Simon Rattle

Over a distinguished career that encompassed lengthy associations with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor Simon Rattle earned acclaim as one of the foremost figures in his field. Although his primary focus remained symphonic repertoire, he also directed significant operatic stagings.

Born in Liverpool on January 19, 1955, Rattle began piano, violin, and percussion lessons in childhood. He performed as a percussionist with the Merseyside Youth Orchestra and later joined Britain’s National Youth Orchestra. Conducting drew him early, and by his mid-teens he had taken up the baton, establishing the Liverpool Sinfonia at age 15. He completed studies at the Royal Academy of Music, receiving his diploma in 1974 at nineteen and capturing first prize in that year’s John Player International Conductors’ Competition. The award secured him an assistant conductor role with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra together with American guest engagements, among them an appearance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1979.

Rattle joined the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1980 as principal conductor and artistic advisor, assuming the additional title of music director in 1990. Under his leadership the ensemble gained wider visibility through tours across Europe, the Americas, and East Asia while forging an extended recording partnership with EMI. From 1977 onward he also conducted opera at Britain’s Glyndebourne Festival, and beginning in 1992 he served as principal guest conductor of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. After relinquishing his Birmingham post in 1998 amid British arts-funding reductions, he appeared frequently as a guest with the Berlin Philharmonic in the late 1990s; the orchestra’s musicians subsequently chose him to succeed Claudio Abbado, and he assumed the post in 2002. Though some critics questioned his Berlin years, the players—whose pay he had helped raise—extended his contract until 2018, after which Kirill Petrenko took the podium.

Rattle maintained a prolific recording schedule with the Berlin Philharmonic for EMI, often releasing as many as five albums annually and encompassing a complete Beethoven symphony cycle. In 2016 he led a new production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Returning to Britain in 2017 as conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, he resumed recording on the ensemble’s LSO Live label; his account of Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust appeared in 2019. He was set to step down from the London Symphony in 2023 and assume conductor-emeritus status, the same year he was appointed chief conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. In 2021, referencing Brexit-related obstacles, he sought German citizenship. Among his Grammy awards is the prize for Best Choral Performance for his 2008 recording of Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem; his London Symphony version of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen received a 2022 nomination for Best Opera Recording. By then his discography had grown to roughly 250 entries, reflecting an unusually broad range that extended from Haydn to Duke Ellington. He is especially recognized for his integral traversals of the symphonies of Beethoven, Mahler, and Sibelius. Rattle has married three times; his third wife is mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená, and the couple has three children.