LSO/Rattle

Barbican Hall, London

Rating:

The Barbican Hall in the City of London has just celebrated its 40th birthday. A festive performance of Haydn’s Creation was supposed to have been conducted by the London Symphony’s music director Simon Rattle, but he withdrew.

I guess even Rattle, lovingly hailed by some as the Tony Blair of music, couldn’t face celebrating a hall that he kept wanting to replace with a new one over a nearby roundabout (yes, really).

And the City’s refusal to do his bidding has precipitated him, now a proud German, to head off to Munich to take on the Bavarian Radio Orchestra.

I went to the non-celebratory concert he did a few days later. The hall was far from full, and the applause polite, but hardly ecstatic.

The Barbican is comfortable, with well-padded seats, plenty of legroom, a decent acoustic and a beautifully maintained carved wood interior. Rattle had chosen a very varied programme, all of which came across well.

The idea that the hall is seriously deficient acoustically is hard to sustain.

And the sound was especially compelling in the high point of the concert, a remarkable performance of Bartok’s searing Miraculous Mandarin, which showed Rattle, conducting without a score, at his best.

Perhaps the truth is, the Barbican Hall is a scapegoat.

Rattle feels uncomfortable in Brexit Britain and, maybe – who knows – these days his Germanness courses through his veins more warmly than his Britishness. Of course, Rattle will make regular returns in a guest capacity.

But the opportunity the LSO presented to him of reconnecting with a world class British orchestra, and taking it to even greater heights has been lost.

Instead, he is heading back to Germany, to a band that is a permanent number two after Berlin, assuming you place it above the orchestras of Dresden and Leipzig, which many wouldn’t.

And doing that, despite not having made a remarkable success of his 15 years in Berlin.

Does the LSO need Rattle? No. They moved swiftly to take on Antonio Pappano, who is mustard keen to show he isn’t just an opera conductor, and will do well.

By returning to Germany, Rattle has perhaps deprived himself of the chance to end his career on a spectacular high.

He has sold his birthright for a mess of sauerkraut.