Music

‘You’re one of the more normal composers’: Simon Rattle and Thomas Adès swap notes


One titan in the room is a challenge. A pair threatens to be a crush. Classical music has many stars. Yet true creative thinkers, who mould the cultural landscape, are a different species: rare, sought after, elusive by nature or necessity. After months of planning, on the eve of announcing a new season, the Barbican Centre has cajoled two such to spend time together on a morning last week, in conversation for the Observer. Both are British but with global reputations. Each has a central role in next year’s programming. Getting a pope and president together could hardly require more meticulous preparation.

Simon Rattle arrives promptly. Time-keeping, in every sense, is a conductor’s reason for existing. We’re in “his” green room backstage at the Barbican, home of the London Symphony Orchestra, of which he is music director. He took up the post in 2017, after 16 years at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic, generally reckoned the best orchestra in the world. You can argue over this meaningless term, but it gives you an idea of Rattle’s status. His is one of the few instantly recognisable faces, and names, in his field. He takes a low-key view of superstardom: blue woolly jumper, grey woolly hair, guiding his wheelie suitcase in one hand, a takeaway coffee in the other. Always animated, heavy-browed eyes intense, today he looks more than usually excited. He has news.

Is it about the new Centre for Music, the hall estimated to cost £288m that may one day replace the LSO’s current home at the Barbican? No. If only. We’ll come back to that. Or a job in Munich? Rattle is rumoured to be the favourite to replace the late Mariss Jansons at the illustrious Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. “Ha, no. I’ve read about that rumour too. Look, it’s a wonderful job, a wonderful orchestra. If I were free we might be talking…” So that’s a no, for now. Surely it’s not baby news? Rattle has five children: two grown-up sons with the American soprano Elise Ross; two school-aged sons, and a daughter, now five, with his third wife, the Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená.

“I’ve become a grandfather!”he exclaims. The baby boy, born hours earlier, is the first child of Rattle’s eldest son, Sacha, a formidable solo clarinettist.

Discussion of labour and birth is interrupted by the advent, a little late, of Thomas Adès, composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, musical phenomenon. Tall, informally chic in black, he resists the culinary possibilities of a Barbican breakfast and asks for a banana. Given his early-to-work habit, he has probably already been at his desk a few hours. He has a ballet to complete (The Dante Project, premiering at the Royal Opera House in May. “I’m currently mid-Purgatory”). A centrepiece of the forthcoming Barbican season will be a celebration of Adès’s 50th birthday. “I’m still 48 so I’m not terribly into my 50th to be honest, not my favourite thing. I think I said to the Barbican, if you’re going to do something, please do it properly, thinking the whole thing would go away. Instead of which…”

Adès has an engaging way of trailing off with a fruity, rollicking, bass-baritone laugh. To finish the sentence for him: instead of which, an entire strand of the Barbican’s multilayered season is devoted to Adès. Rattle, since his years with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra a champion of the composer, will launch the LSO season with the Luxury Suite from Adès’s first opera, Powder Her Face. Adès himself will return later in the season to conduct, among other things, his own Totentanz. It’s a formidable commitment to a living composer.

“I’ve just come out from under Gerald Barry,” Adès plunges straight in, referring to Barry’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, which recently finished a triumphant run at Covent Garden, conducted by Adès. “It went off like a rocket.”

“So I heard. Everyone was worried it couldn’t be produced…” responds Rattle.

Adès conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 2012.



Adès conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 2012. Photograph: BCMG/Clive Barda

“It was a brilliant production.”

Realising this could be an entertaining but extensive diversion, I interrupt. How did he and Rattle meet?

“It’s so long ago I can’t recall… was it the 19th century?” Adès jokes.

“We both had dark hair…” Rattle retorts. Adès looks worried and clutches his head. He is still essentially dark-haired.

Rattle remembers precisely. “It was the grapevine. And it turned out to be right. I was told by several sources that there was this extraordinary young musician, still a student [at King’s College, Cambridge]. I had a look at his music and I asked, has he written an orchestral piece, and the answer came back, not yet…”

“I’d done a small, student-y one called …but all shall be well, which still gets done.”

“Yes, I’ve conducted it…”

Asyla (1997), Adès’s first major orchestral piece, was commissioned by Rattle for the CBSO. He included it in his inaugural concert with the Berlin Philharmonic and persuaded Adès to write another big work, Tevot (2007), for the Berlin players. “Still my favourite moment was when I first looked at the score of Asyla. There I was, at my great age of fortysomething, saying to Tom, um, you know, I really don’t think we’re going to be able to play this bit. And this very quiet, deep voice said to me [mimics Adès] ‘I actually think you’ll be able to’. And actually we could.”

“It was amazing,” Adès continues. “I remember arriving in Birmingham for the first rehearsal, and as usual I was slightly late. I opened the door and this sound was coming out which of course I knew, but to hear it for real – you were all doing it brilliantly, and I thought, something’s happening.”

“That must be such a strange thing for a composer.”

“It’s so weird. It’s what you had in your head but it’s totally different when you hear it.”

Watch Simon Rattle conduct the third movement of Asyla by Thomas Adès.

“It’s like Bartók and his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta,” Rattle goes on. “He said I’ve written this piece, I can’t wait to hear it because I can’t imagine what it will be like. I suppose no one had used that combination of instruments before.” Rattle’s conversation is peppered with quotations and anecdotes (including one about the Czech composer Janáček teaching his three chickens to say goodnight).

“Exactly,” Adès agrees. “For me, with Asyla, it was the cowbells, and the piano tuned a quarter-tone lower. I didn’t know what it’d sound like. Now I use a pretty crude, simple headphone thing to record layers and see what they sound like. In those days that was out of the question…”

Adès, the oldest of three brothers, was born in London in 1971. He spends around half his time here, half in Los Angeles, up in the Hollywood hills. His mother is the art historian Dawn Adès, a specialist in surrealism, his father Timothy Adès a poet and translator. Adès senior’s eclectic record collection, from Spanish folk to Steeleye Span to opera to The Rite of Spring, was a source of fascination to his son. Adès may not have realised, as a child, just how fertile this cultural hinterland was.

“I know my mum was going all over the world curating exhibitions, but that didn’t necessarily filter into my musical life. I was just a kid at home in north London, going to the library in Crouch End, getting out scores and records, or cassettes, spending hours by myself at the piano. I hated going to school. I especially hated sports day. I’d invent phantom tummy aches and stay at home and listen to these records.”

“I can relate to that,” adds Rattle.

The young Adès wrote his Opus 1, Five Eliot Landscapes, when he was 18. Powder Her Face (1995), with a libretto by the novelist Philip Hensher, made headlines for its sumptuous musical depiction of a blowjob, but its creative poise, wit and economy give it lasting profile. In addition to instrumental works elsewhere, operas for the Royal Opera House followed: The Tempest (2004) and The Exterminating Angel (2016). Adès has always multitasked: as a virtuoso pianist, as a conductor, and as a programme director of festivals in Aldeburgh and Tanglewood, Massachusetts.

“I was fairly chaotic to start with. I’ve got quite good at juggling now. I have more routine. I tend to start sketching things way in advance, as soon as I know I’m doing something – it’s quite odd. It starts to grow inside you. And you can go back, even a year later, and think, oh that’s not quite how it goes…”

“It marinates…” Rattle suggests.

They start talking about Janáček, beloved of both of them. Adès is about to conduct his Sinfonietta, “my absolutely favourite piece of music. I nearly brought the score with me for some industrial espionage – I thought you might give me some tips.”

“It’s easier than you think – slightly,” Rattle says, reassuringly. His own career conducting opera began with Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen at Glyndebourne in 1977. “And now I’m married to a Czech, and we walk in the forest where Janáček walked, where the opera is set. I first heard his Glagolitic Mass listening to the transistor in my parents’ kitchen in Liverpool as a teenager and I thought: wow.”

Simon Rattle conducting the LSO at the Barbican, 2019.



Simon Rattle conducting the LSO at the Barbican, 2019. Photograph: Mark Allan

Rattle describes his upbringing as “middle-class, comfortable, but I was a scholarship boy who for that reason had a chance to learn piano, violin and percussion.” The younger child of Denis and Pauline Rattle, with an older sister who used to bring him records and scores home from Liverpool’s libraries, he was surrounded by music all his life. “And she knows my family,“ he interjects, jabbing a conductorly hand in my direction as if waiting for a late entry from the French horns.

It’s true, I did know Rattle’s late parents a little (and, by chance have also met Adès’s). We met at Dartington Summer School of Music when Rattle, already a star, was music director of the CBSO. Denis Rattle, a twinkling businessman with a love of Shakespeare, was a classy jazz pianist who managed to make the left-hand part of a Mozart sonata resemble Art Tatum. Rattle tells how his mother, in her 20s, ran a record shop. His father went in, fancied her and asked her to go dancing. She refused. After a year he said: “Look, I’ve been in every day for a year, and bought a record every time. Will you go dancing now?” And she said: “I suppose I’d better.”

“It’s why we had such a vast collection of 78s – lots of jazz, but classical too. It was a long time until I knew the reason.”

Adès hasn’t heard that story. Both are touched by Rattle’s tale of love’s quest. Conversation turns to Beethoven, his 250th anniversary year, fear of overkill. Adès recently conducted the symphonies with the Britten Sinfonia. “His music is transcendent. He’s always pushing against the sky, reinventing the universe. You can imagine he’d have been absolutely impossible. I love his letters – they’re very funny. I can picture him. I imagine I’d send him an email and get a very tart reply.”

Rattle is mid-Beethoven with the LSO. “He demands more of you than any human. I always think how useful it would be, like now, I’m doing Beethoven 9, if I could get him on the phone and say, Look, Ludwig, I could never get that bit right…”

“I get the feeling that, like certain composers one knows, he might have been quite difficult.”

“Yes, I suspect. But you’re one of the more normal ones and that’s a scary thought.”

[Laughter] Adès: “If you’re a performer yourself, you tend to be a bit more forgiving…”

Rattle: “But as a conductor you are incredibly grateful when someone knows exactly what they want. Even if you do want to strangle them.”

They have an unprintable rant about a couple of living composers.

“As a composer you have to ask yourself, have I written down exactly what I want?” Adès ponders. “I always think it’s my fault. That’s because I’m English… [laughter] My first impulse is to apologise.”

The conductor Simon Rattle, left, and composer Thomas Adès.



The conductor Simon Rattle, left, and composer Thomas Adès. Photograph: Suki Dhanda

His natural courtesy does not extend to Brexit, which has left him “fuelled with fury. It’s a disaster for music. It’s like a collective mass organ failure, like watching someone die. The motives for it were so wrong… all I can hope is that it will be short-lived.” Inevitably, he adds: “Sorry.”

Visas and travel are not the only issue. “I’ve been lucky. I haven’t known life outside the EU. I think of friends starting out – composers in their 20s. Their opportunities have been slashed by 90%. It may not make a difference. But they’ve been cut off from so much of Europe and its musical culture: commissions, tours, grants, simply going to live abroad for a while. It might be possible but it won’t be easy.”

Rattle is only slightly more temperate. “We have 26 nationalities in the LSO. Just making sure they are able to work has already been a massive task. Our job now is to get on with it, as musicians do. No one wants it to be a disaster. But we are diminished. Can we see any type of advantage, for music, in any way at all? Absolutely not. I have racked my brain every which way because I wish to be optimistic.”

As for the Centre for Music, currently stymied by complex delays in moving the Museum of London to Smithfield, Rattle’s patience is being tested: “We have done a huge amount of work already and would be ready to start immediately. We’ve had tremendous support from the City, but it’s clear we are in a queue and I am extremely concerned at the lack of urgency. Whatever the question may be, where we are sitting now is certainly not the answer. The next six months are going to be crucial and we are going to have to be extremely creative: what can we dream up to make it work?”

Composer and conductor go off to have their picture taken. The photographer has to tell them to stop gassing. They’re discussing a detail in one of Adès’s scores. Would this bit be better on a trombone, Rattle wonders, adding: “I’ve never suggested anything like that to a composer before…” It’s lucky Beethoven isn’t alive to take that call. Who knows how the Ninth Symphony might have ended up.

Thomas Adès at 50: Barbican highlights

Simon Rattle opens the London Symphony Orchestra season with Adès’s Luxury Suite from Powder Her Face (13 Sept).

Cleveland Orchestra/Welser-Möst: Adès’s Angel Symphony (12 Oct).

Australian Chamber Orchestra/Tognetti: Adès world premiere (20 Oct).

Birthday concert: Adès conducts the LSO, featuring his Totentanz (7 March 2021).

BBC Symphony Orchestra/Sakari Oramo: Adès’s Asyla (30 April 2021).

Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group/Adès: late-night Green Umbrella concert (21 May 2021).

LA Phil/Dudamel in Dante: concert version of Adès’s ballet score (22 May 2021).

Britten Sinfonia/Adès: concert of Adès’s The Tempest (28 June 2021).

Other Barbican 2020/21 classical music season highlights

  • London Symphony Orchestra Simon Rattle conducts Berg’s Wozzeck, with Christian Gerhaher in the title role; Rattle explores music by Hindemith, with Beethoven piano concertos, soloist Krystian Zimerman.

  • Barbican presents Joyce DiDonato – the mezzo-soprano is a featured artist; Antonio Pappano – as conductor with the LSO and the Coro dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome; as pianist in recitals, with the tenor Jonas Kaufmann and mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili.

  • Sheku Kanneh-Mason – the cellist makes his Barbican recital debut, with his sister and pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason.

The Barbican’s 2020-21 classical music season runs from September to July 2021. Tickets go on sale online to Barbican Members Plus from 9 March, Barbican Members on 11 March and to the general public on 16 March. For tickets and more information, go to: barbican.org.uk/classical2021



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