Word: barbirollis
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NEWSPAPER obituaries for Sir John Barbirolli this summer were condescending. Barbirolli was unfashionable, unpopular, and vaguely old fashioned. The modern critics sneered at his approach to music, his method of conducting, his choice of composers. To the musical establishment, he was the archetype of the out-person...
...unpopularity, Barbirolli was an impressive conductor. He was the embodiment of the classic American caricature of the maestro. His stature, his long flowing hair, his stately appearance, and his knighthood completed the effect. Appearance does not assure good press, though, and Barbirolli never got it. While most of the great British conductors-Beecham, Goossens, Sargent, Boult-stayed primarily in their native country, Barbirolli came to America to conduct the New Pork Philharmonic when Toscanini left it in 1937. His disastrous career here insured him of a bad critical reputation for the rest of his life...
After he left New York, some of the finest contemporary composers chose him to conduct their work. He directed premieres of works by Britten, Vaughan Williams, Rawsthorne, and Arthur Benjamin. But this did little to better his reputation. The New York episode is the best remembered of Barbirolli's career...
...have been a mistake to give him Toscanini's job, and Barbirolli made a greater mistake in accepting it. No two conductors could have been more different-in style, in approach to music, in taste, in general attitude toward conducting. Toscanini, the legendary martinet who kept the smallest details in perfect order, was the complete opposite of the mild-mannered Barbirolli, whose relaxed, romantic interpretations were based more on love than on technicality. When his contract at New York ran out, Barbirolli returned to England, by all accounts a failure, and took over the almost moribund Halle Orchestra of Manchester...
Died. Sir John Barbirolli, 70, internationally famed conductor; of heart disease; in London. Barbirolli was only 37 when he was called upon to step into the retiring Arturo Toscanini's shoes at the New York Philharmonic; it was an impossible task, and he returned to England in 1943 to shape Manchester's venerable but war-ravaged Halle Orchestra into one of Europe's best...