Barbirolli at Hallé: First Viennese School

Having completed my coverage of the 78 RPM recordings of performances conducted by John Barbirolli in both Great Britain and the United States, I can now move on to the “higher fidelity” recordings found on the remaining 82 CDs in Sir John Barbirolli: The Complete Warner Recordings. As I observed when I first began this project, dividing this collection into a manageable set of categories is more challenging than it was when I discussed the Decca recordings of Herbert von Karajan. Fortunately, there is a “top level” classification that will probably be the most viable, particularly because it is the one that RCA used in organizing their anthology of the recordings of Arturo Toscanini.

The Free Trade Hall in Manchester, home of the Hallé Orchestra during Barbirolli’s tenure (photograph by Bernt Rostad, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

That organization is based on the ensembles being conducted. Barbirolli’s major affiliation was with the Hallé Orchestra, based in Manchester. When Hamilton Harty announced in 1932 that he would spend some time conducting overseas, four guest conductors were invited to lead the ensemble during his absence. Barbirolli was one of them, the other three being Edward Elgar, Thomas Beecham, and Pierre Monteux. As a result the Hallé Orchestra figured significantly in the 78 RPM albums that Barbirolli recorded; and he was invited to return to the ensemble after he left the United States.

To call Barbirolli’s subsequent tenure with the Hallé productive would be the height of understatement. It did not take me long to realize that this category was in dire need of division into subcategories. On the grounds that I have to start somewhere, I shall follow the lead of the Decca project by beginning with the CDs devoted primarily to the First Viennese School composers, but restricting my attention to orchestral music. After that, however, I have to depart from the chronological approach. Given Barbirolli’s contribution to the recorded repertoire, I feel that the “Viennese” category should be followed by an “English” one, again for orchestral music, covering the recordings that Barbirolli made of British compositions, regardless of when they were written. Where “everything else” is concerned, the bulk of the recordings involve nineteenth-century compositions. However, I shall provide yet another subdivision, first grouping the music of Antonín Dvořák together with that of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, after which the remaining nineteenth-century composers will be allotted a single subcategory. Then, there will be a separate category for Jean Sibelius, whose repertoire crosses from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Finally, the concertante and vocal Hallé recordings will fill out Barbirolli’s recordings with the ensemble.

The remaining instrumental offerings will involve three groupings of ensembles:

1. The Philharmonia Orchestra and the New Philharmonia Orchestra
2. The London Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Orchestra
3. The “continental” ensembles: the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Orchestre de Paris

The final recording will then cover the opera albums. It goes without saying that this project is likely to take some time; and, as they like to say in advertising, the organization will be subject to change without notice! That said, let me now turn my attention to the six First Viennese School CDs in the collection.

As in the Karajan collection, the primary offerings are the symphonies. I was impressed that Joseph Haydn should get the most attention with a single symphony on three of the CDs in this group. In “order of appearance” these are Hoboken I/ 83 (“The Hen”) in G major, Hoboken I/96 (“Miracle”) in D major, and Hoboken I/88 in G major. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven both only get two symphonies.

However, the first Mozart symphony, K. 201 in A major, is an impressive one, particularly with the opening in medias res measures that leave the listener wondering if (s)he missed something. Barbirolli’s approach elicited just the right combination of effects, a clear sense of beginning but an equally clear sense that the beginning had interrupted “something else in progress.” The other Mozart symphony, K. 551 (“Jupiter”) in C major, is far more familiar and known for the complex counterpoint in the final movement, given a distinctively clear account through Barbirolli’s leadership. There is a similar contrast in the two Beethoven selections, the early Opus 21 (first) in C major and the later Opus 83 (eighth) in F major. In the full canon of Beethoven symphonies, these two have the most explicit reflections of a sense of humor, and Barbirolli definitely wanted to make sure that listeners “got the joke.”

More important is that this is a First Viennese School account that includes Franz Schubert. Ironically, he is represented by two performances of the same symphony, D. 944 (“Great”) in C major. I suspect that Barbirolli decided that his first monaural long-playing recording did not provide an adequate acoustic account of how Schubert had deployed the full resources of a symphony orchestra. I am inclined to agree. However much I have internalized this music, I felt that more of the subtle details of instrumentation could be apprehended in the stereophonic recording.

This category also includes two “honorable mention” appearances. The CD with the Hoboken I/96 symphony has an overture by Carl Maria von Weber, composed for his opera Die Freischütz. Weber had little to do with musical life in Vienna; but Mozart’s wife Constanze was Weber’s cousin (and made it a point to remind others of this fact, particularly after her husband’s death). There are also two brief selections by Felix Mendelssohn, who, like Weber, was German and never advanced very far into nineteenth-century practices.

Finally, I should offer a note of clarification to those that have already bought this collection and have been listening to the CDs. Two of them cross category boundaries: One concludes with Jean Sibelius’ Opus 105 (seventh) symphony in C major; and the other concludes with Johannes Brahms’ Opus 90 (third) symphony in F major. Both of these break sharply with the rest of their respective albums, and they will be discussed for their presence in their appropriate categories!