The Briton billed as the new Rattle
Robin Ticciati is one of the most exciting young conductors on the planet – and he’s about to relocate to Berlin. He talks to Ivan Hewett
Berlin’s music-lovers are getting used to having British maestri making waves in their city. For 16 years it’s been Sir Simon Rattle, at the helm of Berlin’s greatest cultural export, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. He’ll be leaving at the end of the season, but hot on his heels is another Briton, Robin Ticciati, recently appointed head of the Deutsches Symphonie-orchester (German Symphony Orchestra). There are obvious similarities: like Rattle, Ticciati played percussion in the National Youth Orchestra, has wild, untameable hair and has about him something of an “English sprite,” as the German composer Hans Werner Henze once described Rattle. At the tender age of 34, Ticciati is already shaping up to be the likeliest successor to Rattle as Britain’s most exciting conductor.
Ticciati has rapidly made his mark in Berlin. Within weeks of arriving he had conducted “Symphonic Mob”, in which 1,000 amateurs played alongside his own orchestra inside Berlin’s biggest shopping mall. His second concert took place in a disused power station, where Ticciati and the orchestra appeared alongside electronica composer Moritz von Oswald. Will there be more of this? “Absolutely, but I also want to find deeper ways of connecting with schools and young people,” says Ticciati. “These big one-off projects are glitzy and exciting, but you only see the children once, so what effect is it really having? I want to find ways of keeping the contact going throughout the year. Are we re-imagining the music in a way that brings it alive for a new audience?”
Like Rattle, Ticciati, who grew up in Barnes, has a huge admiration for his adopted city. “Culture and classical music is seen as an integral part of life here. The Mayor of Berlin and Angela Merkel often come to the Philharmonie to hear concerts.” Consider the unlikely prospect of seeing Theresa May in thrall to the London Philharmonic at the Royal Festival Hall and the general political indifference in the UK for the arts, and you start to understand the reason for Ticciati’s enthusiasm. “And the orchestra here is fantastic,” he continues. “It has a combination of a very solid German symphonic tradition with a total openness to new ways of thinking. To contribute, I felt I had to engage with as wide a palette of music as possible, all the way from the French 18th century to Thomas Adès.”
Ticciati is one of the most soughtafter young conductors on the planet
– a startling achievement given that he has never had any formal conducting training, instead learning on the job through a series of assisting stints at Birmingham and Glyndebourne and now holds down the demanding post of Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s music director as well as his Berlin post. More worryingly, given his age, the sheer physical challenge of conducting has already taken its toll. He has fought back problems connected to arthritis in his left hip, and two years ago had to drop out of two productions at Glyndebourne, after a herniated disc left him barely able to walk.
Yet he still has the air of an eager student who lives entirely in a cerebral world of music. When we talk he’s quite happy to leave a minute’s silence while he looks for the right word.
Neither of his parents was musical. Instead, Ticciati has largely shaped his own path. In his teens, while with the National Youth Orchestra, he was already thinking about being a conductor. “I wanted to shape the narrative of the whole piece, at a visceral level. Basically, I just had this urge to wave my arms to the music.” He wrote to Colin Davis to ask for help. “He invited me to sit in on his rehearsals, and that began a 13-year friendship. He taught me so many things. We would spend hours together at his house looking at scores, and I was with him right at the end of his life.”
Rattle became another mentor and friend. At the age of 24 he got his first job, as music director of Glyndebourne Tour. Then came the principal conductorship of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, a job he’s now leaving after nine years. “The Scottish Chamber Orchestra allowed me to find my voice as a conductor in a gentle way,” he says. “We’ve just made a new recording of Brahms’s four symphonies, and because we know each other so well we could treat the music intimately.”
These days Ticciati isn’t exactly slowing down, but he has learnt to take life more calmly. “When your career is starting and you’re hungry, it’s so easy just to do more and more,” he says. “But when my back trouble started, it told me that music-making should be part of life and not all of it. So I’m doing less, and I find that’s brought more clarity and space to what I do.”
‘I wanted to shape the narrative of the whole piece. Basically, I just had this urge to wave my arms to music’