Heart of Berlin to beat in Dublin

An Irish audience is in for a real musical treat as conductor Sir Simon Rattle brings the Berliner Philharmoniker to the National Concert Hall tonight

WHEN SIR SIMON RATTLE steps out onto the stage of the National Concert Hall this evening, it will be a first for everyone concerned. The 53-year-old Liverpool native made his name during 18 fruitful years with the City of Birmingham Symphonic Orchestra, but it is since taking up the baton in Berlin that he has entered the classical stratosphere.

In the six years since then, Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker have attracted superlative praise for their work and tonight Irish audiences have a chance to see what all the fuss is about. "It's a premiere for the orchestra and for myself," he says, adding ruefully: "To my deepest shame, I've never been to Dublin. For a James Joyce lover that really is shameful."

A concert by the Berliner Philharmoniker is never anything less than an event, an act of communion between an extraordinary conductor and an outstanding orchestra. But the Berliner Philharmoniker is so much more than an orchestra: it is as central a part of the German capital as the Brandenburg Gate. Ask about their orchestra and even the most typically bad-tempered native Berliner will melt with pride.

It's understandable in a city where, for over a century, the only constant has been change, destruction and division. The orchestra is one of the city's oldest and greatest treasures.

Self-managing and fiercely independent, the orchestra's musicians choose their conductor - not the other way around. It's a tradition that has had an uncanny effect of picking personalities that reflect the zeitgeist of the capital.

For many Berliners, the arrival of Sir Simon Rattle in 2002 was a symbolic final touch to the rebuilding of the city after unification.

The orchestra's home, a golden circus tent-like structure built in the 1960s, once overlooked the no-man's land between East and West Berlin. Now, without moving an inch, it is situated in the heart of the city centre, and in the centre of people's hearts.

"Music is so much of people's being in Berlin and it always was," says Rattle. "There is the feeling here that every civilised person should somehow have this in their life, in their hearts."

Just how deep the orchestra is anchored in people's hearts was clear last May when a fire broke out on the roof of the concert hall. The fire was headline news and only when it was extinguished, with no serious damage to the hall, did people breathe a sigh of relief. Days later, some 12,000 people came to show solidarity with the orchestra at their first concert since the fire.

The appointment of a new principal conductor is even bigger news: when Rattle arrived in the city six years ago, posters proclaiming "Welcome, Sir Simon!" dangled from every lamppost. For Rattle, it was, he says, a kind of homecoming to one of the world's most discerning musical audiences.

"You really feel the depth of love of music in Berlin. There's an amazing feeling that people here know what's going on," he says. "That's something you become very sensitised to on stage. People have a sense of what is coming next and what has just happened is hard to put into words. You can feel the electricity in the air. The public makes the performance."

FOR FIRST-TIME visitors to Germany, the public displays of classical musical literacy here can be startling. There are long waiting lists for music schools, the politics of the classical world are mainstream news; concert halls and opera houses are always full, even on drizzly Tuesday nights.

Chancellor Angela Merkel is a permanent fixture at the Wagner festival in Bayreuth, one of the few public engagements where her husband joins her. "Every politician in Germany would at least pretend to have an interest in classical music," says Rattle, "the way people elsewhere pretend to have an interest in football."

The Berliner Philharmoniker had humble beginnings, founded in 1882 with its first home in a disused, converted roller-skating rink. In 1887 they found their first great conductor in Hans von Bülow, a student of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner, who demanded a previously unheard-of discipline from musicians during lengthy rehearsals.

The first great era lasted until the Nazis rose to power and took control of the orchestra's finances, organisation and repertoire. Jewish orchestra members were purged and performances of "banned" composers such as Hindemith and Mendelssohn resulted in principal conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler being demoted to a "guest" and later banned altogether. He returned after the war and served as conductor until his death in 1954 ushered in the next golden era: the Karajan years.

For 34 years, Herbert von Karajan, the firebrand Austrian conductor, lead the orchestra to new heights of critical and popular success and moved the operation into a new concert hall designed by Hans Scharoun, adjacent to the Berlin Wall. Karajan died three months before the fall of the wall, leaving Italian conductor Claudio Abbado to take up the reigns in the post-unification years.

Since 2002, Rattle has brought sweeping changes to the Philharmoniker, simplifying the bureaucratic structure and securing its financial independence. He has also worked to enlarge the orchestra's repertoire beyond its traditional strengths of composers like Mahler and Brahms, championing modern and more popular works.

That has attracted sniping from German critics who suggest that Rattle's approach is not appropriately heavyweight and has generated friction with the orchestra. It is an understandable observation in a country that has never understood that serious does not always have to be plodding, but one that Rattle brushes off lightly.

"Is anyone really interested in this? The orchestra want to tend the garden of their great German tradition, which is understandable, but they're surprisingly open," says Rattle. "I am what I am. I believe in a wide range of music."

HIS TENURE HAS SEEN THE orchestra open up like never before. In the documentary Trip to Asia, a hit at the Berlin film festival, cameras followed the orchestra on a tour of the Far East, showing like never before the pressures and pleasures of life in a top-rate orchestra.

For Rattle, the film - yet to be released in Ireland - has a candid, confessional quality.

"Every morning when I wake up I have more doubt, that's simply the truth," he says on camera, a remarkable confession from a man at the peak of his powers.

Asked about it now, he confirms with a laugh that doubt works in his life as a control mechanism. "Some people can't live with self-doubt, I just know that I could not function without it," he says.

In the film, orchestra members tell affecting personal stories, of difficult childhoods and trying teenage years, and how all found a calling in music. "Isn't it amazing?" says Rattle, who describes himself as an "uncomfortable, overweight intense boy". "Almost everyone from the orchestra in the film admits that they were the strangest person in their class."

The power of music in youth development is what drives Rattle's other big innovation in Berlin, an extensive outreach programme of concerts, tours and talks. One of the first of these projects, a collaboration with choreographer Royston Maldoom and Berlin school children on a concert performance of The Rite of Spring, was preserved in the inspiring documentary Rhythm is It!

Earlier this year saw another such choreographed performance of German composer Heiner Goebbels's Surrogate Cities, drawing on works including that of Irish-German writer Hugo Hamilton. The projects have attracted huge praise, in particular from the young people involved, but Rattle is modest about his role. For him it's about giving people an opportunity to experience something and make up their own minds about it.

"It's like feudal farming, you don't know which seed is going to germinate. Already, we see a lot of things coming back to us. We notice lives are changed," he says.

There's an element of orchestra self-interest in the enterprise, too. There is no future for the "high priests" of the Berliner Philharmoniker, he says, if they don't find their "evangelists" today and their audience of tomorrow.

"There are so many different things out there capturing young people's attention today. We just need them to know we are there - as well as, not instead," says Rattle. "You cannot force feed it to children. It doesn't work with vegetables and it doesn't work with music."

• Tonight's performance by the Berliner Philharmoniker in the National Concert Hall will be broadcast live in Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin at 9.15pm. The screening will be fully seated and booking is essential.