Conductors under attack

First Simon Rattle, and now James Levine: it's been a bad week for hugely-admired conductors being sniped at in the press, all the more so for me personally, since these are both at the very top of my list of favourite living maestros. So what gives?

The attack on Rattle has been led by Axel Brüggemann, who wrote an article for Welt am Sonntag headlined "Simon von Rattle". The basic thesis seems to be that Rattle, despite starting off wonderfully, is now lapsing into the authoritarian excesses of his feared-and-revered predecessor Herbert von Karajan. The famous marriage between Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic seems to have hit a rocky patch, according to Brüggemann, who says in his wonderfully German way that "while Rattle romps expressively on the podium, the Philharmonic musicians sometimes tend to play as inconsequentially as if they were a wife reaching to the fridge to get out a beer for her husband".

The Guardian article also notes that the Rattle/Berlin Proms last year were "underwhelming" and "bland", while his Idomeneo at Glyndebourne also received mixed reviews. That said, he seems to be fighting back with the scheduling for this year's Proms: Beethoven's Ninth on the Sunday, followed by Messiaen's magnificent Éclairs sur l'Au-delà... on the Monday – the kind of piece which would have brought Karajan out in a cold sweat.

But it's certainly possible that the Berlin Philharmonic, despite loving Rattle as a guest conductor for many years before he took over as music director, is now having institutional second thoughts. Perhaps the two are more suited for a torrid affair than for a decades-long marriage. (And the relationship could conceivably last that long: Rattle is only 48, after all, and conductors are legendarily long-lived.)

While conductors do often get better with age, after all, it's only natural to expect the more mercurial conductors, like Rattle, to have some problems with consistency. And while Rattle did wonders with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, he was not burdened at the time with the sky-high expectations that accompanied him to Berlin, nor with the institutional inertia of a band as heavy and storied as the Berlin Phil.

My guess is that if Rattle is having some difficulties right now – and really I have little reason to believe that he is – he will not only overcome them, but turn the experience to his advantage. Something of a prodigy, his rise in the music world has been steady and largely obstacle-free, and as horn player Howard Howard (really) says of James Levine, "personal hardship tends to make more of an artist – I think you hear the difference between someone who has had a happy, secure life and someone who has had some misery."

I'm less sanguine about Levine, however. I'm glad I saw him quite a lot when I first moved to New York seven years ago, because thinking back to more recent performances, I've not felt the same kind of fire. And the complaints certainly have the ring of truth about them: that, conducting sitting down, he gradually slumps, over the course of long operas to the point at which players at the back of the pit can't even see the baton any more – which, in any case, he barely bothers to move.

To say that "my major communication tool always is my eyes" is all well and good, but that's true of Rattle as well, and he certainly uses his hands to great effect the whole time. I'm actually a fan of minimalist conductors who don't jump up and down and get all excited, but the one thing they all have in common is that they beat time very clearly. Levine seems to be using his orchestra's depth of experience as a crutch which allows him to put minimal physical energy into his performances, and I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Rattle and Levine both, of course, are greatly praised by the managers of their orchestras, but such praise can become self-defeating when you have the managing director of the Boston Symphony say that Levine's "energy level is still way beyond the norm". That's clearly not true: for one thing, he conducts even the shortest programmes sitting down. In general, praise only means something when it's conceivable that the person doing the praising could conceivably say anything else, and that doesn't seem to be the case with respect to the people quoted in these articles.

Now that Levine's contract has been extended to 2011, in fact, I'm a little bit worried about the future of the Met Orchestra – probably the best orchestra in the USA. Valery Gergiev has been getting decidedly mixed reviews of late: it seems he might have the same strain of Russian hubris that afflicts people like Yuri Bashmet, who start believing their own hype to the point at which they think they're above things like rehearsals and preparatory work. If neither Levine nor Gergiev is performing at the height of his abilities, there's certainly a risk that the Met Orchestra will start a long, slow decline into complacency.

Posted by Felix at 13:08 EST