Customer Reviews

Mozart: Symphony No. 35 / Beethoven: Symphony No. 7 / Wagner: Siegfried Idyll

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Barbirolli's reputation has benefited from numerous releases of live concerts by BBC Legends, and although some have been in dodgy sound while others suffer from flawed playing, in every case the conductor's warmth and sincerity come through. Forty years after is death at seventy -- a tender age in a long-lived profession -- he's th tortoise that won the race. Few outside a band of British loyalists fully grasped that JB had achieved greatness; only near the end did prestigious guest appearances with the Berlin Phil. bring wider recognition. For too long he had been so closely identified with the less-than-stellar Halle Orch. in Manchester, which tended to obscure his real excellence (I realize that I'm speaking in generalizations; the short-sighted view of Barbirolli in America was a premature judgment based on his unfortunate tenure as the successor to Toscanini at the NY Phil.).

Which is all prelude to saying how enjoyable this CD is, gathered from three concerts in three different venues between 1966 and 1968. It begins with the kind of expansive, ebullient Mozart that Bruno Walter also specialized in. The modern way with the Sym. 35 "Haffner" is to zip through it at breakneck speed; happily, Barbirolli takes humane tempos that give room for the music to breathe. The sound from Royal Albert Hall is mediocre but listenable stereo with boomy timpani.

By 1968 the sound is considerably brighter, closer, and more well balanced. The Seventh was Barbriolli's favorite Beethoven symphony, but he didn't record it commercially (his studio accounts were limited to four works, Sym. 1, 3, 5 and 8). The reading reading starts out sounding old-fashioned, looking back toward Furtwangler and Klemperer -- the transition from the slow opening of the first movement to the Allegro brings hardly any change of pace, much less the exuberant speed-up that's usual. But the measured pace is grand rather than heavy-footed. The horns whoop with excitement (and hardly a fluff), and there is inner vitality. The second movement, fortunately, isn't old-fashioned. Instead of being slowed down to sound serious, it moves with the lightness implied by the term "allegretto" rather than "andante" or "allegro." The Scherzo is taken fast,h almost to be one beat to the bar, but the brass playing is somewhat crude and unsettled in the Trio. for me, the finale is thrilling when taken at breakneck speed, the way Karajan does it, but Barbirolli hears the music quite differently, giving us a robust but fairly measured Allegro, disregarding the "con brio" that Beethoven wanted. Furtwangler and Klemperer did the same thing, and like their readings, Barbirolli's belongs among the stately yet alive performances in that tradition.

The program ends with the Siegfried Idyll, recorded in mono at the BBC studios in Manchester. the dim and distant miking does the performance no favors, but it's loving, supple, and broadly paced, with lots of expressive rubato. In other words, like everything else on this CD, it's a treat for anyone with a taste for a bygone era of music-making.