RICHARD OSBORNE
GLORIOUS JOHN: REMEMBERING BARBIROLLI
Dame Janet Baker’s words are tribute enough. ‘To stand a few feet from that man and to be involved with the greatest pieces of music in the world – that marks one’s life.’
She was talking of Sir John Barbirolli, who died 50 years ago on 29th July 1970.
My first memory of Barbirolli is of him conducting Elgar’s Second Symphony in Lincoln Cathedral one summer’s evening in the mid-1960s. It was a performance, long-breathed and emotionally charged, such as only he could have led – one of those experiences that goes beyond the notes, as any great act of music-making inevitably does.
Elgar was a great admirer of the young Barbirolli, as were Delius and Ralph Vaughan Williams, the man who famously dubbed him ‘Glorious John’. What a composer most looks for in a performer is a measure of intuitive insight into the music, and Barbirolli had that in spades. Players have other needs.
‘You don’t realise what a tonic he is to us,’ exclaimed Paul Beard, the longserving leader of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, after playing Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius under Barbirolli. (‘My God, what a performance!’) Another battlehardened veteran put it differently: ‘You know, Barbirolli liked music, really liked it.’ Not all musicians do.
There’s no better place to get a sense of Barbirolli the man, aside from the late Michael Kennedy’s marvellous biography, than a 1965 BBC documentary, directed by Melvyn Bragg and presented by Huw Weldon, which survives on Youtube in a 1992 repeat introduced by Alan Bennett. Atmospheric and anecdote-rich, the documentary centres on Manchester and Barbirolli’s rebuilding of the Hallé after his return to England in June 1943, following five years as Toscanini’s successor at the New York Philharmonic.
Despite that New York commitment, Barbirolli twice crossed the Atlantic in 1942 in merchant convoys to visit family in London and conduct morale-boosting concerts in places as far afield as Aberdeen and Streatham Hill.
The following year in Manchester, he found a war-depleted band of 28 players which, six months later, he’d turned into an orchestra capable of making a still treasurable recording of Bax’s wonderfully multi-faceted Third Symphony.
The son of an Italian violinist who had known Verdi and played in the orchestra of La Scala, Milan, Barbirolli was deemed to be the finest English-born opera conductor of his generation until, during the early 1930s, his theatre career was upended by the Iago-like machinations of Sir Thomas Beecham.
Barbirolli was already being trusted by EMI to record with some of the greatest singers and instrumentalists of the day; yet, astonishingly, he had to wait until 1966 to record a complete opera – a still peerless account of Puccini’s
Madama Butterfly, made in Rome for that same company.
Barbirolli’s recording career was often prey to executive misjudgement and technical incompetence. Indeed, it’s only recently that we’ve been able fully to appreciate what he did achieve. And here I’m thinking not of the recent 109-CD anniversary box from Warner Classics, but of such things as a superbly engineered and very affordable six-cd Sony Classical set that allows us to hear just how memorable many of the recordings Barbirolli made with the New York Philharmonic in 1938-42 really are.
I think, too, of the 60 or so recordings, commercially available through the usual channels, that have been released by tireless keepers of the flame the Barbirolli Society. These include restorations of superb accounts of the late symphonies of Dvořák and Tchaikovsky which poor vinyl pressings initially ruined, and discs of so-called lighter music, Hallé Favourites, incomparably conducted.
A recent release is of a concert, introduced by Barbirolli himself, that had aired at the same time as that 1965 BBC documentary. Among its highlights is the 20-year-old Jacqueline du Pré as soloist in Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei.
Barbirolli’s last recording, made days before he died, was a profoundly moving account of Delius’s tone poem Appalachia. Delius described Appalachia as his tribute to the intense love of nature, and to the childlike humour and immense delight in singing and dancing ‘in the life of the old Negro slave population’ that he’d experienced as a young man in Florida in the 1880s.
I don’t know why Barbirolli chose to record the work in the summer of 1970. Had it been Leonard Bernstein, embroiled deep in racial controversy, it would have been a political gesture. Barbirolli’s reason, I suspect, was that he loved the piece and knew that time was running out. Indeed, he suffered a heart attack during the sessions. Coming round after a brief blackout, he found an ambulance waiting. ‘Ambulance!’ he growled. ‘I’m going on with the Delius.’ And after half a day’s rest he did just that.