BBC Legends: Farewell to John Barbirolli

Conductor John Barbirolli (cropped detail of a photograph by Paolo Monti, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

The overly skimpy text on the back of the box of 20 CDs for the third volume in the ICA Classics BBC Legends series begins with the following sentence:

The third 20 CD box in the series features Sir John Barbirolli in his final concert.

As is often the case when insufficient space is provided for significant information, that sentence is not quite accurate. Ironically, it can easily be corrected by the addition of a single word: The second CD in the box, documenting Barbirolli conducting The Hallé orchestra in St Nicholas Chapel at the King’s Lynn Festival in Norfolk, England, presents two of the three compositions performed at his final recorded concert.

This took place on Friday, July 24, 1970. The following day he would conduct a performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 92 (seventh) symphony in A major. He then shifted his attention to rehearsing the New Philharmonia Orchestra on July 29 and died later on that date.

The two recorded selections on the ICA Classics Barbirolli CD are both by Edward Elgar, and most likely they were the “bookends” for the full concert. The opening selection was the Opus 47 “Introduction and Allegro for String Quartet and String Orchestra;” and the program concluded with the Opus 55 (first) symphony in A-flat major. The selection that was not included on the CD (but was released on an Intaglio album) was Elgar’s Opus 37 song cycle Sea Pictures (sung by mezzo Kerstin Meyer).

Mind you, all three of these compositions are available in that wonderful box set, Sir John Barbirolli: The Complete Warner Recordings, which I wrote about on this site in 2020 and continue to consult with generous frequency. Indeed, there are five different recordings of Opus 47 in that box. Furthermore, from a personal point of view, Opus 47 was one of the first compositions given an in-depth analysis in my undergraduate Orchestration class. By the time our work was done on that piece, I no longer needed to follow the score while listening to it!

Barbirolli was 70 when he died of a heart attack. As is clear from his activities in Norfolk, that attack was unexpected. The New Philharmonia rehearsal was for a tour of Japan. He had also prepared a return to the Royal Opera House to conduct a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello. (The Warner box includes a recording of that opera in its entirety.) He had also planned to make recordings of that composer’s Falstaff and Giacomo Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (both of which are represented by excerpts in the Warner box).

Mind you, he had suffered a series of collapses in the months leading up to the King’s Lynn Festival; so it would probably be fairer to say that his death was not entirely unexpected. Nevertheless, he seemed to have been determined to provide perceptive interpretations of the repertoire for as long as his health would allow him to do so. Those closest to him were probably more concerned about the likelihood of death than he was; but those concerns did not make the event any more bearable.