Rattle’s Kids

Sir Simon Rattle has long had an obsession with bringing classical music to a wider audience, and his latest project is a daring effort to link two disparate sectors of German society. “Rattle’s brave determination to include some of Berlin’s most phlegmatic and recalcitrant teenagers into the orchestra’s working life, from the very start of his collaboration with the orchestra, has been captured in Rhythm Is It!, one of the most popular German documentary films for years… In a former bus depot on the edge of industrial wasteland in Berlin, the cooperation between the teenagers and an initially sceptical orchestra reaches its height in a performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, attended by an audience of several thousand. “