Word: barbirolli
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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What nettled the doyen of British critics most was a performance of Rossini's Semiramide Overture by the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir John Barbirolli. "No really musical person," groused Newman, "would leave his comfortable home . . . specifically to hear this . . . But bring, at great expense, a German orchestra all the way from Berlin to play this negligible bit of Italian music in the capital of Scotland, and an English conductor all the way from Manchester to conduct it, and apparently it becomes, by some magical transformation . . . a 'festival' work and we trudge all the way to Edinburgh...
...John Barbirolli was the most popular man in Manchester last week, and with reason. A few hours before concert time he had turned down $40,000 a year and one of the most coveted conductorships in Britain-the BBC Symphony-to stick with the Halle at half the salary...
Ankle Low. Barbirolli's terms for staying were unselfish. He asked and got a raise for his men (none for himself), an increase in the size of his orchestra (to 100 pieces) and a fund for at least one foreign tour a year. The Halle Concert Society was glad to pay. It was a bargain to keep the man who in five years hac hammered and planed their famed but disintegrated 91-year-old orchestra back into top shape-and who, incidentally, hac salvaged his own career in the doing...
When Conductor (and Cellist) Barbirolli and his oboe-playing British wife Evelyn Rothwell packed aboard a Portuguese freighter in New York five years ago, his musical stock was ankle low. At 37, a youngster as conductors go, he had made the tactical mistake of following Arturo Toscanini to a podium that had taken all of the Maestro's fire and ice to control. As boss of the proud, 106-year-old New York Philharmonic-Symphony, Barbirolli had neither Toscanini's precise beat nor his fearsome bearing. The musicians were soon in a state of anarchy. Barbirolli left unhappily...
...with his Manhattan misfortunes "over the dam," Conductor Barbirolli says, "I'm on top of the world." He likes Manchester: "There is not much social life. It gives you time to work." He concentrates on young people, tries to convince them "that it's jazz that's sissy and the real he-man stuff is Beethoven and Bach." One-third of his audiences are 18 or under. Says Barbirolli: "If Frank Sinatra can have his bobby-sox brigade...