GHCD 2331 Secure E-shop Broadcast & Review

SIR. JOHN BARBIROLLI NEY YORK PHILHARMONIC   Franck Symphony in D minor Debussy Iberia Brahms Double Concerto Griffes The White Peacock and works by Berlioz-Benjamin Castelnuovo Tedesco   LIVE RECORDING: 1937- 1943   Franck Symphony in D minor  – 15 October 1939 -III. Finale: Allegro ma non troppo Brahms: Double Concerto in A minor op. 102  – 26 March 1939 - II. Andante Corelli /Barbirolli Concerto Grosso – 23 February 1943

Contents:

On the morning of Friday April 3^rd 1936, Arthur Judson, the 55-year-old general manager of the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York, telegraphed the London offices of Harold Holt Ltd, artist agents for the young English conductor John Barbirolli, offering him a ten-week engagement to conduct the New York Orchestra from the following November 2^nd – January 10^th 1937. With this offer, the way was open for Barbirolli to prove himself and to succeed Arturo Toscanini as permanent conductor of the American orchestra.

It was an astounding offer. Barely ten years had elapsed since Barbirolli had conducted his first London concert, and he was – at that time, 1936 – chief conductor of the Scottish Orchestra in Glasgow. At that stage in his career Barbirolli had not even been offered a Queen’s Hall concert with the BBC Symphony, and in many respects the 36-year-old Barbirolli was then regarded in the country of his birth as little more than a ‘promising newcomer’ as the phrase has it.

The vacancy in New York had arisen through the difficulties Judson had experienced with Toscanini, who virtually regarded the orchestra as ‘his’ property. Matters came to a head when Judson offered a guest engagement to Sir Thomas Beecham for the 1936-37 season without consulting Toscanini, who did not admire Sir Thomas. The volatile Italian immediately resigned, and the search was on for his successor.

Barbirolli was not offered the permanent post on a plate: if he was to get the appointment, he had much to prove during those ten weeks. In the event, he did not need ten weeks, for within a week of his first concert with the Philharmonic-Symphony, Judson was already talking in terms of a permanent appointment for Barbirolli.  The first New York concert took place on Thursday, November 5^th 1936, the programme being comprised of: Berlioz – Le Carnival Romain overture; Bax – The Tale the Pine Trees Knew; Mozart – Symphony No 36 ‘Linz’ and Brahms – Symphony No 4.  Olin Downes, music critic of the New York Times, reported that ‘…there was exceptional virility, grip and lyrical opulence…a red-blooded, dramatic and grandly constructed reading.’  Lawrence Gilman, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, said that Barbirolli ‘…is something better and rare and finer than a conductor of power and sensibility…He [is] a musician of taste and fire and intensity…’ 

One could quote more notices along these lines, but it is unnecessary to do so, for the performances encapsulated on these discs bear out the first impressions that Barbirolli made on the hard-bitten New York press, and which repudiate a view – still prevalent in certain quarters even today - that Barbirolli’s time in New York was unsuccessful. In his first seasons, attendances and box office takings were higher than Toscanini commanded, but towards the end of 1937 Toscanini was back in New York permanently to conduct the new orchestra which had been formed especially for him by the National Broadcasting Company (the NBC Symphony). In some respects, therefore, these two conductors of Italian provenance found themselves in head-to-head competition with each other, and the critics, of course, as always, seemed to relish the argument as to whom was the better 

It was made more difficult for Barbirolli as his programmes were announced and printed months in advance, whereas the NBC broadcast programmes were often fixed at only a few weeks’ notice at best. It got to the point where, on more than several occasions, the same symphony would be performed by these rival orchestras within a few days of each other.

This is not the place to rehearse the old and rather tasteless Barbirolli-Toscanini rivalry; so far as Barbirolli was concerned, there was no rivalry, and it is within quite recent years that a tranche of Barbirolli-Philharmonic broadcast recordings have come to be issued, certainly coming as something of a revelation to those present-day music-lovers who have not been in a position to compare the different but equally admirable work of these two great conductors of different generations, who happened to find themselves in the same city, conducting rival orchestras, at the same time. Several eminent critics appeared to take sides, but there is ample documentary evidence to support admirers of both men. Eugene Ormandy, conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra in succession to Leopold Stokowski, wrote to Fred Gaisberg of HMV early in 1937: ‘…The Philharmonic Orchestra plays better for him than it did for any other conductor outside of Toscanini [this was before Toscanini’s return], and that means a great deal. They all like him personally and musically…’ Ormandy could make such claims as his brother was for many years a cellist in the Philharmonic, playing under Toscanini and other luminaries, and he kept his more famous brother-conductor fully informed of developments in New York.  

Barbirolli’s work-load in New York was hefty; in the 1939-40 season he conducted 104 public concerts, as well as commercial recordings for the American Columbia company with the Philharmonic. But at the end of the 1941/42 season Barbirolli’s six-year contract was up, and the European war had assumed global proportions. It was a tenet of the United States Musicians’ Union that to play in American orchestras you had to be an American citizen: after six years foreign musicians had to take US citizenship to continue holding a permanent position – which rule applied also to conductors.

With close members of his family facing the Blitz in London, the Cockney-born John Barbirolli had no intention of becoming an American citizen; as with his appointment in New York, out of the blue came a new offer from England – to take over the Halle Orchestra in Manchester. He conducted his final Carnegie Hall concert with the Philharmonic, after seven years as the orchestra’s permanent conductor, on March 7^th 1943, concluding the programme with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. By this time, the engineered rivalry with Toscanini was over: a year earlier, the Maestro returned to the Philharmonic for the first time in more than six years, reporting that the orchestra was in wonderful shape – as the oboist Evelyn Rothwell (Barbirolli’s second wife, whom he had married in England in 1939) wrote from New York at the time.

The March 1943 concert was not the last time Barbirolli conducted the New York Philharmonic – Judson invited him back for concerts in January 1959, and in 1968, the Orchestra’s 125^th Season, Barbirolli gave four concerts with them.

The nine works on this double CD set come from a period of over five years – from November 1937 to February 1943 – when Barbirolli was permanent conductor of the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York (the name was shortened to ‘New York Philharmonic’ in 1959), and the repertoire reveals something of the breadth of music Barbirolli programmed during those years.  The earliest performance is of Debussy’s Iberia, the second of his three Images for orchestra, which were written between 1906-12. This was the first of eventually eight performance of the work Barbirolli was to give in New York, and it is an important recording for two reasons: the first is that he never recorded the piece commercially, despite his evident mastery of the score, and the second is that this brilliant orchestral showpiece demonstrates the quality of the Orchestra in Barbirolli’s early years. 

We have seen that a Berlioz Overture opened Barbirolli’s first ever New York programme, so it is appropriate that we include another here – the Benvenuto Cellini Overture (an astounding work for 1838, nine years after Beethoven’s death), which Barbirolli gave in New York during four consecutive seasons (1936-39). Incidentally, it was this orchestra which gave the United States premiere of the Overture in 1884. From the same October 30^th concert in 1938 (which also included Weber’s Oberon overture – not in this collection), we have The White Peacock by the tragic American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920) a beautiful piece of American Impressionism which was first given in its orchestral guise by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski in December, 1919. 

As an example of Barbirolli’s qualities as a concerto accompanist, the performance of Brahms’s Double Concerto is valuable, for this is the only occasion that Barbirolli conducted the work in New York, although he made a notable commercial recording of it in 1959 with Alfredo Campoli and Andre Navarra with the Halle Orchestra. The first American performance was in Boston in 1893, when the cello soloist was Victor Herbert. Boston was also the city that saw the American premiere of the Symphony in D minor by Cesar Franck (the New York Symphony gave the work for the first time in Manhattan in 1910, the Philharmonic following a year later) – Barbirolli’s sole commercial recording dates from 1962, with the Czech Philharmonic, of a work that he conducted in three consecutive seasons in New York.

Although Barbirolli became a noted conductor of Mahler’s music in the final decade or so of his life, and Mahler had been music director of the New York Philharmonic for several seasons towards the end of his life (the last work Mahler conducted was his Fourth Symphony with that orchestra), the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony was the only music by Mahler that Barbirolli conducted during his time in New York, in a December 1939 programme that also included the two Suites from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe. Mahler never conducted the Fifth in New York, but it is not too fanciful to assume that there may have been members of the orchestra in 1939 who had played under Mahler almost thirty years before.  

Following the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, rather more than the usual number of British works appeared on various American orchestral programmes – although this was not as widespread as might be imagined. In the summer of 1940 a short festival of British music was being held in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Barbirolli was invited to conducted the final concert. He readily accepted, and was delighted that the soloist in a performance of Cesar Franck’s Symphonic Variations was the Australian-born composer and pianist Arthur Benjamin. By all accounts, the performance went off extremely well, and perhaps as a ‘thank you’ to Benjamin, Barbirolli programmed the Australian’s recent Overture to an Italian Comedy, in his April 20^th 1941 concert. This sparkling overture had been premiered in London in 1937, and the following season Barbirolli was able to include one of the several Shakespearean overtures by the Italian-American composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco – his sixth, King John. This took place in March 1942, barely a month before Barbirolli’s final New York Philharmonic commercial recording for Columbia. 

Our chronological survey of Barbirolli in New York during this period ends with a Concerto Grosso the conductor put together from the music of Arcangelo Corelli, the 17^th-century Italian violinist and composer, taken from Barbirolli’s penultimate New York Philharmonic concert from February 1943, two weeks before his seven-year association with the orchestra came to an end.                       Robert Matthew-Walker © 2007

Page revised Thursday November 272007