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Barbirolli conducts Nielsen and Brahms

SJB 1061 [Release date : 7 May 2012]

Sir John Barbirolli was a champion of both Jean Sibelius and Carl Nielsen. He recorded all the Sibelius Symphonies and many of the orchestral works, but this 1959 recording of the Symphony No.4 ‘The Inextinguishable’ is Barbirolli’s only commercial recording of the music of Nielsen. The symphony expresses ‘the elemental will to life’ and the explosive start to the symphony bears witness to the inextinguishable energy of the natural world. In the astonishingly powerful finale Nielsen places two timpani players at opposite sides of the orchestra, and from here their thundering volleys fly across the sound stage at each other. Barbirolli’s classic recording is a powerful rendition of Nielsen’s greatest symphony.

Sir John was also a champion of the music of Brahms. He recorded the four symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic and the piano concertos with Daniel Barenboim. This 1959 recording of Symphony No.4 with the Hallé Orchestra was briefly available on CD over ten years ago, so this latest reissue is a welcome reminder of Barbirolli’s intense performance.

Barbirolli conducts Delius

SJB 1059-60

Sir John Barbirolli’s love for Delius’s music dated from his earliest years when he heard the first two Dance Rhapsodies at a concert to which he had been taken as a teenager. Later as a budding cellist he came to know the Cello Sonata and the String Quartet, and played both, and when he turned to conducting in 1924 Delius’s music soon found a place in his programmes. Before the twenties were out he had even recorded the version of ‘A Song before Sunrise’ included in this set.

The set includes the premiere commercial recording of ‘Idyll: Once I passed through a populous city’ (Pye – 11 December 1956) and ‘A Song of Summer’ (HMV – 4 February 1950) and also an earlier performance of the ‘Idyll’ with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, taken from a 1950s BBC broadcast. The set also offers a unique opportunity to hear Barbirolli conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra as well as the Hallé, in ‘The Walk to the Paradise Garden’.

Boston Concerts, 1959

SJB 1057-58

Although Barbirolli’s achievement in rebuilding the war-ravaged Hallé Orchestra during the darkest days of the Second World War may remain the greatest fulfilment of his life, his renown as a conductor within the United States was not confined to his New York era. From 1961-67 Barbirolli was music director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra in Texas, holding the post concurrently with that in Manchester, and in 1967, marking the 125 anniversary of the New York Philharmonic, he was invited back to conduct the orchestra at Lincoln Center.

But even before then, Barbirolli’s appearances in north America would seem to demand a special study by themselves, for early in 1959 he gave several concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra as part of a quite extended tour involving a number of the greatest American and Canadian orchestras, including those in Winnipeg and Vancouver alongside those in Detroit, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York (where in the last city he conducted no fewer than sixteen concerts). The issue under discussion commemorates a typical Barbirolli programme, given in Boston on consecutive days in January 1959, notable for half of it being given over to British music, in essence from the sixteenth-century to the twentieth.

Barbirolli never ‘drove’ the Symphony No.2 by Brahms, which approach can be profoundly detrimental to its inner qualities – for this conductor, the nature of the music was essentially Brahms at his most lyrically expressive, and there can be no doubt that for the Boston players, Barbirolli’s view of the work came as something of a revelation: they had performed it under Monteux and Koussevitsky – string players both, like Barbirolli – but the Englishman brought something of a southern European nature to the music, allowing it to unfold at its own pace, yet at all times never allowing a trace of somnolence to enter his interpretation. Barbirolli treads a fine line, but it is remarkably successful and interpretatively impressive, as the Boston players surely felt so themselves, for in a letter home to his mother, written in Boston on February 1, he said ‘…this Boston orchestra is perhaps the greatest of the lot…The other day after I had rehearsed the 2nd Brahms symphony the whole orchestra stood and cheered me for quite some time, and they have done the same at both concerts…It was lovely, too, to have both the present conductor, [Charles] Münch, and one of the past conductors, Pierre Monteux, both there.’

After that first concert, we learn that all three conductors had a ‘memorable dinner’ together afterwards – the conversation at which would surely have also been worth recording!

Bernard Herrmann’s ‘Moby Dick’

SJB 1056 

When Barbirolli took up the position in New York, in succession to Arturo Toscanini, no less, he perforce came into contact with an indigenous American repertoire of which previously he would naturally have been unaware. A study of Barbirolli’s programmes during his ‘New York’ period reveals a surprising catholicity of repertoire, but within that repertoire may be found examples of American music that undoubtedly benefitted from his practical attention.

The two works on this disc amply demonstrate that assertion. The first, and the more significant, is a large-scale cantata by Bernard Herrmann, ‘Moby Dick’, based on the 1851 novel by the 19th-century American writer Herman Melville. It tells of one man’s obsession with capturing and killing a large white whale, responsible in an earlier encounter for the sailor losing his leg, the animal having been named Moby Dick.

Herrmann was born in New York City in 1911, and wrote the cantata in 1936, and is scored for two soloists, male voice chorus and orchestra. This performance was the world premiere. Few composers could wish for a finer first outing of their work than that given to the cantata by Barbirolli, but what makes this recording more valuable is that it is of the original version of the score, for when, over 30 years later, the music came to be published, Herrmann took the opportunity of revising the work slightly – so in this performance we not only hear the work in its original form, but also in a manner which will never be repeated.

Barbirolli and Herrmann selected highly gifted singers for the parts of Ishmael and Ahab: the American baritone Robert Weede (Ahab) was one of the finest of his generation, having made his Metropolitan Opera debut a little over two years prior to the ‘Moby Dick’ performance; he also gave lessons to Mario Lanza and scored his greatest success in the 1950s in Frank Loesser’s Broadway musical ‘The Most Happy Fella’. William Hain (Ishmael) was, by 1940, a well-established New York tenor, noted for his well-attended comprimario recitals rather than for his operatic work; William Horne, taking the much smaller part of Starbuck, went on to become best-known for singing the title role of Peter Grimes in the American premiere of Britten’s opera, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, in 1946 at Tanglewood.

Barbirolli’s performance of Charles Wakefield Cadman’s ‘Dark Dances of the Mardi Gras’ was the first of this work by the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, although Cadman’s ‘Fantasy for piano and orchestra’ (as it is sub-titled) had been given its world premiere in the summer of 1933 at the Hollywood Bowl with the composer as soloist (as he is in this recording).  Barbirolli’s performance in December 1937 marked the work’s fourteenth performance in America – indicative of the impact the work had soon made. In this performance, we can certainly admire the composer’s virtuosity alongside Barbirolli’s generous and committed orchestral support.

Vaughan Williams – Symphony No.8 – ‘Live’ Recording of the First Performance

SJB 1055

The Symphony No.8 was dedicated to Sir John Barbirolli, and, as with the ‘Antartica’ premiere, the first performance was remarkably fine, exciting the 83-year-old composer to write on the score ‘For Glorious John, with love and admiration from Ralph’. Perhaps the composer was somewhat uncertain regarding several aspects of the new work: at a rehearsal of the symphony, in February 1956, he approached the trumpets and asked ‘Is that all right for you? I haven’t written anything too difficult for you?’ ‘It’s all right, Dr Vaughan Williams,’ came the reply, ‘there’s nothing we can’t manage.’  Thankfully, we can hear on this preserved recording of the premiere, just what a magnificent first performance the work was given. Less than seven weeks later, Barbirolli and the Hallé inaugurated their new Pye Records contract with the first recording of the Symphony (available on SJB 1021).

Vaughan Williams’s Tuba Concerto is a magnificent composition – easily the finest such Concerto ever written; the recorded HMV performance, in this collection, is outstandingly good, but the work, fine as it is, does not seem to have inspired composers to write further for the genre, which has meant that the music has tended to be unjustly ignored. A similar fate has befallen another such work by Vaughan Williams – the Five Variants on ‘Dives and Lazarus’, composed for harp and string orchestra in 1939.

The collection of his music on this CD demonstrates aspects not only of the composer but of the profound grasp of ‘Glorious John’ in Vaughan Williams’s varied means of expression, for not all conductors encompass the composer’s range as Barbirolli was able to do. Less challenging in their demands are two of Vaughan Williams’s best-known shorter orchestral works – the Overture to ‘The Wasps’ and the Fantasia on ‘Greensleeves’. All these recordings offer a lasting testimony to Barbirolli’s total mastery as one of the greatest conductors Britain has ever produced.