Word: conductors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...near-miracle which Barbirolli wrought with the Halle Orchestra is legendary. The orchestra had been without a permanent conductor since the retirement of Hamilton Harty, a decade before Barbirolli's arrival in 1943. Barbirolli managed to make Halle one of the world's leading orchestras, and in the process gained more control over his own florid style. The recordings which he made with the Halle during his decades of association with it are some of the finest in the literature. The Mahler First Symphony which he did with them for Vanguard is a definitive version, a masterpiece which puts...
...Barbirolli's career was long, and certainly distinguished. Educated at the Royal Academy of Music, he was a successful cellist while scarcely out of his teens. In his early twenties, he began his conducting career, first as a choral conductor, then as a conductor with the British National Opera. It was here that his conducting style was shaped. For years, he concentrated on Italian opera, almost to the exclusion of every form of music, and developed his free-wheeling, easy, unquestionably romantic form of conducting. After some years with the British National Opera, and later the Scottish Symphony, came...
HAVING rehabilitated the Halle, Barbirolli set himself higher tasks. He rejuvenated the Salzburg Festival, which had lapsed during the war, and there he conducted the newly discovered Mozart Oboe Concerto, with his wife, Evelyn, as soloist. His career flourished as he was invited to serve as guest conductor of one of the finest orchestras on the continent, and in the United States he accepted the post of conductor of the Houston Symphony, in addition to his duties at Halle...
...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, in its entirety. This sort of thing is dangerous in the hands...
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...