Classical - Dermot Clinch on Rattle at the Proms

On his way from Birmingham to Berlin Simon Rattle stopped off at the Proms. He conducted a group of unsmiling central European men who constitute perhaps the world's best, almost certainly its most conservative, orchestra in music some of which they very probably hate. This was not the orchestra Rattle has just been appointed chief conductor of. That is the Berlin Philharmonic. This was the one from Vienna.

Rattle did not exactly conduct all the time. Sometimes he bent his knees, puffed his cheeks and mimed a straw-chewing yokel, to encourage a proportionate rustic attitude in his players. That was especially during Beethoven's "Pastoral" Symphony. During the pizzicato interlude in Mahler's Second Symphony, "The Resurrection", he dropped his hands to his sides and encouraged his band just to pluck 'n' swing: a gesture of cool neglect that backfired when a couple of violins lost the thread and ruined the precious Viennese ensemble, but which succeeded hands down in its intention of lightening the orchestral mood as if by magic.

So much of what Rattle does is sweetly impeccable. Wasn't it impeccable, with this orchestra, to have just one encore up his sleeve, and that a polka with a title meaning "Long Live the Hungarian Nation"? Wasn't the contemporary Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag's small, angry, guitar-filled Grabstein fur Stephan a perfect curtain-raiser for Mahler's vast, baggy, angry Second Symphony? And wasn't it teasingly, wonderfully impeccable to programme Ravel's La Valse, a mordant French commentary on the Austrian dance that has for so many years provided the Vienna Philharmonic's staple nourishment, as the mainstay of the first of his two appearances with the orchestra?

The music-making itself was curiously less immaculate. At times it even disappointed. Perhaps it is Rattle's deep association with period-instrument orchestras, his absorption in style, his laudable ingrained need to sharpen up old, familiar sound-worlds, that can leave the large picture ignored, left to look after itself.

There were ravishing, stylish solos from the orchestra's lead flute and violin; unsurpassable grace and fullness from massed strings; superb, dramatic storm and wonderful, glowing, Rubens-toned thanksgiving for its passing in Beethoven's "Pastoral". But, between Ravel's vividly imagined orchestral flurries, tension sagged. In Mahler the hammer blows came as if out of nowhere. And Beethoven was presented with such presence and energy that we lost, at times, our foothold in the larger symphonic journey.

This is perhaps the modern way: the recording studio way. Why did the traditionalist Berlin Philharmonic - Furtwangler's orchestra, von Karajan's orchestra - choose Rattle to lead them in the first years of the next millennium in preference to the traditionalist Daniel Barenboim? Because Rattle is modern. Barenboim may be one of the most inspired musicians of our day. But does he have the savvy, or the wit, to make observations like Rattle's in a recent interview, that the French Baroque composer Rameau's notes inegales "are exactly the same as Ellington's swung notes . . . that Rameau moves like jazz, it moves swung"?

Rattle is a natural pedagogue, with a mission to explain. He thrives on learning and on presenting what he learns through the prism of his enthusiasms. This month, he argues for the hot, Romantic, virtues of Karol Szymanowski's little-known opera King Roger, by releasing a new and rather stunning CD of it. This month, too, he follows his nose into an energetic CD of Leonard Bernstein's Wonderful Town. For these reasons, too, en route during a performance of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, say, Rattle will stop - never literally as yet - to indicate this extraordinary harmonic moment or that toweringly vivid outburst and to press on us all, if we didn't know it already, the fantastic things Beethoven is actually capable of doing.

Relaxed listening? Not always. But it is Rattle: the conductor whose 18 years with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra turned them into one of the country's finest bands - in his hands, at least - and him into the most valuable conducting property around. He will teach the relaxed traditionalists of Berlin a lot. They, in their suave, upper-crust way, will no doubt also teach him.

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