Word: barbirollis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...piano concertos. He looked unimpressive, shy as a rabbit. But before he had got through many bars everyone realized his extraordinary talent. When he finished the first concerto the audience clapped and cheered wildly. Toscanini stepped back among the musicians and applauded with them. Last week young John Barbirolli, 37, brought back young Bohemian-born Rudolf Serkin, 33, for a second New York performance that all but eclipsed his first...
...nervousness and novelty. It was the first performance of the Philharmonic's 95th season. It was the first time in ten years that the season patrons could not look forward to a single concert under their beloved Conductor Arturo Toscanini. It was the first time that John Barbirolli, 36, had ever faced an American audience, and this audience that he was tackling at his debut was the most exacting, the most critical in the country. To many in that audience Toscanini and the Philharmonic had seemed inseparable; to nearly all, this young Barbirolli was unknown. They clapped him politely...
Well aware how much on trial he was, Conductor Barbirolli led off with an ornamental curtain-raiser, Berlioz's Roman Carnival Overture. The audience, at once soothed by his meticulous phrasing, his insistence on broad, full tones, was no less impressed by his physical resource. Planting his feet widely, chin down, Conductor Barbirolli swayed his shoulders delicately through the lyrical passages, hunched forward to demand a pianissimo, twitched his kinetic torso and wagged his flying tails to call for quickened tempi. He guided the orchestra carefully through the tenebrous but imitative twilights of a symphonic poem by Arnold...
Conductor Barbirolli earned better marks, and easily passed his New York entrance examination with a suave Mozart symphony and a heroic Brahms Fourth, wherein New York Times Critic Olin Downes discovered "virility, grip, lyrical opulence, and on occasion the impact of the bear's paw." Said the New York Herald Tribune's, Lawrence Oilman: "He has disclosed himself as a musician of taste and fire and intensity, electric, vital, sensitive, dynamic, experienced; as an artist who knows his way among the scores he elects to set before us, who has mastered not only his temperament but his trade...
...return of towering Otto Klemperer. San Francisco stages its opera season first, but by midwinter the rejuvenated symphony will be playing again under the beneficent command of Pierre Monteux. The New York Philharmonic, bereft of Arturo Toscanini, has postponed its season's opening until November when John Barbirolli, an obscure young Englishman so far as the U. S. is concerned, will take over the first ten weeks. Barbirolli's appointment has been frowned upon by many a Philharmonic subscriber who may soon be convinced that he is either the season's dead flop or its dark horse...