Bust of Byron Howard’s bust of John Barbirolli outside the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, where he frequently conducted (photograph by David Brierley, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)
At the beginning of this past June, Warner Classics announced the release of Sir John Barbirolli: The Complete Warner Recordings. The release was timed to mark the fiftieth anniversary of this conductor’s death on July 20. Pandemic conditions apparently impeded distribution; and, as a result, I was not able to make arrangements for a review copy until about a month ago.
The collection is now in my office: all 109 CDs of it. It covers recording sessions made in the United Kingdom as early as 1928, and Barbirolli was still planning recordings with HMV in 1970, the year of his death. The collection thus amounts of a complete history of recording sessions during his time in Great Britain. The only significant gap is the period between 1937 and 1943, which he spent in the United States; and last November Sony Masterworks released a six-CD collection of the recordings that Barbirolli made for both Columbia and RCA Victor.
109 CDs covers a lot of content, and it is unclear that there could be a convenient way to organize it all. Fortunately, the booklet provides an index of all the compositions in order of the last name of the composer. As a result, finding any particular work is not that difficult; and it is easy to skim through the index to get a general idea of Barbirolli’s extensive repertoire. On the other hand, dividing the entire collection into a manageable set of categories, as I did this past June for Herbert von Karajan, is no easy matter, at least if the categories are to be kept to manageable sizes.
My first step was to separate the recordings made for 78s from the “long-playing” sessions. Those recordings could, in turn, be grouped into instrumental music, concertos, and opera. My current plan is to make these my first three articles, after which I shall probably be making more arbitrary decisions, some on the basis of historical periods and others dealing with the ensembles that Barbirolli conducted. The one category I know deserves separate treatment is his experience in conducting the music of English composers.
The recordings of instrumental music for 78 albums covers the first ten CDs in the collection. The repertoire is extensive, with Henry Purcell at one end (the first track of the first CD) and Igor Stravinsky’s “Concerto in D,” known as the “Basle” concerto for string orchestra, at the other (the final three tracks of the tenth CD). There is no doubting Barbirolli’s nationalist preferences; and there are even two different recordings of Edward Elgar’s Opus 47 “Introduction and Allegro.” However, only the second of those two, recorded in 1948, explicitly identifies the string quartet musicians. “Double billing” is also provided for two of Barbirolli’s “chestnut” favorites: the first of the two suites that Edvard Grieg compiled from his incidental music for Peer Gynt and excerpts from Léo Delibes’ score for the ballet Sylvia.
Having dealt with my parents’ rather generous collection of 78s, I have to say that I was more impressed with the sound quality than I anticipated. I wonder how easy it was for those that owned those 78s to be able to distinguish the string quartet from the ensemble in the Elgar Opus 47. I also have to wonder to what extent Barbirolli had to adjust his tempos to fit the duration that a single 78 side could hold. Personally, I do not think that Barbirolli had to compromise the tempos he had in mind at either of those Opus 47 sessions; and I, for one, enjoy being able to listen to both of the recordings, since the second was not shaped by the “cookie cutter” of the first! Similarly, Barbirolli does not seem to have any trouble tapping into the visceral qualities of the “Nimrod” variation from Elgar’s Opus 36 set of “Enigma” variations.
Taken is a whole, there is far too much diversity across these ten CDs to give a “blow by blow” account. Suffice it to say that Barbirolli definitely made a mark for himself as early as the first recordings in this collection. It should not surprise anyone that, during his tenure with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini invited Barbirolli to appear as a guest conductor. This would lead to his extended stay in the United State as cited above. Ultimately, Barbirolli’s tastes were more adventurous than his conservative American listeners tended to prefer. As a result, even in the middle of World War II, Barbirolli returned to Great Britain, much to the significant loss of the American public.
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