Four years ago, Berlin, its Philharmonic and its music establishment fell head over heels in love with Simon Rattle, writes Martin Kettle.
Now they are falling out of love with him. Die Welt's music critic Manuel Brug recently put into words what a lot of the musical world, and not just in Berlin, has been saying in private - that the Rattle magic has worn thin and that the performances don't quite do the business. Brug's powerful commentary is pretty explicit: the Berliners should have chosen Daniel Barenboim rather than Rattle.
Was this souring inevitable? Probably.
The Berlin Philharmonic is rooted in tradition. Rattle, though a respecter of tradition, is an innovator. That is why the Philharmonic themselves chose him. They wanted a new kind of leader who would break from the great past and would give the restored German capital city a musical presence fitted to the 21st century not the 20th or the 19th.
Rattle, charismatic and with a towering achievement behind him in Birmingham, offered a new skin for the great orchestra. The problem has not been that Rattle has failed to deliver on the newness. It is that he has disappointed in the tradition about which the Berliners are themselves so ambivalent.
The orchestra has delivered revelatory performances of the great Austro-German traditional works for more than a century, under Furtwängler, Karajan and Abbado. So far, Rattle seems not to have come up to snuff in that department. Brug singles out his failure in Bruckner - a marginal criticism in this country, but central to Berliners.
I can certainly say I was unmoved by Rattle's Bruckner 9th when he conducted the Berliners in it in London a few years ago (a Barenboim performance of the same work with the same orchestra in the same hall a few years previously was one of the great concerts of my life) - so a lot will be riding on the Bruckner 7th that Rattle is bringing to the Proms this summer.
In Britain the press builds them up then knocks them down. In Germany it is different. Brug seems to write more in sorrow than in anger. But there is no disputing that more questions are being asked about Rattle's music-making now than at any time in the past. But they are questions that go to the heart of what we want from classical music itself.
