Sir John Barbirolli (1899-1970)

Living in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in the early 1960’s, I was rarely able to attend concerts at St. George’s Hall, work and virtual poverty preventing it. We booked a ticket however for the Delius Centenary concerts (the composer was a – reluctant -native of the city), to be performed by Sir Thomas Beecham and his Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Sadly Beecham - Delius’ great advocate - had to withdraw, and the Austrian Rudolph Kemp replaced him. So I never saw this the most colourful of those three great contemporaries (and rivals) : Boult, Beecham and Barbirolli.

At least in that time I managed to attend a concert by Sir John Barbirolli and his beloved Halle Orchestra. The story has often been told of how this son of an Italian father and French mother, born a London cockney as he often boasted, built up the fragments of an orchestra so that it became one of Europe’s finest. He remained loyal to the Halle until his death, only in his later years building up a strong rapport with the Vienna and especially the Berlin Philharmonic orchestras, whilst maintaining a residency with the Houston Orchestra in the U.S.A.

Sadly I don’t remember the details of the concert in Bradford apart from the performance of an Oboe Concerto in which his wife, Evelyn Rothwell* was the soloist. He was a small man and she tall and imposing. I recall their entrance, he with a mincing walk and she a stately one. Once on the podium, Barbirolli was a joy to watch. Clearly he loved his art and lived every note, his eyes watchful of the players, and at moments that moved or delighted him, groaning in the gravely voice for which he was well known. He is fondly remembered for his total love for music, and he could be as happy with a Strauss waltz or a Mahler symphony, of which he became a prime exponent in his latter years.

I have become a great admirer of his music-making and have been a member of The Barbirolli Society (it has a website) for a few years now. Together with Dutton Laboratories, they have reissued many of his recordings and some of his live performances, all digitally re-mastered, and at a very reasonable price. Some of these are from his years with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. There are divided opinions about his seven years with them. He followed Arturo Toscanini and had to contend with the maestro’s many followers in his audience.

There is no disagreement however about his achievements when he came back to England in 1943, and saved an orchestra from dying.

B.R.

*Evelyn Barbirolli, nee Rothwell, died January 25th 2008 aged 97

The Colston Hall, Bristol

This is where I go for concerts these days. It is a conventional auditorium – now undergoing refurbishment - with a warm acoustic and generally I am perched in the cramped choir seating behind the orchestra. The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra is effectively its resident orchestra, Bristol being one of many of the venues it plays in around the West Country, and now under its American Conductor Marin Alsop. Last week’s concert was conducted by Petra Sakari, one of the brilliant Finns who bring so much skill and finesse to contemporary music-making. And the soloist in the Rachmaninoff 2nd was the Russian Nikolai Lugansky.

Though never lacking in power, Lugansky played this wonderful old war horse with a rare delicacy and wonderful fluency. It was almost as if he was commenting on the music, detached from it and yet fully involved, if it is possible to be both at the same time! Perhaps a little mannered at times and certainly milking the climax of the last movement for every drop of emotion, this was a fascinating performance. I have since bought his recording of the 1st and 3rd Concertos and have been comparing the latter with Rachmaninoff’s own recording made in 1940. Again the delicacy is especially noticeable against the composer’s robust, no nonsense and powerful performance and it has the added advantage of brilliant support from the C.B.S.O. under another Finn, Sakari Oramo. Now playing on the international circuit, Lugansky is regarded by many as being in the great Russian tradition of Gilels, Richter and Kissin. He is certainly a pianist to watch.

The other excitement of this concert was the performance of extracts from Prokoviev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet. The orchestra had obviously been well rehearsed in this demanding score. The lyrical extracts were very beautiful and the moments of high drama overwhelming, particularly in the Death of Tybalt. Sitting so near to the orchestra was almost too much; frightening even, especially in this piece: a very terrible death which we almost felt we were sharing. Sakari rightly insisted on the orchestra taking the applause. They had played magnificently. But they in turn refused to stand for the last call, and instead applauded him.

A good concert is an event, an occasion in itself, as this one was.

B.R.

A Royal Occasion

St. Cecilia was an early Christian martyr whose relics now reside in a church which bears her name in Rome. Amongst her attributes was apparently the ability to play the organ and she is now regarded as the patroness of Music. Every year in the U.K. there is a Royal Concert to commemorate her festival day. My eldest daughter and I went to such a concert in the Royal Albert Hall in the early 1980’s. We were seated in the choir stalls of that great auditorium, looking down on the orchestra and soloists, and behind us an array of trumpeters who began the concert with a fanfare composed for the occasion. There were a couple of minor royals in the royal box and we stood in reluctant obeisance as they arrived.

The City of Birmingham Orchestra was playing under their newly appointed and still very young conductor, Simon Rattle to whom we have already referred. The main work in the first half of the concert was Tchaikovsky’s 1st Piano Concerto. It was generally known that Rattle dislikes that composer and only conducts his works under pressure. The pressure on this occasion presumably came from the soloist, the Russian Emile Gilels, whose sensitive performance of Beethoven’s 4th. Piano Concerto I am now listening to on a CD. Sadly in this concert he was past his prime or perhaps having a bad day. Whilst holding the rhythm of a work that must have been long in his head if no longer in his heart, he played a fuselage of wrong notes. From where we sat we could see that the tip of his fingers were bound and the virtuosity one expected from a pianist, whose recordings of the two Brahms concertos remain a main choice by the critics, was lacking. We were disappointed by such an uncharacteristic performance and sad for him. (I did wonder however if, as the citizen of a still Communist country, he was saying something about the occasion!).

The proceeds from these annual concerts go to the Musicians Benevolent Fund. There has been a lot of publicity recently about the poor wages of orchestral players and indeed on the financial viability of British orchestras, all of whom are in serious debt. Not only British ones. One of the many touring Russian orchestras who were here a few years ago came with no cash flow and the members ended up busking in the streets. It hasn’t got that bad here. Yet. The problem will never be sorted until there is adequate sponsoring by the government (Finland with its population of 5M has 13 full time orchestras and 18 part-professional ones!), as well as larger more enthusiastic audiences.

B.R.

Bruno Walter and Gustav Mahler

Bruno Walter(1876-1962 ) was the first champion and interpreter of Mahler’s music. He was only 17 when he was appointed as repetiteur and then chorus master of the Hamburg Opera of which Mahler was the director, and the two became friends as well as colleagues. Walter was born in Berlin and studied piano, composition and conducting there at the Conservatory. He was an excellent pianist and later in life accompanied the contralto Kathleen Ferrier in a series of concerts. But it is as a conductor that he is remembered, holding important positions with leading European orchestras and eventually making many recordings with the New York Philharmonic and The Colombia Orchestra, a special recording ensemble created for him.

His aim was to balance sensitivity with musical precision, evident in his recordings of Mahler’s work. He adored Mahler and indeed became his musical executor. Introducing the musical world to music that at first seemed strange and savage, wholly indulgent to some, but increasingly under his baton, music which belonged and represented the turbulent age in which it was composed, he became the foremost exponent of Mahler’s work. Working with the composer and exposed to his rehearsal methods, he also learned more about himself as an artist. ‘There was much to learn for a lad with my questionable tendency to neglect musical correctness for the sake of feeling’.

I have his recording of the 2nd.Symphony(1958) as I have mentioned, coupled with the 1st. Compared to the passion and lyricism of the Barbirolli and Berlin Philharmonic live performance(1962), for me Walter lacks warmth, but then it was recorded in the sterile acoustics of the Carnegie Hall and that’s enough to knock the bloom off anything.

Without Walter’s advocacy – even idolatry as he confessed – Mahler’s slow acceptance by the public might never have happened. Now he can be regularly heard in the concert halls of the world. I heard Bruno Walter conduct on his first British tour after the 39-45 war, in Watford Town Hall, the venue for many recordings in the 50’s and 60’s. I don’t recall the programme, but I remember him. A quiet, undemonstrative presence, as much caressing as conducting the music. One of the greats.

B.R.

A transcendent experience

When we lived in the West Midlands I became a member of the City of Birmingham Orchestra Society and often would attend afternoon rehearsals on my day off, when Louis Fremaux was the conductor. Shortly before we moved he had a row with the managment and summarily left. For a year the orchestra was without a full time director, though Erich Schmid filled the gap with a cycle of the Beethoven symphonies. During that time the young Simon Rattle was appointed as the director of music and the sensational partnership began between a charismatic conductor and an excellent provincial but soon internationally famous orchestra. Rattle began his first season performing the seven Sibelius symphonies. Then he moved onto the Mahler symphonies. Living in London from 1979, I made sure that whenever I could I was present at the C.B.S.O. and Rattle’s rare appearances in the capital. And it was they and C.B.S.O. Chorus who introduced me to Mahler’s 2nd. ‘Resurrection Symphony on one never-to-be-forgotten evening.

The symphony is in five movements. Mahler described the first of these as ‘funeral rites’, raising the question of the purpose of life. The next two movements are linked by being in triple time; the first a typical ‘landler’ (waltz rhythm) and the other an orchestral transcription of the song ‘St. Anthony and the Fishers’. The fourth introduces the beautiful song ‘Ulricht’ in which the imagery is of the soul leading mankind out of death into the light of God; the soloist being the incomparable Janet Baker, as on two of my three CD’s of the symphony. Then the finale, loud and long until, following a summoning of the legions of the dead by horns and brass outside the main concert hall, there is the hushed entry of the chorus ,‘Arise, arise..’. As I heard this for the first time in the Royal Festival Hall (hardly the most numinous of places) I felt myself levitating from my seat, almost a resurrection of my own. A visceral, spiritual ecstasy beyond expression, but to me utterly real.

I can get excited at a concert, have been known to rise to my feet like a dervish when a work reaches its conclusion shouting ‘bravo’s’ with abandon. But this was quite different and although I recall it as I listen to Barbarolli and the Berlin Philharmonic, Rattle and the C.B.S.O. and Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic, it is an experience unique to its moment, never equalled before or since.

B.R.

A Promenade Concert

My first job was in London and somehow I managed to find enough money out of my meagre wages to buy a season ticket for the 1948 Henry Wood Promenade concerts. Most nights as soon as work was over, I joined the queue and generally got a good position in the arena. This way I began to learn the basic orchestral and choral classical repertoire. The main diet was Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart and the romantic concertos of Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov. But there were performances by contemporary composers, often British ones, few of whom are heard in concert halls today. Popular then for his patriotic music, and seen as the natural successor to Edward Elgar, William Walton was one of them.

One evening I heard his first Symphony (there was a second but that came much later) and was overwhelmed by it. I was amazed to see two sets of tympani, thwacked good and hard in much of the work, especially the second and last movements. Then here was this unashamedly emotional music employing a large modern orchestra with a Sibelius -like journey, not through the craggy splendour of Finland, but with the personal background of a broken love-affair. Only the first three movements were played at the first performance in 1934 because of Walton’s lack of focus following the breakdown. I stood amazed at such music – the excitable rhythm of the opening, the jagged metres of the scherzo (‘presto con malizia’). The sublime, flowing, slow movement with its wonderful flute solo and then the grandeur of the finale – joining in the wild enthusiasm of the promenaders at the end.

Sir Malcom Sargent was the conductor. Adored by the numerous choirs and loathed by many of the orchestras he conducted, he was a popular figure in the British music scene in the middle years of the last century. Immensely elegant, he always wore a white carnation in his buttonhole, was a joy to watch, and was never slow to take his full share of an audience’s applause. Orchestral players called him ‘Flash Harry’. Walton might have been pleased by this performance of his symphony but not as I remember, the first performance of his only full scale opera – ‘Troilus and Cressida’, which Sargent also conducted. Walton felt it was insufficiently rehearsed. Though regarded by some critics as an old fashioned work, its opulent score was warmly welcomed, and its performance by Opera North in the 1963 revised version is still available on CD.

An uneven composer perhaps, but I am still a Walton fan.

p.s. I have just been present at a performance (27.04.06)- of the same symphony. It was a stunning high-powered, superbly prepared reading from Bramwell Tovey and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Such playing! Such a symphony! I am still bowled over by it - 57 years later.

B.R.

Opera Round-Up

This has been another breathless survey, and lots of important people have been haunting me because they were not included. The two earlier articles on Zarzuela and references to de Falla gave some space to Spain, but I omitted Bizet in the French blog, although I had included him in the ‘French Connection 1’ article earlier. Saint Saens’s ‘Samson et Dalila’ ; Massenet’s ‘Manon’ too are important for themselves as well as for their contribution to the development of lyric opera.

And then the Russians were left out altogether, whereas Glinka’s ‘A Life for the Tsar’ in 1836 was perhaps the first nationalistic opera, followed by Mussorgsky’s ‘Boris Godunov’ and the several operas of Rimsky Korsakov. Tchaikovsky’s operas are Russian in spirit if not primarily nationalistic. ‘Eugene Onegin’ is a wonderful work and I saw a superbe production in Amsterdam’s Musik Theatre some time ago. The first act ‘Letter Song’ is one of the finest soprano arias in all music. In Bohemia, Smetana produced the still very popular ‘The Bartered Bride’ which I have seen in a delightful performance. A new recording on the Chandos label under the veteran conductor Sir Charles Mackerras has just been released and received a warm welcome. Mackerras has been a powerful advocate of the operas of Janacek, another man-alone amongst composers, and I have seen two of his extraordinary operas notable for their jagged rhythms vying with heart rending melody, performed by Opera North and the English National Opera.

Opera has become enormously expensive, but for most composers it remains – and I quote from the Oxford Dictionary of Music – their ‘greatest and most attractive challenge. With the development of mechanical and electrical techniques and the advance of the stage producer to an importance comparable with that of the conductor, the staging of opera has become more exciting and controversial’. One thing however remains the same – the behaviour of performers and management which can be as operatic off the stage as on. So as I write there is a major crisis at English National Opera and since Ricardo Mutti’s departure, also at La Scala, Milan. Both opera houses have been recently refurbished or rebuilt, but their domestic dramas remain.

B.R.
Looking ahead, it has been suggested that I add one or two concert-going experiences, so I’ll do that.