Last Night: Rattle's rapturous final symphony

Sir Simon Rattle City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

THERE WERE tears all round as Sir Simon Rattle stepped down as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, after 18 years at the helm.

Rattle, 43, took over the orchestra in 1980 as a callow youth of 25.

It was his brilliant flair for programme planning and uniquely intelligent interpretations of 20th century music - from Ravel, Mahler and Sibelius to Schoenberg, Webern and rising young British hopefuls such as Thomas Ades - which earned the CBSO an international reputation of a kind unknown since Pierre Boulez and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the late Sixties.

Typically, Rattle went out with a bang. Three bangs, actually. Such were the queues for his last concerts on Saturday and Sunday at Birmingham's Symphony Hall that the CBSO flung wide the doors of its final rehearsal to let in an eager public.

And what a bonanza of an occasion it was. With the hall festooned in its scarlet and silver livery, and the equally silvery, mercurial maestro stealing his own show by giving lavishly of his unbeatable best.

The doting fans, young and old alike, weren't letting their man get away lightly.

Time and again they hauled him back, to yells of "Simon" and "encore' and "bravo', to ply him on stage with their bouquets and accolades.

Grizzled he may be now (after 10,000 hours spent with the CBSO), but to them he still is "young Simon" - the likely lad from Liverpool that Brummies took to their hearts 18 action-packed seasons ago. True to form, their hero didn't let them down.With canny ingenuity, Rattle opted to bow out with Mahler's epic Resurrection Symphony culminating, aptly, in the massive final chorus, "Yes, thou shalt rise again!"

Rattle will rise again, but where he will pop up next is anybody's guess, although the world's great orchestras - notably the Berlin and Vienna philharmonics - are falling over themselves to engage his services.

Some argue he is just the kind of appointment needed to give Covent Garden a kick up the backside; or to sal- vage single-handedly Peter Mandelson's millennium celebrations.

Certainly this un-maestroish maestro will continue to work with the UK's Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and he'll be back in Birmingham and at London's Barbican next spring, leading the CBSO in his fiery "Towards Millennium" series.

So watch this space. Rattle may be a hard act to follow, but we have not seen the last of him yet.