Sir Simon Rattle

Information about the programme

For his second concert as the new Chief Conductor of the BRSO, Simon Rattle has also chosen a piece that is very dear to him: Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. He once said in an interview that Haydn and Mahler were the two composers for whom he needed no translation; they had come to live with him. Similar to Haydn’s Creation, Mahler’s music is about the whole world – but a world that, only 100 years later, is already showing traces of considerable degradation. Mahler, especially in his Sixth Symphony and its devastating final movement, heralds the totality of human experience in the modern age. It is a work that Rattle considers an “icon,” and with his performance he joins the great Mahler tradition of the BRSO and its former chief conductors. Simon Rattle was already enthusiastic about the music of Betsy Jolas as a student, saying it was “like a late summer day, like a premium wine, full of character and color.” It was only much later that he got to know the French-American composer personally. The new piece by the 97-year-old, who for him remains youthfully wise, will “blend wonderfully with Mahler’s wild, timeless Sixth.”