Berlin Philharmonic/Rattle review – all guns blazing on Simon's farewell tour

Royal Festival Hall, London
The fruits of Simon Rattle’s long partnership with the Berlin orchestra were evident in a magisterial Bruckner Ninth and vivid miniatures by Hans Abrahamsen

In 2002, newly installed as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, Simon Rattle brought Bruckner’s unfinished Ninth Symphony to the Festival Hall on one of their first joint visits. The performance was a serious disappointment, wonderfully played – as you would expect, but all on the surface and with little interpretative depth.

What a change the intervening 16 years have wrought. Here, in the first of two London concerts marking Rattle’s departure from Berlin, was a performance for the ages of that same Bruckner symphony. It showed how much Rattle has come to terms with Bruckner during his Berlin years but, above all, it displayed the deep musical rapport between players and conductor that has matured during his long tenure in the German capital.

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