Stravinsky’s The Firebird begins in darkness, and it might be the softest, deepest darkness in all music. Basses and cellos rock slowly, pianissimo, in their lowest register; using mutes to give the sound that added touch of velvet. Far beneath them rumbles the bass drum: a halo of blackness, perceptible only at the very edge of the senses. In Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, with Sir Simon Rattle conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, you felt your hairs tingle before you discerned a note. Seconds later, the very air within the hall seemed to be quivering with sensuous, engulfing bass warmth.

You can be sure that Rattle anticipated that sensation; planned for it, in fact, from the moment that he confirmed this short British tour with his new orchestra. The BRSO visited two of the UK’s finest concert halls (in Liverpool and Birmingham) and one of its worst (the Barbican) and Rattle knows each of these acoustics intimately. In Liverpool, he’s known it since boyhood, and although the Philharmonic Hall has undergone many alterations it still has the most natural bass resonance of any UK orchestral venue: an analogue-era ambience quite unlike the brilliant digital clarity of Symphony Hall in Brum, which Rattle had built to his own specifications in the late........

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