Music Academy of the West musicians rehearse with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Centre in 2019.
“Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra are on a California tour working with music students at Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West,” writes Ronald Blum in Tuesday’s (3/22) Associated Press. “Simon Rattle was getting ready to leave Europe for the first time since the start of the pandemic… ‘It’s kind of a miracle that it’s happening,’ he said. A U.S. tour started Saturday in Palo Alto, continued on to Berkeley and Costa Mesa before three concerts in Santa Barbara this week. The symphony launched its partnership with the academy in 2018 when five section principals spent 10 days teaching and picked a dozen students as fellows to work with the orchestra in London the following January. Rattle did not accompany the company on its summer 2019 trip to California, and then the pandemic disrupted the world…. ‘I have still on my desk a huge pile of programs that we had to change—and then the second change and then fourth,’ he said…. ‘We’ve learned to be more flexible.’ … Rattle became music director of the LSO in 2017 and ends that tenure in 2023, when he [becomes] chief conductor of Munich’s Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.”
