The tousle-haired musical knight Sir Simon Rattle is the focus of Benedikt Schulte’s new documentary world-premiering May 16 in The Sound of Music section of DOK.fest Munich. And given that Rattle is the chief conductor of Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and has German citizenship, he’ll be there in person to see it.
The medium-length film was made to commemorate Rattle’s 70th birthday, although the conductor’s age is not referred to. He talks about growing up in Liverpool, how he caught the musical bug after his autistic sister started to bring home Schoenberg records from the library. He himself would wrestle on the bus with the largest musical score he could get his hands on. “As I child, I always had music in my head. I thought everybody did,” Rattle says in the film. The true Damascene moment came when he attended a concert of Mahler’s Second Symphony under the baton of George Hurst. He realised as a boy that he had to be the conduit for “all that musical energy.”
Schulte gathers an array of musical luminaries to tell Rattle’s story and to express their appreciation for him, such as director Peter Sellars, contemporary composer Thomas Adès, conductors John Carewe and Karina Canellakis and pianist Imogen Cooper. We also hear from the young conductors that Rattle is mentoring. His advice isn’t always lofty. “If you’re going to say something [to an orchestra], make it something incredibly practical. Don’t do any poetry before they’ve had their first coffee.”
Rattle took over the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the age of 25 – “that came at point when the orchestra said, ‘now we want to be something else’” – and remained there for eighteen years. In 2002, he succeeded Claudio Abbado as conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. Later, in 2017, he signed for five seasons as director of the London Symphony Orchestra before taking up the post as head of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Director Benedikt Schulte, himself an amateur pianist, was determined to make a film about Rattle as the 70thbirthday approached. When he sat down to interview the conductor, he was surprised to discover that Rattle knew as much about the filming process.
“He has so much more experience in filmmaking than I do, although he’s not the filmmaker,” Schulte confirms. “He’s a very good protagonist and interview partner. Whatever he says you can use in editing. You could print what he says because he’s such a great narrator. Ok, I think most of the things he says, to be frank he has said before, because there’s a limited variety of questions you can ask someone, and he’s been doing this for so many decades now. So I felt that he knew better what I was going to ask than I did myself, but he was kind enough not to let me feel that.”
Rattle is also a man with a very busy agenda. “When you get him in front of the camera, he is completely there for you, but [getting] him there is sometimes not that easy because, of course, his schedule is very full,” Schulte says.
The music in the film is expansive, with much Mahler, some Poulenc, a bit of Bach and Germany’s very own Karlheinz Stockhausen to further illustrate Rattle’s modernist aesthetic.
“You have to do this puzzle,” says Schulte of his desire to present the full musical range. “But we were lucky enough to be on that tour with Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Berlin and London. So we captured the Mahler 6, which happens to be a piece of Simon’s core repertoire. And then we had the contemporary music of Thomas Adès, so we had the chance to film the rehearsal in the Royal Albert Hall. And the collaboration with Peter Sellars covers the Baroque era, and we had the Viennese classics with Imogen Cooper at the piano with the Berlin Philharmonic. So yeah, it was a bit of luck and a bit of planning that all these aspects were covered.”
The film is bookended with parts of a wider performance of Schoenberg’s vast Gurre Lieder, directed by Rattle, for 300 musicians and two choirs.
The master conductor is happy to attend the world premiere even though, like many subjects, he is averse to watching himself on screen. The film, sold by C Major, will show on Arte later in the summer. This weekend in Munich, Rattle will also be presented the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, likened to the Nobel Prize in terms of importance.
For Schulte, the process of following and interviewing Rattle has only increased his admiration for him. “I think what all great conductors have in common is that they recognise this nucleus of energy between the orchestra and the audience…It’s a reciprocity. It’s a kind of communication that creates a musical sculpture in the concert hall. And as Simon says in the film, he is the conduit of all this energy.”
