Arranging a meeting with Simon Rattle takes some time – unsurprisingly: he’s a very busy man. So am I. Finally, we settle on a Sunday morning, the only time we can find. When at last the interview happens, we have nothing but time. Covid-19 has swept across the globe, extinguishing lives and plunging the world of the performing arts into profound darkness and disarray. The purpose of the interview is to discuss Rattle’s new recording of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, paired with his Sinfonietta – two of the most life-affirming pieces in the repertory. But we sit looking at each other on computer screens, once we’ve overcome the technology, he in Berlin, I in north London, two men of a certain age, our unshorn silvery locks all but cascading over our shoulders, briefly bereft of language, blinking at what has just befallen our world.

We have known each other for more than 30 years, during which time the talk has been all about what we are going to do next, our hopes, our dreams, our visions. Suddenly, at a stroke, all that has disappeared. We both feel cut off at the knees, unable to provide the thing most needed at this moment, the very thing that can bring people together – the assertion of shared humanity: art, and particularly art shared by people gathered together in the flesh to experience something collectively. ‘It’s just songs in a room, words in a room,’ he says. But the sharing is all. Any actor, any dancer, any musician will tell you that beyond the laughter, beyond the applause, is that moment when time past and time to come cease and we all live together with peculiar intensity in time present.

Captain Rattle of the can-do pirates who make up the London Symphony Orchestra is more than ready to pick up the pieces and ‘remember what it is to play together’ (photo: Doug Peters / LSO)

By a slightly bitter irony, the programme that he and the LSO were about to launch this autumn was called Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano – an acknowledgment that his parents and mine and their contemporaries lived through an unimaginably convulsive experience during the Second World War. At least they had art – indeed, art suddenly became their lifeline. We all grew up on reports of Dame Myra Hess at the National Gallery, Donald Wolfit doing matinees of King Lear in London’s West End, Sadler’s Wells Ballet dancing round the country, ENSA (the Entertainments National Service Association) entertaining the troops at the front, Laurence Olivier giving his Richard III as the firebombs whizzed and hissed through the night air. It’s what we were put on this earth to do. But we’ve all been grounded. And it’s far from clear how we’ll take off again.

‘It does strike me that for all of us part of the problem is that it involves reimagining what the world might be,’ says Rattle. ‘Many of my colleagues feel that as with a magic switch it’ll just go back to what it was.’ The crucial factor is the distance we are all being instructed to place between ourselves and our fellow human beings, whether on stage or in the audience. A week or two before the interview, the city of Vienna declared that the performing arts would resume their work, starting with rehearsals. There would, however, be certain restrictions – all the actors must maintain a distance of two metres from one another, there must be no singing or ‘excessive speaking’. Those rehearsals never happened [though the Vienna Philharmonic and State Opera eventually resumed rehearsals and performances in June]. For orchestral musicians, proximity, ensemble, the ability to hear each other are all part of the essence of their work. It is hard to see a way forward, until such time as the holy grail of the vaccine might appear, hovering in mid-air.

‘For all of us, part of the [post-Covid] problem is that it involves reimagining what the world might be’ – Sir Simon Rattle

As it happens, as we speak, Rattle, a little to his own astonishment, has two concerts lined up, one of them in Munich with the Bavarian RSO in an ingenious programme: Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis in one half and the Mozart Gran Partita in the second – with everyone apart from percussion getting a crack of the whip. The event is billed as a Geisterkonzert, ghostly because there is no audience, which is no novelty for a radio orchestra, of course, but Rattle has since reported that it had an intensity of atmosphere like nothing he’s ever known. A little later, he’s in Prague with the Czech Philharmonic at the Rudolfinum. We speak again after it: this time he is wildly excited. There were 65 players in the orchestra, alternating with a student orchestra. And they were not distanced: everybody had been tested. They did Mahler, Berio, Dvořák – the Op 72 set of Slavonic Dances spread out over the evening. ‘There was an audience of 500 all wearing masks,’ he says, ‘sitting near to each other, sitting in a block. Afterwards they were shaking hands! I was prepared for the occasional hug, but handshaking! It was almost like exposing yourself. The guy who arranged all this came up to me and said: “We’re so looking forward to having you and the LSO playing Mahler’s Sixth in May.” I laughed. But then I thought, “Will we be allowed to rehearse it in England?”’

Rattle points out that even two months is a long time. In fact, both of these concerts were arranged just two weeks before they happened. But then the can-do spirit, so quintessentially characteristic of him (one of his contemporaries at the Royal Academy of Music remembers the 17-year-old putting his head round the door of the canteen and shouting, ‘I’ve found a free room. Anyone want to rehearse Bruckner Seven?’), falters a bit. ‘How will we resume our work? We were all taking so many aeroplanes. I feel that this is going to be a very rare privilege. The LSO makes – wait for it – 45 per cent of its income from international touring.’ A pause as he peers into the abyss. Then he’s off again, eyes newly bright, tail bushier than ever: ‘We’ve been talking with the people at the Royal Albert Hall, who are finding it incredibly hard to make the right kind of distance between people in that gigantic space. And we’ve adapted our rehearsal rooms at St Luke’s. The LSO are wonderful can-do pirates: we can have not a full orchestra, but almost 50 people in that space – they’ve worked out the direction everybody moves in and out of it, there are portaloos in there, distant filming equipment. People are going to be incredibly creative. It does look like in August (later rather than sooner) we’ll at least be able to be in a room together or at least a good proportion of us, so that we can do it – remember what it is to play together.’

Rattle directs the LSO and Gerald Finley as the Forester in Peter Sellars’s semi-staged The Cunning Little Vixen recorded at the Barbican Hall, London, in June 2019 (photo: Mark Allan)

Rattle’s entry in Wikipedia baldly states, under the heading Occupation, ‘Conductor of classical music (active 1970–present)’. Man and boy, he’s been conducting – with a brief interlude at the University of Oxford, and a little time out for compassionate leave – for 50 years, and he’s still aching for it. Being suddenly put out of work is hateful for all musicians, but for a conductor it’s a particularly devastating thing, because you can’t practise. Your daily experience is of standing in front of up to a hundred hugely talented and properly temperamental individuals, convincing them of your view of the music, making a thousand small but crucial adjustments, all the while keeping the collective psychology buoyant and ready for the concert itself, marshalling the adrenalin so that it informs everything but doesn’t swamp it. Not doing that leaves a massive and painful hole in a person’s life. What, I wonder, has he been doing during lockdown. ‘Exploring pieces I’ve missed. Like Mendelssohn’s Elijah, which to my horror I’d actually never heard (apart from little bits badly done, of course), and I’d written it off, but it’s wonderful, and now, of course, I feel desperately ashamed.’ He’s on a roll. ‘Dvořák’s American Suite, which he wrote in America and really sounds like American music or what he would have imagined American music should sound like.’

There’s a pause as we contemplate a still largely ungraspable future. ‘Shall we talk about The Cunning Little Vixen?’ I say. ‘From another world!’ he cries. And indeed, the live recording is based on performances given at the Barbican last June, when ‘pandemic’ was just a bogey word dragged out when editors needed a scary story to liven up the science pages. The piece was presented in a not universally admired semi-staged production by Rattle’s regular collaborator Peter Sellars; they had done it in Berlin before, in 2017, when Sellars described the opera as ‘the favourite piece of music of Simon Rattle. He loves it more than Beethoven’s Ninth.’ Certainly he has conducted it more. ‘When I was 20 it was put on at the Academy with Steuart Bedford conducting it, and there I was in the orchestra playing the celesta, conducting the offstage chorus, playing cards with the harp player when we had too many pages of rests.’ He assisted Bedford, and it was, he says, the piece that most made him want to be involved in opera. ‘And then – wow! – two years later, in 1977, it was Glyndebourne. I conducted it there and on tour, and then at the Royal Opera House, where Sacha – my eldest son, who is now 36 and a professional clarinettist – and I made our professional ROH debuts together.’ Sacha sang the young frog in the last scene. ‘He was six. We went together hand in hand on the Tube, he would go to the kids’ dressing room and at the very end of the opera, there on stage, suddenly, was the family member of the next generation, life going on – which is absolutely what that opera is like.’

‘The Cunning Little Vixen is about what a terrible mess humans make of their lives, how unnatural our living is’ – Sir Simon Rattle

This disc release seems uncannily timely – now, when we have no choice but to address the question of how to renew ourselves. ‘Especially when nature is everywhere these days in lockdown,’ says Rattle. ‘The little mice are all over the place – they’re basically strolling past us. Look, the piece is deeply about what a terrible mess human beings make of their lives and how unnatural our living is. It took me, oh, more than 25 years to persuade Peter to do the piece, because he, like many people, had the feeling that this is a light-hearted piece, that it has kids in mind. It’s actually one of the darker pieces I’ve ever worked on. I find it profoundly moving and beautiful – a lot of the music reduces me to tears.’ Me too. I was at the dress rehearsal of that Royal Opera House production, and was diverted, shocked and touched by it, as I have been in some measure by every production of it I’ve ever seen and every recording I’ve ever heard. But this new one is different. The last act is simply overwhelming, both in its humanity and in its ecstatic embrace of the natural world. Partly, this is due to the fine individual performances of Lucy Crowe and, unforgettably, Gerald Finley, whose Forester takes his already extraordinary career to yet another new height. ‘Working with Gerry, both Peter and I came to the same conclusion – young Robert De Niro. And meeting him you’d have no suspicion that that creature was there – but my God, is there a volcano in there!’

Beyond even that is the contribution of the orchestra – nearly half the score is, after all, purely orchestral. The Berlin players in the video of the same semi-staged production at the Philharmonie play, as Sellars says, gloriously, superbly, though Janáček has not really been in their veins. ‘They found it very difficult,’ says Rattle, ‘but they absolutely loved it to pieces.’

And they have completely mastered it, and so beautifully do they perform it that one starts to hear the composer’s influences, making it feel like a piece that we know very well. The same is true of the Vienna Philharmonic under Charles Mackerras. With the LSO it is different – they seem to have just discovered it and to be in a state of enraptured amazement with its originality. Their playing is of breathtaking electricity and vitality; it’s like young love. ‘Part of the joy of working with an orchestra like the LSO is the immediacy with which they can grasp something. When we did The Cunning Little Vixen I realised that they completely understood how this music dances, that they related to the strangeness of it and the intensity and the humour. I was profoundly surprised and moved at how deep that connection was. Almost nobody in the orchestra had played in Janáček’s operas before. And before we’d done the performances, we decided that we would do all of them and record them all, and make a new cycle of these extraordinary pieces – though now it has to be delayed until the world has returned to normal.’

One of the things that Sellars did was to banish any animal imagery from the show. ‘Peter said, “I’ll do it for you if you don’t insist on there being any fur.” And I thought that was fair enough.’ But equally influential on Rattle was Sellars’s insistence on the darkness in the piece. The ROH production of 1990 was directed by Bill Bryden. Rattle had asked him to do it having seen his radical presentation of the medieval English mystery plays at London’s National Theatre, a production that was earthy, communal, folk-like, rough-edged – all qualities that Rattle felt would take the opera away from any incipient tweeness. The opera made a rich and touching evening, with a wonderful cast headed by Lillian Watson, Thomas Allen and Robert Tear. It was sung in English, very much the norm for productions of the time in England, and it seemed somehow to link up to the native tradition, to the mystery plays themselves, and the mummers’ plays, and ultimately A Midsummer Night’s Dream – as one can hear on the still excellent recording made of it. (The adaptation of the translated text was by Rattle himself). It was not lacking in the darkness that Sellars so clearly discerns in the piece, but it had little of the swift, terrible savagery of the new recording. No great orchestra does savagery like the LSO.

The work is indeed steeped in blood – as was the author of the remarkable novel, Liška Bystrouška (‘Vixen Little Sharp-Ears’), on which it is based. Rudolf Tešnohlídek’s brutal father was a horse-slaughterer; the smell of the eviscerated animals permeated the family home. Tešnohlídek’s first wife shot herself in his presence not long after they were married; he was twice tried for her murder and twice acquitted. Inspired by cartoon sketches, he started writing about the vixen in 1920 and it was a huge success. He was enchanted by Janáček’s opera (premiered in 1924), which follows the book very closely, drawing text from it. But darkness increasingly enveloped him, and, sitting at the desk of the office in which he wrote the original instalments of the story, Tešnohlídek shot himself through the chest, dying almost immediately. Both his book and the masterful libretto – made by Janáček himself, who showed unerring dramaturgical instinct – give us nature, red in tooth and claw. The first words uttered by the adorable little vixen, who has just spotted the frog, are: ‘Mummy! Mummy! What’s that? Can I eat it?’

Janáček made his own contribution to the bloodshed: he has the poacher shooting the vixen, an event which does not occur in Tešnohlídek’s story. It is utterly shocking, but like everything else in the piece, and throughout Janáček’s work, the agony and the ecstasy coexist; only a few pages after the vixen’s death, the Forester is revisiting the place in the forest where he courted his wife and is overwhelmed by its beauty. ‘Jak je les divukrásn!’ – ‘How splendid the forest is!’ – he cries, and the pantheistic rapture of it somehow absorbs and subsumes the loss of the vixen, because it is part of the great cycle of renewal: even the cheeky frog at the very end of the opera, it turns out, is the grandson of the one we met at its beginning. The work is a song of the earth, ‘the mother who nourishes us all’, as Tešnohlídek says; we are in the realm of Mahler’s ‘Liebens, Lebens trunk’ne Welt’. It’s small wonder that Janáček asked for this final scene of The Cunning Little Vixen to be played at his funeral. The new recording realises all this more vividly, more viscerally and in more detail than any performance I have ever heard, a deeply inspired conjunction of an orchestra, a fine cast, a provocative director and a conductor in direct, almost primitive, contact with the music.

On the subject of renewal, I’m reluctant to ask Rattle about the prospects for the new concert hall, but it is so much a part of the palpable excitement that has been fuelling the LSO since he became Music Director that I can’t duck the issue. ‘Will it be delayed?’ ‘Er, yes,’ he says, facetiously. ‘Look, this is not at the forefront of anybody’s mind at the moment. The chances of it happening are diminished greatly. What is very interesting, however, is that the City of London is still completely behind it, although they’d now like us to look at the idea of a commercial development with a concert hall inside it – something that has worked very well in other places in the world. What kind of commercial development the other side of this is another matter – they still want the Culture Mile. Probably we will have to adapt the idea. Who knows? This is not something to give up on.’ He is more urgently concerned with the orchestra’s pioneering outreach work: ‘Listen, the LSO works with 10 of the poorest London boroughs, in the musical schools there. This has been part of our work for more than 10 years. One of the very best of them, the Bird College Music Service, in Bexley, closed forever a few days ago. It’s gone. This is just the start, and we will have to pick up the pieces. These wonderful young people who might not do anything musical otherwise – how are they going to survive? There’s so much to fight for to keep the whole artistic ecology going – the whole artistic business together. Nobody can imagine that everything will be the same. If we haven’t used this time to think about what we’re going to do …’ He pauses, and rallies. ‘Survival wouldn’t be bad, either,’ says the captain of the can-do pirates – a sentiment that underlies every note of The Cunning Little Vixen, in Rattle’s reading.

Sir Simon Rattle’s Janáček disc is out now on LSO Live. Read the Gramophone review.

This interview originally appeared in the September 2020 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today!