” he said during Tuesday morning’s rehearsal of the Ninth, “or you’re likely to get two thousand people all coughing at once.”
In the event, the coughing proved more of a problem than even he had expected. That Tuesday night, during a quiet passage of the Ninth’s first movement, somebody—or perhaps several somebodies—coughed so loudly that the flute player couldn’t hear the harmonic change that was his cue, and as a result failed to enter on time. This in turn threw the rest of the orchestra off, so that they had to scramble to re-group. I didn’t catch any of this with my own ear, and neither did anyone else, as far as I know; I only learned about it a day or two later from a member of the orchestra. But I did hear the remarkable speech Rattle gave as a result. In the brief space between the first and second movements, he turned around to the audience and addressed us in a soft-spoken, polite, but firm manner. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “this is a piece that requires enormous silence. It comes out of silence, and it goes back into silence. I hope you will join us in creating that magical atmosphere. And these”—he held up his own white handkerchief, used for mopping his brow between movements–”can be quite useful for that purpose.”
I can think of only one comparable moment of direct address during all my years of attending performances, and that was at a dance concert many years ago at the New Victory Theater. Mikhail Baryshnikov was performing alone onstage (I think it might even have been the piece set to his own heartbeat), and an oblivious young woman in the first row was noisily eating a seemingly endless series of plastic-wrapped candies. I was sitting right behind her and was almost ready to murder her myself, when suddenly, without breaking his gestural sequence, Baryshnikov said, “Stop that.” He said it only once, and he said it just loud enough to be heard in the first few rows, but he terrified that girl into behaving herself.
Rattle’s announcement had a similar effect on the whole of the Carnegie auditorium. There was not another cough during the remaining three movements of the Mahler symphony. This was annoying in itself (if the coughing was so obviously voluntary, why had they done it in the first place?), but it was also tremendously heartening: it seemed that if we could just borrow Simon Rattle for another month or two, he could probably whip these terrible New York audiences into shape. Rattle himself, at any rate, appeared to be enjoying his new-found powers, for he held the final silence at the end of the Ninth—a deep, scary, reverent silence—for longer than I have ever heard any end-silence held in Carnegie Hall. Only when he released his extended arms, letting them fall to his sides, did the audience feel free to burst into its thunderous applause.
I saw him do this with the final silences on the other two Mahler works as well (though he was foiled, in the case of the Tenth, by a loud cougher who had cannily been waiting for just such a silence to interrupt, and whose noise was taken by the rest of that unusually boorish crowd as its release signal). And then, in the orchestra’s Sunday afternoon performance of The Rite of Spring, I saw him do something different.
The Berlin Philharmonic’s rendition of Stravinsky’s piece was actually part of a larger program called The Rite of Spring Project. The culmination of months of work on the part of music teachers, music advisors, an imported choreographer, and over a hundred New York City schoolchildren, the project involved dance as well as music, and student-played, student-written compositions as well as the professional performance. It was held in the far-uptown United Palace Theater, a former 1930s movie palace (now the home of Rev. Ike’s congregation) which holds more than three thousand people within its huge, unbelievably rococo space. The audience that Sunday afternoon consisted of the usual Carnegie Hall types, vastly augmented on this occasion by the families of the participating schoolchildren, walk-ins from the 175th Street neighborhood, and a large sprinkling of other people lured in by the fifteen-dollar ticket price.
At the break between the student-composed part of the program and the Stravinsky-composed part, an informally dressed Simon Rattle got up on the makeshift stage and spoke to the audience about what we were about to see and hear. He briefly summarized the plot of The Rite of Spring in a way that made it sound analogous to our own troubled times, and then remarked, “And if this sounds familiar…,” setting off a wave of collusive audience laughter. He then issued a warning, or guideline, or instruction, but he did it so delicately that everyone simply took it as a pleasantly offered joke. “The Rite of Spring, which lasts about half an hour, sounds as if it is ending several times before it actually does end,” he said. “With opera, they say it’s over when the fat lady sings. Well, in this, you’ll know it’s over when the moon rises and the tall girl dances herself to death.” And with that, he made his way down to the floor-level orchestra pit and took up his baton. He didn’t need to say another word; the applause came only when he wanted it, and then it wouldn’t stop. The overwhelmed schoolchildren who had been dancing onstage seemed pleased but also slightly terrified—they didn’t have their curtain calls thoroughly rehearsed, as professionals would have, so they looked a bit like a hundred deer caught in the headlights. And they just stood there looking like that until Simon Rattle climbed back up and, in a way that was inexpressibly moving, took two of the central children by the hands and led them all in their bows.
Wendy Lesser, the founding editor of The Threepenny Review, has published eight books; her most recent, Room for Doubt, is out as a Vintage paperback in April 2008.
