Click on the link below to watch JB rehearse the Hallé Orchestra in the Scherzo of Bruckner 7. Following a spell with the New York Philharmonic, Barbirolli (born 1899) was conductor of the Hallé from 1943 until his death.
On this date: Sir John Barbirolli died fifty years ago.
JB was part of my musical awakening as a pupil in Barry Boys’ Comprehensive, when I spent hard-earned holiday-job cash on so many of his recordings including the EMI Sibelius 5 & 7, Beethoven ‘Eroica’ and Tchaikovsky Francesca da Rimini (still one of the weightiest, most ardent on record). His visit with the Halle to Barry’s Memorial Hall where I sold programmes was a Damascene evening! Alas, even I’m too young to have produced any of his recordings, but I did dabble with his recorded history in the early 1990s. During EMI sessions I produced with the LPO during that decade, the much-missed principal horn Nicholas Busch and I would often fall to talking about the absent horn notes in a couple of bars of the third movement of Barbirolli’s EMI Mahler 5 with the New Philharmonia, of which orchestra Nick was then First Horn.. When this celebrated recording was about to be issued on CD for the first time, I suggested to Nick that he bring his Mahler 5 horn part to an upcoming LPO session I was about to produce at Watford Town Hall, where JB’s Mahler 5 was made. With the help of the excellent engineer Mike Hatch, Nick expertly dubbed the missing notes on to the 1969 recording, and the correction was duly incorporated into that first CD issue in the EMI Studio series. The story even made the Evening Standard Diary page! I was amused to find the added notes AWOL again when the recording appeared in EMI’s Great Recordings of the Century series, and have yet to check whether or not they’re there in the big Warner Classics box of JB’s EMI and Pye recordings. Was I right to meddle with history? Sir John’s widow Evelyn once told me that her husband considered his job complete when he left the studio (hence, I imagine, the error which must have been the producer’s, being allowed to be published). So perhaps I should have let sleeping dogs slumber on…? Comments welcome!
Thanks to the Barbirolli Society, with now 100 CDs issued and the new Sony box of (almost() all of his RCA-Columbia New York Philharmonic recordings available, we are in a far better position to appreciate his very considerable qualities than ever before.
When I heard the news of Barbirolli’s death I was in a lay-by North of Inverness and switched the car radio on. I don’t mind admitting when I heard the news I shed a tear. So many memories of great Barbirolli concerts and a very real sense of loss; particularly vivid among them, the Birthday concert in Manchester just released with its magisterial Elgar and Vaughan Williams 6th, a Philharmonia concert in the Usher Hall including Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem and Violin Concerto played by the wonderful Wanda Wilkomirska and a Scottish National Orchestra reprise of a concert given some 30 years previously with Arrau (Chopin 1) culminating in a wonderful account of Sibelius 5 which came gloriously unstuck in the last six chords. It didn’t matter in the least when so much that had gone before was so right.
The birthday concert, for JB’s 70th, is reviewed on this site by me. Colin
My first Prom in 1964 was JB playing Schubert 9 and Brahms Second Piano Concerto with Hans Richter- Haaser.
The following year bought forth an emotional Sibelius 1 and Violin Concerto with the visiting Helsinki PO at the RFH Centenary Concert.
And so onwards until near the end.
JB is simply the most expressively emotional conductor in my experience, connecting me to works sometimes in a unique way that words are completely inadequate to explain.
Barbirolli was loyal, committed and strong-minded. He was a great advocate for John (McC). He replied to John’s mother, Elisabeth, when she asked for advice during John’s childhood, about his musical abilities. (Another well-known British conductor didn’t.) He stood by John’s First Symphony, when he wanted to include it in a radio broadcast, and the Reading Panel wouldn’t pass it. He said he would not broadcast again for the BBC unless they allowed it to be broadcast – and got his way. John owed a great deal to JB, and he worshipped him as a musician. I have a letter from JB to John, after John greatly praised his recording of Otello. (JB had been in Houston at the time John wrote his critique, and had recently returned.) Many people loved to do impressions of JB – John’s was especially warm-hearted and affectionate.