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So it was that at the age of nineteen he entered a conducting competition promoted by the Bournemouth Symphony. His one thought was that if he did reach the finals, he would have the chance of conducting a professional orchestra. He won the competition, though modestly he attributes hissuccess to the fact that everyone else wasnervousand hcwas young and cocky enough not to care. Winning first place gave him two busy and valuable years in Bournemouth as assistant conductor. He remembers going to his first rehearsal with the orchestra and noting that it was the very first time that “I hadn’t myself asked every single player to play, put out the chairs and provide the musie. It suddenly seemed so easy!”

In Bournemouth he did up to forty concerts a year, including schoolsconcerts.ofwhich there were sometimes three in a day. At first he found the experience of working with a professional orchestra profoundly discouraging. As he explains now: “Any decent orchestra will be able to play anything,and mostof the problemsyou will put forward yourself: it issoeasy for a conductor to make things worse, and I certainly did for at least two years " Hebegan todoubt that hewas right for the role of conductor at all,but experience and growing confidence finally broueht him around.

Emerging from that period, he madę his first records. For EMI there was Stravinsky’s Pulcinella (complete) with the Northern Sinfonia, and he conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra for the young Soviet pianist Andrei Gavrilov, in a prize-winning record of Prokofiev’s First Piano Concerto and Ravel'sforthe Left Hand. Healsowent back to the National Youth Orchestra to make a record of Stravinsky\s Rite of Spring. The recording came as a by-product of intcnsive rehearsals with these talented youngsters preparing for a concert performance to be conducted by Picrre Boulez. When Boulez arrived, Rattle’s record had already been madę, and he remembers with somechagrin theexperienceof having a conductor who had infiuenced him morę than any othercontemporary taking over and amending his work. “Boulez. was presented with the orchestra playing it absolutely perfectly,” says Rattle, “but in someone else’s manner. So he proceeded to take it to pieces and it got worse and worse and worse, and then it got betterand betterand better. By the time he had finished, what he had done was so much better than what I had, it was infuriating. I wished I could have madę the recording the next cay.” Amongconductorsof older generations, the one whom Rattle singlesout asa special inspiration is Wilhelm Furtwangler. Rattle remarks that ifyou catch him playing records at homc, it is morę likely to be an old performance in mono than anything rcccnt. “Fm always fascinated to listen,” headmits, “but it's very dangerous when youYe preparing a work. You can pick up the surface without knowing what went into it, without knowing the basis. My generation hearsso many things, and if one thinksof performances on record now, they’re much morę alike than the performances on record of twenty or thirty years ago. As you go on, the parameters of diflerence become smaller and smaller. ‘Now this is the way,’ our tradition says. Each age has its own particular mannerisms.”

rt was the feeling that there was no long tradition of performing practice which gave Rattle a special thrill in tackling the Mahler Tenth Symphony in Deryck Cookescompletion of the fuli five movements. He feels decply that thiswork putsa totally diflerent slanton the composer’semotions in his last yearof life. Particularly revealing is the finale, not an incomplete staiement, Continued on page 14