“In the first year there had been so few men that apparently it had been quite a traumatic experience for some. In 1980, Rattle took the best part of a year off to study literature at Oxford. “I didn’t listen to music at all during term just to see if I could live without it,” he remembers. “Have a cherry.”At a crucial point in his career, just as he was taking up the appointment with the CBSO, Rattle made another move that his German critics may have trouble understanding but which may reveal something of his approach to the creative process; and also, perhaps, the sensitive character who is almost certainly finding the attacks in Berlin harder than he lets on.

It’s something you earn, and I think that it also works better. I’m biased, as it’s my temperament.” He gestures towards a bowl in front of us. “So there was this violinist who said when Szell died, ‘From now until my death I will never shave or cut my hair again.’” When he met him, recalls Rattle, the violinist had “a beard down to his knees, incredibly long hair, and played like a demon.”Nowadays, he says, a conductor rules through musical authority rather than fear “It’s a very different thing. “The autocratic way, which was possible until so very recently,” he says, “was scandalous.”He mentions tales of the regime run by the late George Szell at the Cleveland Orchestra in America “No one was allowed any facial hair,” he says. “It happens in Italy, of course – you make a good cappuccino there and you’re a maestro So you damn well should be,” he jokes “In America, it happens. But in the rest of the world, no.” He must know that this isn’t true. He just disapproves strongly of the older, more dictatorial methods.

But those days are over.”Rattle is quite firm about this, almost falling off his chair when I ask him if the players call him “maestro” “You are being British and ironic, aren’t you?” he says. “Believe it or not,” he says, “I’m the first conductor who’s been allowed to speak at these auditions. I think there was a worry with Karajan that his voice would cow too many people In an autocratic time, that could have been true. Talking about the auditions at which all the players vote on whom to admit to their ranks, Rattle tells me something extraordinary.

A former intendant of the BPO, Elmar Weingarten, described Rattle’s appointment as “a risk” But it seems that the orchestra was ready for change. He gained an agent and, the following year, a post at the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra after winning the John Player International Conductors competition. Positions with the BBC Scottish Symphony and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic followed. Then, in 1980, he took over at the CBSO.His time there, during which he championed 20th-century music, conducted period-instrument concerts with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and investigated Ellington and Gershwin, made him a household name in Britain and a frequent guest on the podiums of the world’s great orchestras.Such eclecticism, however, is not necessarily considered a virtue in Germany.

“We thought he had a small concert in mind,” said one official.Three years later, at the Royal Academy of Music in London, he conducted his fellow students in Mahler’s Second, a piece that had convinced him that music was to be his life’s work when he first heard it aged 11. There has always been an ebullience, a breadth and a lack of formality to Rattle that marked him out from more patrician, stiffer conductors.As a young child, Rattle’s first love was jazz, although by the time he was seven his favourite reading was Berlioz’s Treatise on Instrumentation. At 15, he conducted his first symphony concert for a local charity. Having asked the Liverpool Spastic Fellowship if he could put on a musical evening for them, the organisers were astounded when he turned up with a 75-piece orchestra. We know we’re all in it together, and I know that much greater conductors than I have had a much worse time of it. So I try not to weep into my coffee too much.”Bringing Rattle, the curly-maned Liverpudlian who raised the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra from a provincial band to world-class status, to Berlin was a bold step. “The history is that we stay, if we can.”He continues: “Actually, someone found some old articles about Furtw?ler, asking why he was wasting his time with all this second-rate new music when he should have been dealing with the great classical canon That made me smile.