|
Rattle, the outgoing chief conductor of the prestigious
Berliner Philharmoniker, will take up his new role as music
director of the LSO in September and will be running both
orchestras concurrently for the 2017-2018 season.
"I'm doing the insane thing for one year that I promised I would
never do in my life, run two orchestras at the same time,"
Rattle told a news conference in London.
"I hope the season is like a tapas bar of the type of things I
have in mind," he said of his plans for the LSO.
The season will range from challenging contemporary works and
new commissions by young composers to old favorites by the likes
of Edward Elgar, Leonard Bernstein, Claude Debussy, Dmitri
Shostakovich and Ludwig van Beethoven.
The season will culminate with a performance of German modernist
Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Gruppen", a work for 120 musicians
divided into three orchestras, in the monumental Turbine Hall of
the Tate Modern gallery, a former power station.
An instantly recognizable figure with his shock of white curls,
Rattle, 61, is one of the biggest names in classical music.
He has worked with the LSO many times as a guest conductor. They
reached an audience of hundreds of millions when they performed
Vangelis' "Chariots of Fire" during the opening ceremony of the
London 2012 Olympics with comedy character Mr Bean.
Rattle brings star power to the 113-year-old LSO as it tries to
get a proposed new concert hall off the ground. The project is
costed at 278 million pounds ($345 million), a daunting sum at a
time of government budget austerity and economic uncertainty.
The orchestra is currently based at the Barbican Centre, which
is considered by music lovers to have too small a stage and
flawed acoustics.
"It's very clear that we can do a lot of wonderful work in the
Barbican, but it's also clear that there's about 20 percent of
the repertoire that we can't," Rattle said.
The project to build a new venue suffered a setback in November
when the government pulled funding for a business plan to be
completed by 2018, but the City of London corporation, which
runs the financial district, announced last week it would plug
the gap.
"There are so many questions. It's an if not a when," Rattle
said of the proposed new venue, adding that the project was
"terribly important".
(Editing by Alison Williams)
[© 2017 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2017 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
|
