Thursday, December 17, 2020

Barbirolli in London: Beyond the Philharmonias

As was observed this past Saturday, in the collection Sir John Barbirolli: The Complete Warner Recordings, Barbirolli’s recording legacy with the two generations of the Philharmonia Orchestra is second in size only to his Hallé Orchestra discography. However, two other London-based ensembles figure significantly in the Warner anthology, the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) and, to a lesser extent, the BBC Symphony Orchestra. While the numbers may be modest, the content has Barbirolli venturing into repertoire that received little, if any, attention in his other ventures.

What interests me the most is increased attention to concertos, with particular attention to Barbirolli’s commitment to recording the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. This composer wrote only four concertos. These were for violin (1925), piano (1926), oboe (1944), and tuba (1954). Barbirolli only recorded the last two of these; and, as might be guessed, the soloist for the oboe concerto was his wife Evelyn.

My real delight, however, comes from the tuba concerto, which I have heard in performance only with piano accompaniment at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Vaughan Williams wrote it for Philip Catelinet, Principal Tuba for LSO; and Barbirolli conducted the premiere on June 13, 1954. The recording was made in Kingsway Hall the following day. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that I have never heard the tuba sound so lyrical, and this is one of those offerings that stands out for me in the entire Warner collection.

There are also three concerto performances featuring cellist Jacqueline du Pré as soloist. The best known of these is probably Edward Elgar’s Opus 85 concerto in E minor, whose music figured significantly in “The Cellist,” a “biographical” (scare quotes intentional) ballet about du Pré choreographed by Cathy Marston for The Royal Ballet. Warner coupled this concerto with Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken VIIb/2 cello concerto in D major, which is probably about as popular as the Elgar concerto. Barbirolli also coupled with du Pré to record a G minor concerto by Georg Matthias Monn, who happened to die in the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach, 1750. Arnold Schoenberg provided a realization of the continuo for this concerto, which then appeared in a performing edition prepared by Valda Aveling. While du Pré’s performances are definitely not as ham-fisted as the ones that her husband, Daniel Barenboim, gave when recording the piano concertos of Johannes Brahms with Barbirolli, I have to confess that she is not near the top of my “must-listen” list of cellists.

On a more positive side the BBC Symphony Orchestra is the ensemble for Barbirolli’s recording of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 55 (“Eroica”) symphony in E-flat major. Beethoven symphonies do not figure significantly in the Barbirolli discography. In the Warner collection the only recording of Opus 67 (the fifth) in C minor can be found on an early 78 RPM release. The Hallé recordings accounted only for Opus 21 (the first) in C major and Opus 93 (the eighth) in F major. While his interests may have been elsewhere, Barbirolli elicited an impressively intense account of Opus 55; and I suspect that repeat listening experiences may continue to turn up a generous share of compelling moments.

It is also worth noting that the only recording in the Warner collection of a tone poem by Richard Strauss was made with LSO. This was the Opus 40 “Ein Heldenleben” (a hero’s life), recorded in September of 1969. I can appreciate that Strauss was not high on Barbirolli’s list, particularly when compared with the dramatic rhetoric of composers like Vaughan Williams and Jean Sibelius; so I do not feel I am missing anything in the absence of any of the other Strauss tone poems!

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