The shoulder of lamb is taking longer to cook than it should, says Sir Simon Rattle, laying out a platter of cherry tomatoes and salami slices for starters. “It’s kind of on its way.”

The lamb can take as long as it likes. The principal conductor and artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra is in the south of France to rehearse The Twilight of the Gods, fourth and final opera of Wagner’s Ring, which they have been presenting at the Aix-en-Provence festival every July since 2006. Rather than face the lunchtime heat and throng of the town, Rattle has invited me to the house he rents on a hill behind – a traditional Provençal villa in secluded grounds, offering long, lofty views over sun-baked countryside.

The scene could be a Cézanne landscape – it has identical shades of green and apricot, the same languorous charm and rambling rusticity – so it comes as no surprise when I learn from Rattle that Cézanne lived on this road. Its prime asset is silence, an antidote to the pressure-cooker effect of Wagner’s unusually long and intense music, which has been occupying an increasing amount of Rattle’s time.

Apart from two empty glasses and a score of Bach’s St Matthew Passion on a garden table, the only sign that the house is occupied is a tricycle and baby chair – Rattle has two young sons with his third wife, the mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozená. (He also has two grown-up sons from his first marriage.)

The little boys, however, are not about to invade our midday peace, as they are holidaying with their mother in her native Czech Republic. And, even if he wanted to, Rattle can’t socialise with the Berlin Philharmonic musicians, who are still giving concerts in Germany. For a couple of weeks the man who sometimes appears to be the world’s most visible conductor is living in glorious isolation.

. . .

So he has found time, between rehearsals with singers, to go shopping: he bought the shoulder of lamb “because they didn’t have a leg”. Rattle’s hands are best known for shaping orchestral sound, but I have been forewarned that he is also a dab hand in the kitchen.

He has taken the trouble to marinate the lamb overnight and cook it on a low heat for four and a half hours. “Thank you, Heston Blumenthal”, he murmurs, bowing to the proprietor of The Fat Duck, the celebrated English restaurant. Rattle pours me a glass of water and we sample the salami. Lunch en plein air has begun.

He blames “this old French oven” for upsetting his timings. A trace of Mistral wafts across our domestic stage-set. Small wonder Rattle, 54, and the Berlin musicians look on their Aix residency as a working holiday.

It is exactly 35 years since the world first took notice of the curly-haired conductor from Liverpool. Aged 19 he won the John Player professional conductors’ competition. Fellow students at London’s Royal Academy of Music had already noted his steely self-assurance, his boundless energy, his love of Mahler. He sought the advice of French composer-conductor Pierre Boulez, signed up with the Harold Holt agency and quickly began working with front-rank orchestras. Aged 24 he was appointed principal conductor of the down-at-heel City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He transformed its fortunes, galvanising the campaign to build its new concert hall. At its 1991 inauguration it was hailed as the finest in Britain.

Rattle’s musical brilliance on the podium and single-mindedness off it impressed politicians, inspired musicians and wowed audiences. After 20 years in Birmingham, London beckoned – but Rattle was not interested. Despite their high artistic reputation, London’s orchestras lead a hand-to-mouth existence and make do with imperfect concert halls. Instead, Rattle played the field and ended up with the biggest prize of all, the Berlin Philharmonic.

It offered a depth of tradition and standard of working conditions no other city could match. Taking up the principal conductorship in 2002, he set about modernising its repertoire, developing its outreach work with schools and ethnic minorities and generally making it less stuffy.

Rattle’s “man of the people” image went down well in Germany but it wasn’t long before critics on both sides of the Channel began to pick holes. They said his performances of the German Romantics, the Berliners’ bread and butter, lacked coherence; he was destroying the orchestra’s unique sound; he had become “the Tony Blair of music”, the implication being that he was an expert communicator rather than an interpreter of depth.

My impression, voiced at the time in the FT, was that Rattle seemed to be approaching Berlin as if it were Birmingham on German soil: he began his tenure with English music, imported an education team from the UK and seemed intent on sidestepping the Berlin Philharmonic’s tradition instead of understanding and nurturing it.

Rattle found the criticism painful. Popping another tomato in his mouth, he lets slip that the reason Lunch with the FT took so long to arrange – more than a year – was that he was stung by what I had written. “That’s why I avoided speaking to you.”

. . .

But last year his Berlin contract was extended to 2018 – an impressive vote of confidence from an orchestra that, unusually, is entirely self-governing while receiving most of its funds from the state. And a visit to the London Proms revealed a man who had matured and mellowed. He had finally begun to learn German. He still struggles to speak it (“anyone less linguistically gifted than me is hard to imagine”, he confesses), but by attempting to do so he had broken an important psychological barrier. His podium gestures were as jubilant as ever, but his Brahms had acquired unmistakable depth.

Sitting across the lunch table, I begin to understand why. Rattle is settling into comfortable middle age. The blue T-shirt may advertise a man still young at heart but the curls are white and thinning. Yesterday’s boy wonder is now older than most of his orchestra. He has begun to slow down, to be slightly less sensitive to criticism.

But there’s another factor at work. Rattle has made his home in Berlin, something not even Herbert von Karajan, his most illustrious predecessor, had done. He lives in one of the city’s leafy quarters and is often seen doing the family shopping in its open-air markets. It’s as if he has gone native. So what has he learned about the Germans?

“People are more subtle and complicated than they are made out to be,” he answers, pouring some of the red wine he has brought outside. Does this mean Germans are not the humourless caricature peddled by England’s tabloid newspapers? Rattle sighs. It wasn’t until his late twenties, he says, after discussing the horrors of the Nazi era with Viennese conductor Rudolf Schwarz, a Belsen survivor who resumed his career in Birmingham after the war, that he became aware of the complexities of national identity.

“The age-old enmity between the two countries may have been important to a certain generation, but it’s a myth of the past. “The Weltmeisterschaft” – Rattle uses the German word for the football World Cup, hosted by Germany in 2006 – “made a huge difference. Germans showed they could give a party. It gave the place a different feeling, a sense of confidence.

“Germans have an understanding of history and cannot allow themselves to forget it. It may be a curse but in some ways it’s a blessing. It makes them cautious. American economists can’t understand the German fear of inflation and the effects of inflation when dealing with the world economic crisis.

“They wonder why Germany pursues such a different course – ‘Why can’t they agree with us?’. I would have thought it was fairly obvious. These are intelligent people but they show a lack of historical awareness [of the inflationary pressures that brought Hitler to power].”

I follow Rattle into the kitchen, where he pronounces the lamb ready, serving it with an aubergine ragout spiced with garlic, ginger, onions and Thai fish sauce. We carry our plates back outside and, digging into his delicious ragout, I ask whether life in Germany has given him a different perspective on England.

“As a nation we English tend to be self-deprecating, looking down on ourselves. We’re insular but also flexible, whereas in Germany it’s a case of besser wissen – we know better. That’s very Deutsch. People are never frightened to tell you what you’re doing wrong, in a way that would never happen in England.”

How does this affect his relationship with the orchestra? Language plays a huge role, he replies. “German sounds so clear and articulated but it’s not allusive. My language teacher came to some of my rehearsals and told me afterwards that I didn’t know how to talk to Germans. “You can’t say vielleicht [perhaps] and ‘don’t you think that ...?’. They have none of our layers of politeness, and you have to be careful how you use humour, because Germans often take irony as sarcasm.”

. . .

Rattle ponders the challenges of running a German institution. In England, he says, people like to be indecisive and then, after making up their mind, they can be relied on to go through with it. Germans, by contrast, like to be decisive and then change their mind.

“The necessity for rules and strictness is a way of dealing with an enormously powerful impulse: Germans are among the most emotional people on the planet. Maybe it has to do with the fact that as a nation they are always drawn back to nature and the forest.”

Where, then, does the concept of German precision come from? Rattle believes it is a self-imposed correction to the German psyche. “Without it there would be complete chaos, because everyone is so emotional. That’s one of the reasons the Berlin Philharmonic plays as it does – volcanic emotions from deep within. There are lots of nationalities in the orchestra now, but they are there because they are attracted to that type of temperament.” All the more extraordinary, I suggest, that they should have chosen an Englishman as conductor. Rattle nods. Coming from a culture of inhibition and restraint, where musicians must be encouraged to give of themselves emotionally, he faced “a culture where you have to tame emotions and channel them; it has been fascinating to find our way round each other. In many ways we are an odd couple”.

Time for pudding. Instead of the summer berry tart I have brought, which we agree might be better shared with his singers later in the day, Rattle produces a bowl of sliced melon – the perfect antidote to Mediterranean heat.

What does a conductor actually do, beyond coordinating and motivating musicians? “I have no satisfactory answer because whatever you say, the opposite would also be true. It’s to do with controlling and not controlling, allowing and not allowing. It’s essentially to do with balance – responding to each other and finding where that balance lies.”

Rattle suggests a coffee. “Every drug helps,” he says, alluding to the prospect of a long and arduous Wagner rehearsal 20 minutes away at the Aix theatre.

We talk about two ambitious Berlin Philharmonic initiatives – its digital concert hall and the dance programme Rattle pioneered with youngsters from the city’s ethnic minority communities.

The word “relevance”, he says, is misleading when applied to classical music. “I think that, strangely, all this new technology will deliver more of it to more people. I’m optimistic for the future. Orchestras are still operating an old model, and how much needs to be changed is not clear, but there’s enormous clarity to the concept of people coming together in quiet, with time to listen. The largest percentage of what’s important about classical music is that it simply takes time.”

A car rolls up; it’s time to go to rehearsal. On the drive into town he muses that, even after seven years at the helm of the Berlin orchestra, “we know it’s just the start of the journey”. I quote a German saying inspired by eastern philosophy, Der Weg ist das Ziel (the journey is the destination). “Yes, never permit yourself to arrive. Maybe it’s a weakness.”

And then we do arrive – at the theatre. Rattle is through the stage door in an instant, ready to face the volcanic emotions that his hands, his temperament, will surely control.

Sir Simon Rattle conducts the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra’s end-of-season concert at the Berlin Waldbühne on June 21. The Aix-en-Provence festival begins on July 3. Rattle’s new recording of the Brahms symphonies will be released by EMI in September.

Andrew Clark is the FT’s chief classical music critic.

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Simon Rattle’s house
Provence

Cherry tomatoes and salami
Shoulder of lamb
Aubergine ragout
Melon
Château Yon-Figeac 2003 x 2 glasses
Jug of water
Coffee

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Orchestral manoeuvres on the web

Call up the website of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Click on “any time any place” and you’ll see Sir Simon Rattle close up, conducting the final movement of Brahms’ First Symphony. Every flicker of his eyes, every wave of his baton is there, making you feel as if you are there too – not 15 rows back but invisibly roaming over the front desks of the orchestra.

It’s not a rehearsal, it’s not a mock-up – it’s a high-definition film of a recent concert. Pay an online fee of €9.90 ($13.76) and you can watch the Berlin Philharmonic’s next indoor concert as it takes place (August 28) on your laptop or at home. It doesn’t matter whether you are in Tokyo, Toronto or Tunbridge Wells. For €89, you can sign up for a season of live concert transmissions.

The Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall is classical music’s most advanced response to the digital revolution. Since the Philharmonia of London did the first live classical webcast in 2005, orchestras have realised that their potential audience is vastly bigger than the 2,000 that fills the average concert hall.

For classical music, the implications of digital technology are huge. It’s not just a process of disseminating video clips to a global audience or selling downloads of in-house recordings. It’s about giving novice listeners a feeling for the concert experience in a way that encourages them to go out and sample the real thing.

The costs are considerable. You need an experienced director and crew, as well as camera equipment that does not distract the audience. Musicians usually expect higher fees. Editing time is extra, as are publishers’ rights. Filming a single concert can cost up to £30,000.

The Digital Concert Hall, sponsored by Deutsche Bank, cost more than €1m. Thanks to the Berlin Phil’s international reputation, and its sophisticated digital facilities, enough music lovers worldwide have signed up to make it financially viable.

No other orchestra has persuaded enough people to pay, but many provide free clips. The Philharmonia has created a series of high-quality films around its “Vienna City of Dreams” festival, and its footage of Gustavo Dudamel rehearsing Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony had 28,000 hits on YouTube.

Chaz Jenkins, head of LSO Live, the London Symphony Orchestra’s record label, sees digital technology primarily as a promotional tool. “Watching a concert online is a non-intimidating way to experience classical music. You see how it all works, because you can have cameras within the orchestra.It’s a big growth thing for the future.”

www.lso.co.uk
www.berliner-philharmoniker.de/en
www.philharmonia.co.uk/city_of_dreams