First, you can knock Rattle for some of the musical decisions he makes, but not his means of executing them - every gesture considered and to the point, even in the more complex stuff. Valery Gergiev please note: enough with your gurning and flailing already.
As for the repertoire, I am afraid that I am no friend to the Second Viennese School. Music is meant to be enjoyed, not admired, and I just don't like listening to this music enough. I can see that it's very well done for what it is (and Berg in particular was clearly a supremely talented musician); I imagine it would be fun to conduct, and perhaps fun to play. But to listen to I find it ugly, restless and cold.
Schoenberg and his disciples would no doubt have told you they were broadening music's expressive range, and in some of Berg's work that's true (the Violin Concerto; but I can't think of anything else). What they were really doing, however, was chucking the baby out with the bathwater - there's more emotional and psychological contrast in Mozart's simple major and minor triads than than in this music. By excluding tonality more or less completely (and later on by excluding regular rhythm), it painted itself into a very small corner indeed.
Some of the quieter episodes have a kind of chilly beauty, but aside from this what else is there to enjoy? The routine crunching dissonances? Not for me. There is a desperate narrowness of affect; I find the music lacks breadth and contrast, the ability to present the listener with a variety of emotional and psychological landscapes. Even in these early pieces serialism's tell-tale constriction was there - already the reliance on timbre as a means of imparting life and contrast. But timbre is not enough as a constructive device, and there is a meandering quality to the music that I think due to lack of harmonic direction. Harmony without poles lacks magnetism; hence the reliance of legions of 20th Century composers on texture to get them to the finishing line. Hence the ever expanding orchestras and esoteric instruments.
I've always felt too that there was little mileage in the argument that this music was a necessary response to the political times. After all, war, famine and pestilence were not new things; they have always ravaged Europe. And modernism had reared its head in the form of Mahler's Ninth Symphony and Strauss's Elektra long before the Archduke Ferdinand was shot. It was a period in which composers were finding Romanticism unsatisfactory, and looking for other means of expression: Sibelius had already used a simpler, subtler style in his 3rd Symphony (1907); the darkness of his 4th (1911) is attributed to a diagnosis of throat cancer rather than fears of war. Strauss himself put expressionism behind him with Rosenkavalier (1911), and never went back.
No, the truth is surely that the human desire for novelty in the context of what looked like a worn-out idiom was as much responsible for Berg and Webern's experimentation as anything going on in the fields of Flanders; that and a desire to scandalize the conservative Viennese bourgeousie (surely the dreariest of motivations any artist can experience).
Whatever musicologists might say, there is no prescribed correct response to the times you live in. Each of us is free to respond in the way we like. The American critic Joe Queenan once wrote that he had personally responded to the threat of nuclear annihalation by listening to more Bach. I'm with Queenan on this.
In a way the most instructive thing associated with the evening (apart from the sublime Prelude to Act I of Parsifal, which sent me scurrying to the internet to look out the score), was the interview Rattle gave to the BBC in the afternoon. In it he recounted Felix Kok's story (Kok was for many years CBSO leader under Rattle) of turning up one day in 1948 to an orchestral rehearsal in, I think, the Kingsway Hall, London. The players had no idea what they were going to play or with whom. Then the door opened and in walked Wilhelm Furtwangler and Kirsten Flagstad. The music on the stand seemed to consist of four short orchestral pieces. There was no title, and no composer's name on the handwritten parts. However Kok said that as they began to play and Ms Flagstad to sing, they knew they were in the presence of greatness; and as millions of ordinary people have since discovered, the music was by Richard Strauss, and now bears the title Four Last Songs.
