Sir John Barbirolli was just 11 when he took his cello into a London studio to cut his first recordings in October 1911. In the nearly 60 years that remained to him, he was in the studio frequently, assembling a catalogue so vast that it covers nearly every aspect of his professional life, often in fine detail. Although the 10 records that follow are all superb examples of his art, they’re not meant solely to be my personal nominations for Barbirolli’s Best. Rather, I’ve aimed to provide a bird’s-eye view of his career’s variegated terrain while highlighting a few of its artistic peaks. I can’t say this made the selection process any less agonising, but I tried to be guided by a sense of responsibility to the conductor’s legacy. JB has been gone for a half-century now, but his innate musicality, generous spirit and profound humanity shine as bright as ever in his finest recordings.

Debussy: Danse sacrée; Danse profane (rec 1927)

Ethel Bartlett pf National Gramophonic Society Chamber Orchestra (Barbirolli Society)

Barbirolli was immersed in music from infancy. His father and paternal grandfather were violinists who’d played in the premiere of Verdi’s Otello at La Scala, Milan, and later (before Barbirolli’s birth) made their way to London to find work in theatre orchestras. Young Giovanni Battista (he later anglicised his name) started on the violin but soon switched to the cello. He practised for hours each day and spent his spare time studying scores. By age 16, he was the youngest player in Henry Wood’s Queen’s Hall Orchestra, and aged 18 he was in the cello section of the LSO when Elgar conducted the first performance of his Cello Concerto. But he was determined to conduct, and after the war he began forming his own ensembles in order to make his dream a reality.

He made his first recordings as conductor in 1927 under the auspices of the National Gramophonic Society, leading a string orchestra he’d founded a few years earlier (the society’s notes in Gramophone February 1927 give the backstory). The repertoire was definitely off the beaten track: Debussy, Delius, Elgar, Marcello and Warlock. Although Debussy and Ravel don’t figure prominently in his discography, both composers were near to his heart. He’d performed Ravel’s String Quartet in 1916 while still a student at the Royal Academy of Music (causing an outcry from some of the faculty, who believed the music unsuitable for presentation in an academic setting) and played Debussy’s Cello Sonata at a 1917 Aeolian Hall recital. Now, as a conductor, he was making one of the first recordings of Debussy’s 1904 works Danse sacrée and Danse profane for harp and strings.

A piano replaces the harp here (surely because it was easier to capture on record), and the sound is dim by modern standards, but the performance itself is remarkable for its poise, polish and rapt atmosphere. The delicacy of the string tone and the chastely expressive use of portamentos are telling. To the end of his career, Barbirolli was meticulous about marking string parts with bowings and other details, and if this isn’t yet the richly supple, finely shaded ‘Barbirolli sound’ he’d soon bring to the string section of nearly every orchestra he conducted, it’s well on its way.

Chopin: Piano Concerto No 2 (rec 1935)

Alfred Cortot pf Unnamed orchestra (Naxos, 5/39)

At the time Barbirolli made his first orchestral recordings, he was busy with the British National Opera Company, leading productions all over England. In December 1927 he made his LSO conducting debut, taking over at short notice for an indisposed Sir Thomas Beecham (Elgar’s Second Symphony was on the programme, and Barbirolli had just days to learn it). The concert’s success led immediately to a contract with HMV, and soon Barbirolli was recording arias and concertos with Chaliapin, Gigli, Heifetz, Kreisler, Melchior, Rubinstein, Schnabel and other leading soloists of the day. From this period’s embarrassment of riches, I’ve selected Chopin’s F minor Piano Concerto with Cortot, in part because Barbirolli makes such an unusually satisfying meal of the orchestral part, but also as it so vividly illustrates the conductor’s technical prowess. Cortot plays with copious rubato, and Barbirolli has the orchestra following his every swell and sigh.

Sibelius: Symphony No 2 (rec 1940)

New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra (Sony, 8/99)

One segment of Barbirolli’s career sadly not documented on records is his tenure as principal conductor of the Scottish Orchestra (now the RSNO) from 1933 to 1936 – especially as it presages his ferocious work rebuilding the Hallé Orchestra. He brought a starry array of soloists to the north, which, together with his work for HMV, led to word getting back to the American impresario Arthur Judson, who was searching for a conductor to replace Arturo Toscanini at the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Society. Barbirolli was a highly unlikely choice, given his youth, relative inexperience and lack of name recognition, but his respectful collegiality – a sea change from having to deal with an explosive Toscanini – and thorough musicianship quickly won over the orchestra (known as ‘Murder Incorporated’ for its merciless treatment of conductors). Some critics remained intransigent and maintained that orchestral standards declined under his watch. A series of discs for Columbia and various live broadcast recordings tell a different story, however. This Sibelius Second, for instance, is white hot. Barbirolli was a devoted Sibelian and would record this symphony three more times, including an acclaimed 1962 account with the RPO; but I find this brilliantly articulate interpretation even more thrilling, and from the first pulsating bars the New York strings exhibit that inimitable Barbirolli sound, not just in terms of tonal richness but also in their attention to details of dynamics and articulation.

Bax: Symphony No 3 (rec 1943-44)

Hallé Orchestra (Warner, 2/44)

There was true affection between Barbirolli and New York Philharmonic-Symphony musicians, but the Second World War intensified Barbirolli’s desire to return home, so when he received an invitation to take the helm at the Hallé – one of Britain’s oldest permanent orchestras – he felt it impossible to resist. What he discovered when he arrived in Manchester in June 1943, however, was a shambles at best, and he had to rebuild the orchestra almost entirely from scratch. ‘I had to find the “slightly maimed”,’ he later recalled. ‘It didn’t matter if they had flat feet as long as they had straight fingers.’ How astonishing, then, to hear the Hallé’s confident and accomplished performance of Bax’s broodingly complex Third Symphony, recorded a mere seven months after his arrival. Barbirolli’s ardent championship of British music was nothing new. He had a vibrant patriotic streak and a keen sense of duty to Britain’s musical past and present – Bax’s The Tale the Pine-Trees Knew was the centrepiece of his New York Philharmonic-Symphony debut, for example. In retrospect, it’s clear that under his leadership the Hallé was already well on its way to becoming a guiding light of the nation’s musical culture.

With Vaughan Williams (photo: Bridgeman Images)

Vaughan Williams: Symphony No 8 (rec 1956)

Hallé Orchestra (Naxos, 2/59)

Barbirolli was a friend to many composers, yet his relationship with Vaughan Williams was one of special connections. As early as 1925, as part of the Music Society Quartet, Barbirolli played and recorded the Phantasy Quintet, and as time went on he gradually added most of the orchestral works to his repertoire. He conducted the suite from the ballet Job in his first New York concerts, and later brought A London Symphony and the Pastoral Symphony to audiences there. With the Hallé, Vaughan Williams’s music became even more of a staple, both in concert and on records. There’s an ardent, touchingly plaintive Fifth from 1944 (recorded just a month after Bax’s Third, in fact); it’s a little rough-hewn when heard alongside his radiant 1962 account with the Philharmonia, but this ruggedness is part of its charm. Then there’s the 1957 A London Symphony, one of Barbirolli and the Hallé’s most magical recordings, and close to perfection in terms of both atmosphere and dramatic trenchancy. It seems more apt, however, to give the palm to this kaleidoscopic and still unrivalled reading of the Eighth, as the work was dedicated to Barbirolli – ‘Glorious John’, as Vaughan Williams called him, for the admiration was reciprocal. Awarding the conductor with the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society in 1950, the composer described him as ‘one of those wizards who can take the dry bones of crotchets and quavers and breathe into them the breath of life’.

Brahms: Symphony No 2 (rec 1959)

Boston Symphony Orchestra (VAI DVD)

It’s one thing to hear Barbirolli’s music-making and quite another to see him in action. He was exceptionally graceful on the podium, and some sceptical critics (mistakenly) considered his elegant baton technique to be a little too slick. In truth, he was proud of his natural ability to communicate through gesture, and firmly believed that conductors were born and not made. Watching this grainy broadcast of a BSO television broadcast, one can appreciate the expressive fluidity of his movements: those smooth, lateral motions, as if he were bowing an invisible violin to elicit legato phrasing; or the way he jackhammers with his fists to get that ben marcato quality Brahms asks for. And throughout, one sees him in a delicate dance, leading and then stepping back to let the orchestra play – an equilibrium that’s only possible if the musicians have complete confidence in their conductor.

Brahms’s Second was one of Barbirolli’s signature works, and he knew exactly what the composer wanted. Still, these were his very first concerts with the BSO, and it’s remarkable how warmly responsive they are to him – indeed, at the concert’s end they applaud and cheer him as loudly as the audience does. The performance was part of a tour of US orchestras Barbirolli undertook after reducing some of his responsibilities with the Hallé, stepping down a rung from permanent conductor to conductor-in-chief. This gave him time not only to tour but also to take on the music directorship of the Houston Symphony, with whom he’d established an instant rapport during a 1960 visit. Sadly, although Barbirolli remained with the Texas orchestra until 1967, they made no recordings together.

Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius (rec 1964)

Janet Baker mez Richard Lewis ten Kim Borg bass Hallé Orchestra (Warner, 10/65)

Barbirolli was a loyal friend to Elgar long before the two men met, and I believe it’s not far-fetched to assert that no other composer’s music meant quite so much to him. How, then, to choose a single recording out of the dozens that represent a lifetime’s worth of fierce devotion? The choice is especially complicated as Barbirolli’s Elgar has special significance for me. It was through the conductor’s passionately patient recordings of the Enigma Variations and the First Symphony with the Philharmonia that I first fell under the music’s spell – and fell hard. A 1966 Sospiri with the strings of the New Philharmonia is perhaps the most nobly cathartic five minutes of music I know (Barbirolli’s friend and biographer Michael Kennedy, who knew that the conductor, like Elgar, suffered from severe bouts of depression, heard in this recording ‘a hint of what it was like to peer into the abyss of gloom’). And I don’t think any conductor (including Elgar himself) has plumbed the depths of Falstaff with such courageous compassion.

Barbirolli’s recording of The Dream of Gerontius has significant flaws. Richard Lewis is not in his best voice as Gerontius, and while Finnish bass Kim Borg has the Stygian tone the conductor clearly felt was right for the Priest and the Angel of the Agony, his English diction is distractingly unidiomatic. Yet the intensity never slackens for a moment, reflecting Barbirolli’s indelible experience playing the work under the composer’s direction at the 1920 Three Choirs Festival, as well as his conviction that Elgar composed it ‘in a constant white heat of inspiration’. A devout Catholic, Barbirolli wrote to a friend after the sessions that he wanted to leave this recording ‘as a kind of testament to my faith’; the recording stands, too, as a burning testament to his steadfast faith in Elgar’s genius.

Barbirolli with the Hallé at the 1952 Cheltenham Festival (Brian Seed / Bridgeman Images)

Puccini: Madama Butterfly (rec 1966)

Renata Scotto sop Carlo Bergonzi ten et al Rome Opera House Chorus and Orchestra (Warner, 9/67)

Although opera was a primary component of Barbirolli’s career at its outset (first with the British National Opera Company, and then, beginning in 1928, at Covent Garden), there was precious little opera in his musical diet between 1937 and 1951, when he finally returned to the Royal Opera House. A distantly miked live recording of Aida from 1953 (with Maria Callas in terrific form) gives an inkling of the nuanced playing he drew from the ROH orchestra, and the performance itself is notable for its unwavering lyricism. Even the Triumphal March has a songlike quality. Odd, then, that he didn’t make his first studio recording of an opera until 1965: a sincerely felt yet slightly too grand Dido and Aeneas with Victoria de los Ángeles. (Purcell and the earlier school of English composers had always been in his repertoire, usually in his own full-throated orchestral arrangements.) The following year, he flew to Rome to record Madama Butterfly, winning over the jaded musicians of the city’s opera house orchestra and inspiring them to rehearse Puccini’s well-worn score in depth. The resulting recording is exquisitely detailed. Barbirolli reportedly spent a great deal of time on the connecting scenes and passages – ‘The most difficult parts in Butterfly are the ones nobody notices,’ he said – and this gives his reading a rare richness of incident that adds both weight and impetus to the opera’s narrative trajectory.

Mahler: Symphony No 6 (rec 1967)

New Philharmonia (Warner, 7/68)

It’s possible that Barbirolli found his path to Mahler working with contralto Kathleen Ferrier. They often performed Kindertotenlieder and Das Lied von der Erde – a splotchy sounding 1952 broadcast recording (now on APR) serves as a poignant memento of their special relationship – and it was only following her untimely death in 1953 that he began adding the symphonies to his repertoire. He said it took him a full year to properly learn a Mahler score – this, of course, included meticulous marking of the orchestral parts. He recorded four of the symphonies in the studio, including acclaimed accounts of Nos 5 and 9; various live broadcast performances of all but the Eighth have been issued over the past few decades. I felt some responsibility to plump for the Ninth (1964) as the emblematic Barbirolli Mahler recording, not only for its unique poetic intensity but also as it’s an important milestone in his long relationship with the Berlin Philharmonic – following glowingly received performances, the Berliners themselves invited him to make the record, and they hadn’t recorded with a British conductor in more than a quarter-century. But surely the Sixth with the New Philharmonia is the most daring of his Mahler interpretations, and I still remember my first encounter with it: the slow, dogged tread of the opening movement holding me fast in its grip, and the aching tenderness of the Andante moderato as devastating in its own way as the symphony’s catastrophic conclusion. No matter how many times I’ve heard it since, it never fails to land an emotional punch of disorientating force.

Delius: Brigg Fair; Appalachia (rec 1970)

Alun Jenkins bar Ambrosian Singers, Hallé Orchestra (Warner, 2/71)

Delius’s music had been in Barbirolli’s repertoire from his days as a professional cellist, and in 1928, fresh from the success of his surprise LSO debut, he conducted a broadcast of the Violin Concerto with Albert Sammons as soloist. When a letter of sincere appreciation from the composer arrived shortly after, he hesitated before opening it – as he recalled: ‘I loved this music so much and if Delius himself didn’t like what I’d done I thought I’d better give up.’

My own introduction to Delius’s music came through Beecham’s celebrated stereo recordings, but it was not until I heard Barbirolli’s some years later that I truly fell in love, and my first head-over-heels swoon was for this Brigg Fair. Beecham makes the music suavely rapturous, a gorgeous pastoral scene painted with colour and finesse but one in which I can discern no human figures. Barbirolli, on the other hand, transforms these variations into a psychological study where memory sparks a sunset glow of nostalgia, longing and – in those sinuous woodwind lines – perhaps a hint of something more sinister, too. His way with Appalachia (the coupling on my original LP) is perhaps more impressive still, for he somehow gives shape and direction to this 40-minute work, sustaining a heady atmosphere of wistful ecstasy from beginning to end. I can’t think of a better example of his mastery of large-scale structure.

Music matters – even at the end

Barbirolli, like many conductors before and after him, was a workaholic, and his health began to deteriorate by the time he was in his mid-sixties. In addition to suffering from clinical depression, he had arteriosclerosis and his medications led to regular blackouts. Still, he continued to run himself ragged, and just two weeks after leading the Delius sessions in mid-July 1970, he died. Yet, although he was physically debilitated, these performances convey as well as any a sense of how dearly he valued lyricism over flash, and how resolutely he refused to compromise or bow to convention. ‘Music mattered to him more than anything in life – in the end more than life itself,’ Kennedy wrote in the epilogue to his biography. How lucky we are, then, to have these records where his spirit survives in all its wondrously perfect imperfection.

Sony’s new Barbirolli box-set is now available; Warner’s new box-set is out now, while three more anniversary recordings, all with the Hallé, are on the Barbirolli Society label.

This article originally appeared in the July 2020 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today!