Christian Merlin (in part two of an interview whose first half dealt with changes in music criticism): “I think we’re living in an era, at least in the West, where the cult of an individual is no longer in fashion: rather, we’re looking for integration, collaboration, involvement of everyone. The first person to really embody this change was Simon Rattle. There are 128 musicians in the Berlin Phil, and Rattle would always say ‘I am the 129th’. That doesn’t mean that there were no tensions; there were enormous ones – perhaps precisely because the musicians had been used to a conductor who decides everything!”