Simon Rattle: From Birmingham to Berlin

The biography of Simon Rattle, the new music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, updated for paperback publication.

Still in his mid-forties, Simon Rattle is a musician for the new century: he is equally at home conducting Beethoven symphonies, the twentieth-century repertory with which he made his reputation with the City of Birmingham Orchestra, new works he has commissioned, jazz by Ellington and Bernstein, or baroque opera with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. His range is unique, his achievements already remarkable. As Rattle takes on the music directorship of the Berlin Philharmonic, Nicholas Kenyon talks to him as well as to his friends and colleagues about what has made Rattle one of the most powerful musical communicators of our time--and looks at the challenges that await him in Berlin.

Nicholas Kenyon has been director of the BBC Proms since 1996 and was formerly a music critic for The New Yorker, The Times (London), and The Observer (London). He lives in London.