Simon Rattle reviews

The Rite of Spring does not dominate here, not because the performance is lame. Rather, it is part of something truly exceptional, joined here by masterpieces from Webern, Berg and Ligeti in performances of outstanding beauty, passion and power. This film captures a concert at the Barbican from January 2015, when the public courtship between the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle was still ongoing and their artistic marriage not yet certain.

Sir Simon Rattle’s first Tosca was always going to be an event. Whether it was intended to be this kind of event is difficult to tell. The extremes of tempo and colour from the Berlin Philharmonic in the first minutes of Philipp Himmelmann’s Baden-Baden Easter Festival production are enough to make one’s hair stand on end: a visceral rush of energy that deliquesces into an oily pool of heavily perfumed sound, reminiscent of being trapped in a high-performance sports car with a man who is wearing far too much aftershave. 

Pelléas et Mélisande requires deftness and subtlety. Sir Simon Rattle delivers, evoking Debussy’s half-lit, dappled colours and exceptionally refined understated ambiguity with apparent ease. The cast in this LSO Live set is strong, if not always entirely idiomatic. As in earlier productions, Magdalena Kožená’s Mélisande has a firm streak of red-blooded coquettish defiance that is effective, even if it belies the character’s customary blanched fragility. Christian Gerhaher’s Pelléas is similarly finely sung, if a little too knowing.

It is a delusion that recording technology and home listening can ever replicate the concert hall experience, though that has never stopped producers and artists aiming for the impossible. Hence this weighty box of six LPs, offering ‘direct to disc’ analogue recordings of the Berlin Philharmonic’s Brahms symphony performances of 2014, captured live by two Sennheiser microphones high above Simon Rattle’s head, cut onto lacquer on a Neumann VMS-80 lathe, a piece of equipment that some venerate as if it’s the Holy Grail.

Every year the Berlin Philharmonic marks its birthday (1 May 1892) with a concert. In 2016 the world-renowned orchestra headed to Norway for the occasion – to the town of Røros, where there’s a light, airy Baroque church whose interior, with its balcony tiers above the pews, is rather reminiscent of a small theatre.

'In seeing as well as hearing this concert, what comes over is Rattle's love for the music and the orchestra's wholehearted response'

Ravel Le tombeau de Couperin; Daphnis et Chloé - Suite No. 2

Dutilleux L'arbre des songes; Métaboles

Delage Quatre poèmes hindous 

Julia Bullock (soprano); Leonidas Kavakos (violin); London Symphony Orchestra/Simon Rattle

LSO Live LSO3038

Orchestral concerts al fresco don’t get more spectacular or more wide-spectrum than this. Here are Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic in the Waldbuhne, a ravine-hollowed amphitheatre outside the city which began ingloriously as a Hitler showcase and has now, it seems, shucked off the bad vibes as a paragon of democracy.