By Nicholas Kenyon

Sir Simon Rattle, still in his mid-forties, becomes music director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in the fall of 2002 in succession to Claudio Abbado, Herbert von Karajan, and Wilhelm Furtwängler. One of the world's most traditional musical institutions has elected as its leader a young British conductor with radical ideas and boundless energy, who is just as much at home with the music of Bernstein or Rameau, Duke Ellington or Boulez, as he is with Beethoven or Brahms. For an orchestra that has grown to world eminence on the idea of the Austro-German musical tradition as the central experience of our music-making, it is a daring risk and a massive leap of faith.

Rattle's appointment shows that one of the world's great orchestras knows that it has to change if it is to adapt to the realities of musical life in the 21st century. And Rattle is hugely optimistic about what can be achieved: "Everyone would say that man for man, player for player, the orchestra is now individually stronger than it has ever been. No orchestra comes close to that individual level; the level of ability is breathtaking, I mean almost vertigo-inducing." Behind that perhaps lies the unspoken thought that there is still much to do to form that individual excellence into a newly coherent style-or more likely, a variety of styles for a variety of repertories-that will suit baroque and classical music as well as it suits Brahms or Mahler. Rattle is positive about the future, yet he knows that in Berlin he is stepping into a snake pit of controversy that has already claimed many artistic lives. The last years of Karajan's rule were marred by internal feuding and tensions, and the Abbado relationship, which started so promisingly, soured so quickly that it was questionable whether the orchestra would have renewed his contract had Abbado himself not decided to go.

Already Rattle has had huge problems during 2001, both in working with the players toward the structure he believes is necessary for the orchestra and then, more publicly, ensuring that the political conditions were right to sign his contract. By the summer of 2001 those problems had basically been resolved, and the contract was signed in September, but it is naïve to imagine that they will not recur in the future. Berlin is a thrilling city as it tries to rebuild itself and obliterate the memories of the Wall, but it is not a rich city and will struggle to maintain the huge variety of musical ensembles (including its three heavily subsidized opera houses) that were enlarged during the Cold War era. The Philharmonic is safe, for the moment, and Rattle has achieved a pay raise for his players and some financial stability for the organization. But for how long?

It is a puzzle to some why Simon Rattle should want the unknown challenges of Berlin when he could, had he so wished, have been living a well-paid, highly feted life for the past few years as the music director of an American orchestra. It could have been Rattle, rather than his friend Esa-Pekka Salonen, who leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic into Disney Hall in 2003; it could have been him, rather than Christoph Eschenbach whose music-making he so much admires ("I think they are luckier than they know") rebuilding the Philadelphia Orchestra. It could probably, but who knows, have been Rattle in Boston. To understand his reluctance to commit himself, you have to appreciate the surprisingly turbulent times that Rattle has had as a guest conductor around the world. He has always preferred to build his music-making slowly with ensembles he knows well and who trust him, rather than flying in and out of situations where the reaction of the musicians has been at best unpredictable and sometimes downright hostile.

Early in his career, I saw him suffer with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. His encounters with the Cleveland Orchestra were notorious ("Precision is a byword in the Cleveland Orchestra, and the players felt insulted," said one of them); his one appearance with the Israel Philharmonic was distinctly unhappy. And though Rattle has been praised to the skies as a conductor in Britain and more widely in Europe, he has not enjoyed such automatically good reactions in the United States, especially in New York. When he gave his first concerts there with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in January 1985, they were not a huge success with the critics, in spite of Ernest Fleischmann's belief that they were some of the greatest performances the orchestra had given: "Mahler 10 we took to New York, and that was Simon's debut there. I take grave issue with the critics who disliked it because I just don't think New York critics are able to distinguish an orchestra playing with the special commitment that they brought to it. I thought it was one of the greatest things he ever did and was in tears at the end." Peter G. Davis in New York magazine wrote: "Rattle finally made his New York debut in a characteristically low-key manner.... [E]xpectations ran high but both events turned out to be disappointing.... What these thoughtfully unspectacular New York concerts indicated to me is that Rattle prefers to work methodically at being the best musician he knows how to be rather than diverting his energies into over-exposure and aggressive career politicking. That sort of disarming modesty, and an earnest wish to make himself scarce, have only added to the conductor's mystique." There was an echo of that when he returned with his Birmingham orchestra in 1992, when the sniffy elements in The New York Times were unrelenting: "...when the clouds of praise clear away and only the Birmingham musicians are left, what we hear is an assemblage of very modest skills...."

But part of Simon Rattle's genius as a conductor has always been to make musicians play as more than the sum of their parts: not only the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra over 18 years of his music directorship, but also the Rotterdam Philharmonic (in a staggering Parsifal in 2000, and Tristan in 2001) or the period instruments of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (in Mozart and most recently in Fidelio at Glyndebourne in 2001) have been transformed beyond all recognition by his painstaking rehearsals and inspirational performances. How does he do it?

The first time I encountered something I gathered was called Simon Rattle was nearly 20 years ago. I was standing with friends in a queue for Covent Garden Prom, and suddenly there bore down on us a small whirlwind: a bright-eyed, intense, entrancing young man with a shock of unkempt hair and an absolutely unavoidable stare. He bullied, in the nicest possible way, one of my friends to take part in a forthcoming performance of a Mahler symphony at the Royal Academy, and flew off down the queue. "That," she said with an air of inevitability, "was Simon Rattle." It was a scene, I was to discover, which had repeated countless times in the years when Rattle had used every ploy to persuade people to play for him.

From his earliest years in Liverpool, Rattle has been motivated by an extraordinary desire to make music, to bring people together to join in the celebration of live music-making that underpins his art. His parents were both musical, his father Denis (who died in 1996) especially so-he had almost gone into music after forming a dance band while at Oxford with such luminaries as Frank Taplin, a future chairman of the Metropolitan Opera. Both his parents were extremely supportive of Simon but without forcing the pace of his development. Simon has an elder sister, Susan, who is slightly handicapped but is a fully qualified librarian in Liverpool: She used to bring him scores of 20th-century masterpieces to look at, and he quickly became a natural score-reader. In the days of Sir Charles Groves, Rattle was able to hear adventurous music live at the Liverpool Philharmonic: Messiaen and Janácek, Bartók and especially Mahler, quickly became his favorites. He loved percussion and became a timpanist as well as a very good pianist and a not very good violinist, and he warmed to the big 20th-century display pieces. He even organized performances for the family where they would each be given specially written-out percussion parts to play along to recordings that Simon would conduct ("It's so embarrassing to think about it...it sounds so horrifying," Rattle says today).

The work that made the biggest impact on him, and was to recur as a leitmotif of his conducting life, was Mahler's Second Symphony, which he heard when he was 11. "That was it. That was a completely transfiguring experience. It was the road to Damascus, and it knocked me for six. I couldn't get the impression of it out of my mind for days, and I think that in serious terms that is where the seed was sown." It was no coincidence that when Simon arrived at London's Royal Academy of Music when he was still only 16, a work he was determined to put on was the Mahler Second, and he eventually did so on December 6, 1973, at 2:45 p.m.-an occasion that is memorable because his future agent, Martin Campbell-White of Askonas Holt, had been tipped off and was in the audience: "The performance was somewhat raw but, my God, it was fantastic. I don't even think the technique was limited. The impassioned approach that is a hallmark of Simon's style was already there. And the ability to get people to play with him, which is something very special. It was tremendous."

Campbell-White planned a gentle start to Rattle's career, but was scuppered by Rattle's impetuosity in entering a conducting competition in Bournemouth, and winning. Rattle was plunged into a period of work with the Bournemouth orchestras that was less than happy, though it gave him the chance to learn some classical repertory. Rattle says now: "I faced the whole difficulty of the young professional in coming to terms with the limits on one's ability.... I very seriously toyed with the idea of giving up altogether." Of course he didn't, and successful engagements with smaller groups such as the Nash Ensemble and London Sinfonietta led on to posts with the BBC Scottish Symphony and the Liverpool Philharmonic, where he was able to extend his orchestral repertory into the 20th-century masterpieces he loved.

Rattle's career has been marked by a shrewd decisiveness in saying a firm "no" to offers that are not right, combined with a razor-sharp perception of where the real opportunity lies. Just as he might have been seduced by American wealth but kept himself free for the challenge of Berlin, so too earlier in his career he might well have taken the music directorship of an orchestra abroad but instead in 1980 suddenly decided he wanted to rebuild the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, which was at that moment not at all in good musical health. In collaboration with his long-time colleague Ed Smith (who went on to manage, briefly, the Toronto Symphony), he transformed the orchestra over an 18-year period, which has now become legendary in the musical world.

It did not happen by magic. The Birmingham revolution was a combination of many factors: relentless dedication and energy, taking the orchestra through what Ed Smith calculated as around 10,000 hours of rehearsal, exceptionally good program planning and pacing of the repertory-not doing particular works until the orchestra was ready, repeating works often enough to develop them, but not too often to prevent their being always fresh. In the middle of the process, in the late 1980s, an injection of extra development money from the Arts Council in London helped to put the orchestra on a new footing, though the increase was shamefully not maintained. Then the building of Symphony Hall Birmingham, with its wonderful acoustics, helped to provide the real spur to an increase of the orchestra's standards after it opened in 1991.

Program schemes of huge imagination, such as the "Towards the Millennium" festival, which ran through the 1990s, exploring the music of the 20th century decade-by-decade, created great attention. When the Birmingham orchestra came to London, it was invariably well prepared and well rehearsed, and received reviews of astonishing fulsomeness and unanimity over the years. As the critic Hugh Canning wrote when Rattle finally left Birmingham: "What this young conductor has achieved in Birmingham should-but probably won't-serve as a model for running a symphony orchestra and galvanizing a musical public in favor of a wide-ranging and progressive repertory...." Rattle ended in Birmingham as he began, with Mahler's Second Symphony preceded by a contemporary masterpiece: in 1980, Boulez's Rituel, in 1998, Thomas Adès's Asyla.

Toward the end of the 1980s, Rattle's musical horizons began to expand in several directions. He made his long-delayed debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1987, and it was a great success (though problems were to follow later: he cancelled recordings with them because the players in the recordings would not be the same as the players in the concerts, which caused outrage among the powerful media committee of the orchestra). He worked with the new Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, a successful satellite of the CBSO, in a variety of smaller-scale 20th-century repertory, including Bernstein. And perhaps most important for his stylistic development, he embraced the newly formed Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and went on to develop his work with period instruments throughout the 1990s, taking a Rameau opera to the Salzburg Festival for the first time and doing wonderfully uplifting concerts of Haydn and Mozart-and in 2000, of Berlioz as well-with this virtuosic ensemble. Because of this, his stylistic range is now wider than that of any major conductor alive, and that will have a real impact in Berlin, where he has already tried out Rameau and reveled in Haydn with the Philharmonic.

With the addition of the Vienna Philharmonic to his small roster of orchestras in the 1990s, Rattle was able to leave behind the Concertgebouw, Cleveland, and other orchestras with whom it didn't work. New York he continued to refuse, but though he kept loyal to Los Angeles, the emphasis in America shifted to the East Coast, to Boston and Philadelphia. This increased attraction of America was at least partly related to the fact that in the 1990s Rattle went through a painful divorce from his first wife, the singer Elise Ross, and later remarried to the writer Candace Allen. Ellie took their two sons to live in San Francisco, and it would be increasingly difficult for him to maintain as much contact with them as he wanted, unless he were based somewhere in America.

By 1997 the Philadelphia Orchestra was making a determined bid for Rattle, and the Philadelphia Enquirer may not have helped when they headlined a huge Rattle profile:

Wanted: Musical Genius
Sex Appeal A Must
England's Simon Rattle Fits The Bill
Can Philadelphia Get Him?

As Peter Dobrin reported: "The only trouble is, Sir Simon Rattle says he's not coming...."

With Berlin on the horizon but far from definite, Rattle risked much by turning down the music directorship in Philadelphia. As his agent puts it: "Philadelphia was a real possibility, but in the end Simon and Candace decided it wasn't for them. He went there in January 1999, and they were still putting enormous pressure on him. He had a fantastic time, loved the orchestra, and everyone from the Mayor downwards was very keen. But he came back and in the end he said he really didn't want to live in Philadelphia, and number two, he is a European. He loves Vienna, he loves Berlin, he loves London. He does not want to lose that."

Then there was Boston, where Rattle got on famously in the 1980s but cooled off slightly during the 1990s as the orchestra seemed to lose direction. Seiji Ozawa's slow decision-making about his departure added to the uncertainty, and it was hard not to see a calculated snub to Rattle in the timing of Ozawa's announcement that he would go to the Vienna Opera-it was announced the very morning of the vote in Berlin. Rattle's comments on Boston are forthright. "Boston, well what happened in Boston? Do you know? The only person who really knows everything is Ken Haas, and he is dead. My hero was the timpanist of the Boston Symphony, Vic Firth.... The first approaches about Boston were made through Vic. But even he didn't seem to trust what was going on. I have a lot of affection for them, but the situation is a complete mystery to me. There was never anything definite. Vic said, `If they're messing you around, tell them to go fuck themselves.'"

In Berlin, Rattle now faces the biggest challenge of his professional career. But it is one to which his entire musical life has been leading, and he is not going to let it go wrong. Rattle said, years ago, "My greatest danger is that I could become too lazy. It could all be too easy." But it did not become too easy: He saw to that, by setting himself new challenges, exploring new playing styles and new repertory, with a sureness of touch that leaves you amazed at the self-knowledge and foresight that lies behind it. Simon Rattle is a musical force of nature, and he now has a world stage on which to operate. It cannot be anything but important for the future of music: risky, thrilling, and probably a touch dangerous. Because of his stylistic range, his openness to new performing styles and to a repertory that is not bound by conventional boundaries, it is worth thinking of Simon Rattle as not just another great conductor, but as the characteristic conductor of the 21st century. He will be conducting our future.

Nicholas Kenyon has been Director of the BBC Proms since 1996 and is a former music critic of The New Yorker, the London Times, and the Observer. He was editor of Early Music (1982-92), and Controller, BBC Radio 3 (1992-98). He wrote the history of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and his book Simon Rattle: From Birmingham to Berlin will be published by Faber Inc. in America in 2002.