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Sir John Barbirolli (conductor) The Complete Warner Recordings
rec. 1928-1970
WARNER 9029538608 [109 CDs]

This brick-shaped cornucopia arrived on my birthday (the curious may like to know that I have now completed the three major recording speeds). It contains virtually everything recorded by one of our greatest musicians, John Barbirolli (1899-1970), a diminutive powerhouse with a fearsome work ethic and a distinctive style. Here is a quick digest of his life for those who have been living on the planet Zog or have been born since his death.

Born a true Cockney to a French mother on 2 December 1899, he was the son and grandson of Italian violinists who had both played with Toscanini under Verdi, in the première of Otello at La Scala. Little Giovanni Battista, or Tita, was started on the violin but drove his grandfather mad by wandering about the house playing it. One day the old gentleman went out and returned in a hansom cab with a small cello, saying: ‘Now, play that and you’ll have to sit down.’ A natural musician, Tita (alternatively Tito) won scholarships to Trinity College of Music and the Royal College. He played in London orchestras, also giving recitals, and first conducted in the army, during a year of war service. After the war he continued his solo and orchestral career, giving an early performance of the Elgar Concerto and playing in two string quartets. By 1924 he was directing chamber orchestras; and he became a conductor of the ill-fated British National Opera Company. In 1929 he first conducted for the Royal Philharmonic Society and appeared with the LSO. Meanwhile, having initially recorded for Edison-Bell and the NGS, he was valued by HMV as one of their finest conductors of opera discs, accompanying the top singers.

From 1932 Barbirolli guest conducted Britain’s oldest orchestra, the Hallé in Manchester; and in 1933 he began three seasons with the Scottish Orchestra. By now he was recording concertos with famous soloists. When Toscanini gave up the New York Philharmonic-Symphony in 1936, Barbirolli was invited for ten weeks, and in 1937 he took over as music director. He stayed until 1943 but refused another contract because of the war in Europe. Leslie Heward’s early demise had left the Hallé rudderless, and Barbirolli returned to rebuild the ensemble. Conductor and orchestra formed a celebrated alliance which endured until his death. At the same time, Barbirolli pursued an international career after the war, becoming chief conductor at Houston in the 1960s. He was knighted in 1949. In later years, encouraged by friends including the critic Neville Cardus, he became an admired interpreter of Mahler. He died at home in London of heart failure on 29 July 1970. Earlier that day he had rehearsed the Eroica with the New Philharmonia for a planned Japanese tour.

Faced with 109 CDs, I cannot possibly offer a detailed review, so this article will be more of a meditation on Barbirolli’s recording career, picking out selected highlights or discs which I feel have been underrated. Warner’s survey takes in his long association with ‘His Master’s Voice’, from 1928 to a fortnight before his death. His 1950s Pye records are also here but virtually all his 1938-42 New York output is in a Sony box (19075988382, six discs): the one exception is Yehudi Menuhin’s superb Schumann Violin Concerto, the first to present the original score – and the first recording, in my opinion, to show this great violinist in his true light. Each disc is in a separate cardboard pochette which has the original sleeve design(s), where applicable, on the front, and the track and recording details on the back. The booklet is well illustrated and includes an index of all the works and pieces, with their CD numbers; however, the essay by Raymond Holden is too brief to be of much use to the inquiring new listener. Discs 1 to 10 are devoted to orchestral music from ‘The 78 rpm Collection’, the ensembles including John Barbirolli’s Chamber Orchestra, the Royal Opera Orchestra, the LSO, pick-up bands described as ‘Symphony Orchestra’, the New Symphony Orchestra, the LPO and the Hallé. A curiosity previously unknown to me is that JB directed the London Violoncello School in his arrangement of ‘O Isis und Osiris’ from Die Zauberflöte and Pablo Casals’s Sardana. Now I need to jump to the end of the box for the vocal miscellanies: five discs (98 to 103) of ‘The 78 rpm Collection’ and such things as operatic duets with Lenora Lafayette and Richard Lewis; Falla sung by Marina de Gabarain; and Ravel, Berlioz, Elgar and Mahler with Janet Baker. Discs 11 to 97 present the meat of the career, in mono for HMV and in stereo for Pye and, from 1962, the final HMV phase. Where possible the contents of an original LP are kept together but sometimes, they are split – two of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance Marches, for instance, are on Disc 45 and the other three on 48.

Speaking of Elgar, the most-recorded work in JB’s discography was the Introduction and Allegro, done six times – the first in 1927, for the NGS, was with his own little ensemble, and so was the second, made for HMV in 1929 and the earliest of five here. This version led the composer to say he had not realised it was such a big work, and it was surely a factor in his not making his own recording. When I was editing the magazine known variously as ICRC, CRC and CRQ, I asked my late friend Lyndon Jenkins to review all six for our Barbirolli centenary issue, under the rubric The Devil of an Interpretation. ‘Of the two stereo versions, from 1956 and 1962,’ Lyndon wrote, ‘I have never been in any doubt that the earlier one reflects Barbirolli at his most Elgarian. He was then at the height of his powers, surrounded by his beloved Hallé players with the faithful Laurance Turner leading, and the music has the genuine authentic Barbirolli sound and authoritative feel, even down to the stamped-out chords at the climax of the fugue (the last generally accompanied in concert performances by an almighty stamp of JB’s left foot, just to emphasise the point!). I love this performance, with its nostalgia and Elgarian nobilmente held in perfect balance.’ I could not express it better myself, and Pye put us further in their debt by supplying the soloists’ names – besides Turner, they were Sydney Partington, long-time principal viola Sydney Errington (whose playing of the Welsh tune is beautiful) and Oliver Vella. Lyndon felt, and I agree, that the famous final version with the Sinfonia of London ‘is altogether heavier, almost massive’. That LP of Elgar and RVW string pieces encapsulates for me the reason why I prefer Adrian Boult’s Classicism to JB’s Romanticism. Unlike another cello-playing maestro, Toscanini, who balanced the string section like a quartet (his ideal was the Busch Quartet), Barbirolli tended to favour the lower strings and this trait became more marked in the later recordings which I encountered on their original releases. He admired Toscanini, to the extent of patronising the Maestro’s hatmaker, but they took a radically different view of the entire orchestra’s sonority. Barbirolli remained an unashamed cellist and sometimes, I recall from the concert hall, it seemed he could barely resist the urge to get in among the cello section. At heart a Romantic, he built his orchestral sound up from the bottom.

Elgar was also my introduction to Barbirolli, although at that time I could not have told you the difference between him and Berettoni or Bartolucci. As a teenager in a household where my mother, who set the musical tone, hated English music, I knew just two Elgar recordings, Maggie Teyte singing Pleading and Peter Dawson singing ‘O my warriors’ from Caractacus. My mother had bought the 12-inch plum label disc for the other side, The Song of the Flea, and I remember her disapproval when she found me listening to the Elgar. Even then I caught the grandeur of both the music and the interpretation, and it is one of the best transfers here among the 78 rpm vocals. The Sword Song, a ten-inch side from the same session, is also wonderful, as is the Flea in its breezy Australian fashion. Frida Leider made some of her best records with JB, including arias from Don Giovanni, Armide, Tristan and Parsifal and the big scene from Fidelio, ‘Abscheulicher! … Komm Hoffnung’, with an orchestra including Aubrey Brain. This fraught session took place on 8 May 1928, starting at Kingsway Hall, and the sound was relayed by landline to a studio off Leicester Square. ‘We rehearsed like the devil,’ JB recalled. ‘Finally, we decided everything was in order. We got what we thought must be two absolutely perfect waxes. That was quite something in the 78-rev. days in a piece that has such orchestral hazards. We all sat back with a sigh of relief.’ Then the telephone rang. A distraught Fred Gaisberg told them that nothing had come through on the landline. Leider, JB and the entire orchestra piled into a fleet of taxis and that afternoon the scene was redone in Studio C at Queen’s Small Hall: the result was a classic, with dramatic singing by the soprano and tremendously exciting horn playing by Brain and his colleagues, with just one fluff. Three days after that Leider and JB recorded Wagner’s Träume with a similar pick-up orchestra: it is clearly Brain playing the important horn part breathtakingly beautifully.

When the tenor Aureliano Pertile arrived for a Studio C session a year later, he was amazed to be greeted by the conductor in his native Veneto dialect: sadly, just one of their six takes was issued, the ‘Improvviso’ from Andrea Chénier. Other great singers here are the roly-poly Dutch contralto Maartje Offers, who inter alia ‘offers’ Elgar’s ‘Where corals lie’; Elsie Suddaby; Maria Olszewska; Ina Souez; Renato Zanelli; Giovanni Inghilleri, who was still recording in the 1950s; Walter Widdop; Feodor Chaliapin; Fernando Autori; the terrific mezzo-soprano Irene Minghini-Cattaneo, later killed by Allied bombing; Lily Pons; Dusolina Giannini; Beniamino Gigli; Arthur Fear; Lauritz Melchior; Elisabeth Schumann, ethereal in the Meistersinger quintet; Friedrich Schorr; Emmi Leisner; Joseph Hislop; Richard Crooks; and Browning Mummery. Disc 92 contains the legendary Turandot excerpts from the 1937 Coronation season at Covent Garden, with Eva Turner, Giovanni Martinelli, two exponents of Liù from different performances, Mafalda Favero and Licia Albanese, and an amazing supporting cast. The 78 rpm discs remained unissued and the sequence did not appear until 1988.

A concerto section, Discs 70 to 87, begins with more of ‘The 78 rpm Collection’: a rather unimpressive Haydn D major Cello Concerto with Suggia, belying the swashbuckling look of her portrait by Augustus John; endearing Bach and Tchaikovsky with Elman; Mozart, Chopin and Tchaikovsky with Rubinstein; Chopin with Cortot; Mozart, Glazunov, Wieniawski and Saint-Saëns with Heifetz; Beethoven and Brahms with Kreisler, not to be preferred to his 1920s versions with Leo Blech; Mozart with Edwin Fischer and Schnabel; Schumann with Piatigorsky and Menuhin; and a number of things with Evelyn Rothwell (Lady Barbirolli), including the first recording of Mozart’s Oboe Concerto. Pye gems are the Brahms Double with Campoli and Navarra and the Elgar Cello Concerto with Navarra, slightly pressed in the Scherzo – the famous version with Jacqueline du Pré is also here, of course. Barbirolli was a renowned accompanist and, despite his Romantic inclinations, impressed even the arch-Classicist Adolf Busch. I would have loved to hear them in the Elgar Concerto – one of their performances together, at Bournemouth in 1935, sent Cardus into raptures. In New York, besides the enmity of that old bore Olin Downes of The New York Times, JB faced inevitable comparisons. When a flatterer called him ‘Toscanini the Second’ after a 1939 performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Busch exclaimed: ‘No – Barbirolli the First!’ No doubt JB, already guilt-ridden at being away from wartime England, was glad to escape. He returned from America in June 1943, braving the U-boats, to reconstitute the Hallé. Readers may have heard his account of auditioning an aged double-bassist and getting so frustrated that he grabbed the bass and bow and managed to get the required note; whereupon the old boy said: ‘Oop therr? Ah’ve never been oop therr before…’ Within weeks they gave their first concert and by December 1943 they were starting to make amazing records, such as Bax’s Third Symphony – with Livia Gollancz’s haunting horn solo in its Lento – and Vaughan Williams’s new Fifth. One of the post-war 78 rpm discs is a nice curio, a stylish rendering of Rossini’s Overture to La gazza ladra with the Augusteo Orchestra that is a souvenir of one of JB’s trips to Italy.

Among the early mono LP performances are Rubbra’s Fifth, Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antartica and a passionate 1954 Elgar Second. This symphony was first brought to the fore by Boult but it also played a crucial role in JB’s career. He learnt it within days in 1928 to replace the indisposed Beecham and at the end, standing among the violins, was a little man who said: ‘My name’s Gaisberg, don’t sign any contracts, I’ll phone you in the morning.’ I still prefer Boult’s interpretation but it is interesting to hear JB tear into the climaxes. Not being well versed in his discography, I have made other discoveries: for instance, he recorded Delius’s A Song of Summer twice. The 1950 Hallé version begins very quietly and has a good dynamic range for the time, so that the climaxes are quite impressive. It times at 11:01. Those who know Ken Russell’s fine Delius film will remember that this tone poem was the main achievement of Eric Fenby and the stricken Delius – EF completed it after the composer's death. The musical material came from an earlier unsatisfactory piece. The film used the 1966 Kingsway Hall recording by JB and the LSO, which times at 11:29. As in 1950, JB gives the phrases their full value and then some, in true Romantic style. The recording starts quite loudly and the climaxes are huge; it seems to end suddenly and I think the reissue engineer has snipped the natural reverberation off the last note. Rather faster is the 1953 Decca version by the same orchestra under Anthony Collins, which times at 8:49 and keeps the phrases on a relatively short leash, without serious injury. It starts very quietly like the 1950 Hallé version. I got to know and love the piece from the film and it follows that I should like JB's 1966 version, but in fact my favourite is the 1974 recording by the RPO under Sir Charles Groves, which times at 9:36 and has the orchestra set back a little in Abbey Road Studio 1. This performance starts extremely softly and climaxes are nicely contained in the space, with room to expand. Groves lets the piece evolve with utter naturalness, never forcing the pace or getting bogged down. The solo violinist (Erich Gruenberg?) is particularly good. Of course, JB’s Delius will have its own place in many people’s hearts and his very last recording was a wholehearted Brigg Fair.

The Pye material features a lot of standard repertoire with the Hallé which is done better elsewhere, I think, although true believers will be delighted to have it all collected and remastered. One disc which still charms is the coupling of Dvořák’s wind Serenade with Gounod’s Petite Symphonie, a lovely work rarely recorded. The playing of the Hallé winds is excellent, reflecting the high standard of British wind virtuosity. Rob Cowan directed my attention to the six Suppé overtures from 1957: they are indeed great fun, conducted with skill and panache. RVW’s A London Symphony from the same year is well worth a listen, with lovely viola solos, although many may prefer EMI’s version from a decade later which I mention below. The Eighth, dedicated to JB with the famous epithet ‘Glorious John’, caused a stir when it was recorded soon after the première – as JB’s first Pye project – and readers may remember the sleeve of the 1956 LP, with the signatures of all the players who took part. Produced and engineered by the Mercury team, it was trumped by Boult’s Decca version; but its quality is evident. After the Pye connection ended, some records were made with Concert Hall, Electrecord and, more effectively, Supraphon.

The late HMV period, lasting only eight years, packed in an enormous amount of studio work and saw JB at last matched with HMV’s best orchestras, although the Hallé was by no means excluded. The fruits include all the symphonies of Brahms, Elgar and Sibelius, as well as Beethoven, Mahler, Tchaikovsky and Vaughan Williams. JB notoriously did not get on with the VPO at their Brahms sessions, a clash perhaps caused by his tempi – there are times when you fear you are in for 16 slow movements – yet there is nothing wrong with the playing and I always enjoy the performances, even if I prefer Boult’s interpretations. The Sibelius cycle with the Hallé really does suffer from some slow tempi: my favourite symphonies, the Third and Sixth, are particular casualties despite nice touches. Perhaps the Fourth is the best. I also find the Elgar First with the Philharmonia and the Second with the Hallé a bit over-ripe; and while there is no gainsaying the fervour and glow of the RVW Fifth with the Philharmonia, it seems to be a case of diminishing returns – both of Boult’s recordings are better timed and shaped, so that each movement achieves its full effect. A London Symphony, for which the Hallé players came down to Abbey Road, is much more ‘on song’: adding a minute to the duration of the opening movement was perhaps not a good idea, but speeding up the Lento by almost a minute was a move in the right direction. As in the Pye version, the viola solos are memorable. Tchaikovsky’s Serenade and Arensky’s Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky find JB in his element, coaxing splendid sonorities from the LSO strings. On the other hand, the committed performance of Strauss’s Metamorphosen with the New Philharmonia has a tad too much resonance around the strings for my taste.

In former times, British conductors were seldom invited to record Beethoven, especially the symphonies, thought to be the property of such sages as Weingartner, Walter, Toscanini and Furtwängler. Henry Wood, who performed as much Beethoven as anyone, achieved the Eroica and the Fifth. Boult managed four works in his long career, Sargent three, Coates two and Harty one. Ironically Beecham, not a convinced or convincing Beethovenian, got away with six. Barbirolli, an intense, inspired Beethoven conductor on his day, waited almost until the end of his life to record the Eroica. Its predecessors were the Fifth (1947), First (1957) and Eighth (1958): a 1945 Seventh was not completed. Although JB conducted the Eroica in his second Scottish season, along with the Fifth and Seventh, and programmed it in New York, it is fair to say that he did not fully connect with it until after the war. The work became a feature of Hallé concerts and by 1948 Granville Hill of The Manchester Guardian could write: ‘The sublimities of the “Eroica” Symphony have seldom in our experience been as finely revealed as in Mr John Barbirolli’s interpretation yesterday at Belle Vue. Conductor and players were in their most inspired mood and they gave a performance which can without hyperbole be described as magnificent in its full disclosure of the strength, grandeur, and passion of this great music.’ Yet his whole-hearted renditions took a toll of his inner and outer resources. ‘Strange how the Eroica exhausts me these days,’ he wrote from Houston in February 1966 to his friend Audrey Napier Smith, a Hallé violinist. ‘It may well be because I am really beginning to plumb its depths.’ Almost a year later, in January 1967, JB took the BBC SO on a tour of Iron Curtain countries and the Eroica was played in Warsaw, Moscow and Leningrad. Conductor and players were therefore well primed for their recording, made in Studio 1 at Abbey Road on 18 and 19 May. The LP’s sleeve bore a striking picture of Napoleon, viewed from the back. As with other conductors of modest height – Toscanini, Erich Kleiber – there was something Napoleonic about Barbirolli, and this recording shows the mature JB’s Beethoven at its best. Reviewing it in The Gramophone, Trevor Harvey found the tempo for the opening movement too slow, but concluded: ‘As to all the rest I have no hesitation in saying that I think it the greatest performance I have yet heard on record, with playing at least as good as any and in a recording that deserves equal praise.’ For me, the tempi seem justified, even though Toscanini is my ideal. The chording at the start is solid and Barbirolli does not yield too much for the second subject, so that a strong pulse runs through the Allegro con brio: you feel the cumulative force in the development and terrific power is generated in the recapitulation, where you realise JB has been ‘keeping his powder dry’. The rhythm at the start of the Marcia funebre is not as sharply etched as in some readings but again the impact is cumulative: the C major episode has prodigious power. Beethoven makes as if to repeat the first theme but interrupts it to plunge into the abyss, and by the time it does return, it is altered beyond belief. All of this we hear from Barbirolli. The rhythm in the Scherzo is tremendous and the Trio, where the pulse is not too relaxed, features fine horn playing. The same epic thread runs through the variations: in the march variation JB does not try to lift his listeners out of their seats, as Toscanini used to do, but gives it a solid thrust. The slow variation comes as a moment of calm, even balm, before developing its own force, and the symphony ends in a blazing coda.

The opera and choral harvest from JB’s late period would have been more extensive, had he lived even a few more years. As it is, we have an unbeatable Madama Butterfly, superbly cast with Scotto, Bergonzi and Panerai, and a slightly controversial Otello – many Italian opera fans cannot accept Fischer-Dieskau’s Iago, although the original singer was a Frenchman, Victor Maurel. My wife and I have been enjoying the Verdi Requiem, recorded at Watford Town Hall on eight days in August 1969, with a make-up session in January 1970. Produced by Ronald Kinloch Anderson, it was engineered by Allen Stagg (Stuart Eltham for the later session). I have never before owned this set and the crusty reviews it has received have not encouraged me to hear it – I will not embarrass the shade of my late colleague Alan Blyth by quoting what he says in ‘Choral Music on Record’, but he was treading in the footsteps of many others. Let us start with two factors which put it ahead of Giulini’s legendary EMI recording, the sound quality – which seems splendid to me – and the soloists. Giulini’s reputation as a master of this score, which I endorse, is a ‘given’, but I have two sublime live versions which suffice to represent him in my collection. JB’s soloists are Montserrat Caballé (superb), Fiorenza Cossotto (hearing her in the Liber scriptus is a treat), Jon Vickers (in his best voice) and Ruggiero Raimondi. I well remember hearing this bass in a terrific La Scala company performance under Abbado at Covent Garden. The part lies in the best regions of his voice and he is a rex tremendae here: his only lack is a trill in the Hostias – Vickers does one! There is an intriguing ‘voicing’ in the Agnus Dei, Cossotto’s baleful tone registering more strongly than Caballé’s, but they are both in tune and the floated soprano line is clearly there. Until I re-read AB’s screed, I had not even noticed that JB’s opening to the work was especially slow. To me it sounds reverent, hushed. You could say that some sections of the Mass are slower than usual but, as my wife said, you are able to hear the harmonies developing; and the big moments are really big, with no suggestion of dragged feet. The choral and orchestral forces are the same as on Giulini’s set, but from the ‘New’ Philharmonia era. I have no complaints and at one stage I thought: what a terrific choral bass line. One can be surprised in this great work. I have several Toscanini versions – I perhaps like the most famous one the least of them – and various others, including Carlo Sabajno and two each by De Sabata (both live), Serafin and Fricsay. I now also have Paul van Kempen’s, not heard yet. Never a particular fan of Barenboim’s conducting, I loved his La Scala recording and I still do. Pappano is a ‘banker’ in this sort of repertoire. I suspect I shall often return to Barbirolli.

A total surprise was the 1965 Dido and Aeneas, in Neville Boyling’s edition. My exploration of Purcell’s opera took me in different directions, although I always kept Anthony Lewis’s version for Janet Baker’s Dido, and I had forgotten that JB’s recording had even been made. Although the sound he gets from the ECO must have seemed a trifle fulsome even in 1965, the overall effect is very musical, with Raymond Leppard at the harpsichord, and the singing is lovely: Victoria de los Angeles is Dido, Peter Glossop is Aeneas, Heather Harper is Belinda and the rest of the cast is first-rate. Boyling is the balance engineer, with Kinloch Anderson producing, and the Studio 1 recording still sounds good. The various song cycles with Janet Baker come from her greatest period and the understanding between singer and conductor is palpable. Sea Pictures is everyone’s favourite, including mine, but Les Nuits d’été is also ideally sensual.

When we come to The Dream of Gerontius, another surprise is in store. Not from the 1964 Free Trade Hall recording, which is a known quantity, notable for the choral singing and the Angel of Janet Baker. No, the shock comes from the first of three bonus discs, which presents Part 2 of Gerontius (presumably Part 1 is unavailable or in poor sound) from the performance in Manchester Town Hall on 23 March 1951. The title role is taken by Parry Jones, who has had little exposure on CD and is even omitted from Marston’s new set of British Tenors. His singing is distinguished, as befits his great reputation, and the Angel of Marjorie Thomas, familiar from Sargent’s second recording, is very moving and involving – she does not have the vocal heft of some other contraltos for the big phrases, but she measures out her tone so exactly that the effect is overwhelming. The chorus master is the great Herbert Bardgett, moonlighting from Huddersfield, and the singing and playing of the Hallé Choir and Orchestra is responsive to JB’s urging. A few bars are missing and the sound from acetate discs (or so my ears tell me) can be crackly, but this is a treasure to place beside JB’s live Rome account. Parry Jones can also be heard on the 1948 recording of John Ireland’s These Things Shall Be which precedes Part 1 of the 1964 Gerontius on Disc 88.

Of the two other bonus CDs, Disc 108 offers seven rehearsal sequences, which will please those who like that sort of thing, and Disc 109 has a Jon Tolansky documentary with fond reminiscences of JB from violinists Michael Davis and John Georgiadis, engineer Robert Gooch, soprano Renata Scotto and percussionist Kevin Nutty. This disc also contains the speeches by RVW and JB at the 1950 presentation to JB of the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal; and a 1964 interview with JB by Kinloch Anderson.

I realise there are composers I have not touched, such as Mahler, but perhaps readers will contribute their own comments on my omissions. In conclusion, I would say that this sumptuous box amounts to more than just the sum of its parts. The remastering, by Studio Art & Son, Annecy, appears to be impeccable. My own respect for Barbirolli has already increased, and I hope to penetrate into some of the areas of his musical personality that I have neglected.

Tully Potter

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