Word: barbirolli
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...Barbirolli's conducting was an experience in sheer physical grace. The emotive power of his body seemed at times to be equal to the emotive power of the music he conducted, as every muscle of his body, and every inch of himself to the very tips of his hair, seemed to involve itself in the music. He was not a histrionic conductor, as Giulini so often is, but he was a man deeply involved in his music. He seemed never to analyze a piece of music in terms of the individual notes and phrases, but as an emotional experience...
...Barbirolli did some work as a composer and arranger, but certainly his reputation will not rest on this, for, in fact, he wrote nothing that can be considered a masterpiece. He was an accomplished cellist, however, and his experience as an instrumentalist, perhaps more than his training as a conductor, influenced the shape of his work, for he conducted with a remarkable understanding. He was, in the final summing up, a conductor of vastly underrated talent, a man who never received the recognition that was due his talent as an interpreter of modern and Romantic composers. Certainly he lacked...
EVERY obituary writer, and every music critic, in this country has by now observed that John Barbirolli and Goerge Szell were polar opposites. While Barbirolli was the actual successor of Toscanini in the New York post, Szell was, in a very real sense, his spiritual successor. Toscanini and Szell were cut from the same cloth: men of precision who held tight rein over their orchestras and insisted on perfection in their performers. Like Barbirolli, Szell was a distinguished soloist in his own right. To a far greater degree than Barbirolli, he pursued his career as an instrumentalist all his life...
Szell's musical training was remarkably good. Max Reger was his composition teacher, and his mentor was Richard Strauss. It was at the recommendation of Strauss that he received his first appointment as a conductor, at the Strasbourg Opera. His career was more scholarly than Barbirolli's had been; when he advanced to the post of principal conductor of the Berlin State Opera, he also served as Professor at the Hochschule fur Musik in Berlin. A Hungarian national, Szell left Germany during the Nazi era and conducted throughout the world, from Australia to Edinburgh...
SZELL conducted a wide variety of composers, and a large number of works. He was weakest where Barbirolli was strongest, in the post-Romantics. Nonetheless, a recording which Columbia released after his death, of the Bruckner Eighth Symphony, is a truly fine work. Szell's genius was diffuse. He conducted so many composers well that it is hard to single out one set of performances for particular distinction. Besides being a great conductor, he was a great man. Although his control of the orchestra was tight and somewhat tyrannical, he was still well liked. Before he died, he conducted several...