Is there a bigger star in classical music than conductor Simon Rattle? “Rattle’s career path has been a perfect, shooting-star arc from the National Youth Orchestra to Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra to his mould-breaking 10 years with the City of Birmingham Orchestra. At 48, he is very young to be a conductor of international repute and he remains, to many, the perennial high-achieving golden boy of British classical music. He certainly seems to be much too amiable and accommodating to have survived and thrived in one of the notoriously brittle areas of the arts.”