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Barbirolli's first recorded Bruckner Symphony - with two full orchestras in Manchester, 1961
"This previously-unreleased Barbirolli/Bruckner Ninth bristles with ardent energy and yearning devotion" - Audiophile Audition
Sir John Barbirolli's recordings of Bruckner are exceptionally thin on the ground. Although his earliest known performance of music by the composer dates from 1940, it was only in the late 1950s that Bruckner's music started to creep more regularly into Barbirolli's concert repertoire, and he never recorded Bruckner commercially.
The present recording marks both the first time that Barbirolli had ever conducted the 9th Symphony (records indicate two performances of the Fourth and four of the Seventh symphonies between 1940 and 1961) and the earliest known recording of Barbirolli conducting any Bruckner work. Two later live recordings, both from 1966, have surfaced, one with the Hallé, the other with the Berlin Philharmonic.
Here we have two full orchestras playing together - itself an exceptionally rare occurrence - in a concert broadcast by the BBC from the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. My source here was a good taped, mono, FM-quality recording of a BBC broadcast of the concert, which I assume was transmitted some short time after the event (this is suggested by slightly different background hiss profiles during the announements and a lack of audience applause).
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BRUCKNER Symphony No. 9 in D minor (original version)
BBC broadcast, Free Trade Hall, Manchester
From the concert of 14 December, 1961
Producer and XR Remastering:Andrew Rose
Cover artwork based on photographs of Barbirolli
Total duration: 57:43
BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra
Sir John Barbirolli, conductor
CONCERT REVIEW: After Mahler, Bruckner. At the Hallé concert in
Manchester a fortnight ago, Mahler’s unfinished 10th Symphony was
played. Last night it was the turn of Bruckner’s ninth, also an
incomplete work.
Sir John Barbirolli treated Bruckner with
equally distinguished consideration. The performance had generosity and
opulence, for the Hallé and BBC Northern orchestras were in combination,
but it was specially notable for its authenticity. A finale was
sketched and almost finished, but only three movements were wholly put
into shape by the composer himself, so last night’s rendering very
properly ended with the slow movement. Moreover, this was the original
version of the music. Perhaps Ferdinand Lowe, who edited the first
published score, was not quote so reprehensible as the Bruckner
partisans would have us believe – for the composer, like Berlioz, has a
coterie of admirers who rush to protect him from the cold, harsh world,
and find evidence of sinister plots and deliberate hostility at every
turn – but he certainly made unwarrantable and gratuitous alterations to
a remarkable work.
It is undoubtedly Bruckner at his grandest.
The old naiveté has gone, and if there is still no high degree of
sophistication there are unequivocal pointers to the future. Even
Wagnerian chromaticism is carried a stage or two further; there are
positive hints of the early Schoenberg, and even probings beyond that
point. The content of the symphony, as distinct from its style – in so
far, that is, as the two can ever be separable – is purposeful and
moving. In form it is expansive but not rambling, and there is a dynamic
quality all too often missing from the earlier symphonies.
The
performance was eloquent and revealing. Sir John controlled the big
ensemble so effectively that there was no suggestion of inflation or
over-weight.
J. H. Elliot, The Guardian, 14 December 1961 (excerpt)
Reviews: MusicWeb International & Audiophile Audition
A rare event in the meeting of the composer and a dedicated John Barbirolli
Producer and recording engineer
Despite harmonic ambiguity in the manner of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, the Scherzo, too, resolves itself into d minor. In the midst of the emotional maelstroms Bruckner unleashes, a single oboe attempts to provide solace. The upward motion catapults downward in an abysmal descent, a vision out of Dante or Milton. The Trio brings a breathless relief, vainly yearning for pastoral consolation. The whirling woodwinds face thumping, nervous strings. The sense of unfathomable despair will appear later, in the final movement, when Bruckner writes a colossal chromatic chord comprised of seven pitches. Having returned to Bruckner’s original edition, without the Loewe “clean-up” campaign we can savor just how far Bruckner meant to urge traditional tonal schemes, to the point where Schoenberg felt compelled to exceed Wagner and Bruckner and dispense with conventional tonal expectations. The huge Adagio opens with an agonized hymn in a curious form of E Major, with two pitches, C and A-sharp, intruding where they do not belong. By the time we reach the massive finale in resplendent E Major, Bruckner has reprised melodies from his D Minor Mass, the Adagio of the Symphony No. 8, and a fragment from the Seventh Symphony. Barbirolli imbues Bruckner’s epic oratory with a pregnant gravitas, especially when we hear the “Dresden Amen” motif and its spirited aftermath.
That the entire movement, if not the entire Bruckner opera, serves as an extended Te Deum,
we can scarcely doubt, given the alternately somber and lyrical cast of
this excellently-preserved performance, which sonically transcends its
origins as an FM mono source tape (using Pristine’s pseudo-stereo, which
works extremely well), courtesy of great pains taken by
—Gary Lemco
Audiophile Audition
This recording will be welcomed in some quarters as a
previously unissued rarity in considerably better sound than would be
the case had
Barbirolli habitually adopted fast speeds in Bruckner. His beat can be
fluid and mercurial – or erratic and impulsive, depending on how you
hear it. As a non-fan of Jochum’s Bruckner, I tend to belong to the
second camp, finding the approach of both conductors too jerky and
disjointed, without the over-arching span and sense of flow I prefer to
hear in Bruckner.
There are other problems: some of the playing
is scrappy, and some entries are hesitant and not together, as might be
expected from two combined orchestras not over-familiar with the score.
The brass can be coarse and blatty, the strings a bit screechy. In
addition, there is a fair amount of audience coughing and Glorious John
contributes his habitual, audible “groanalong”. However, those flaws are
most apparent in the first movement which is either exciting or taken
too fast, depending on your taste, and there are inspired moments when
Barbirolli’s spirited and heartfelt manner pays dividends: such a one is
the sudden acceleration of tempo for the re-appearance of the bucolic
second subject at 6’47”. The standard of playing improves considerably
in the aggressive Scherzo and the Adagio goes best of all. The opening
is still too gung-ho for me, lacking the otherworldly serenity I prize
in that music and there is some decidedly slipshod lack of rhythmic
co-ordination ten minutes into the movement between the descending
octave steps for the string and the brass chords, but the rough grandeur
of the closing minutes compensates.
The introductory and closing radio announcements are included here.
I cannot in all honesty call this a classic performance and would
suggest that the inconsistencies in execution and indifferent sound
render it more attractive to admirers of Barbirolli than to traditional
Brucknerians but it is certainly to Pristine’s credit that they have
made it available.
Ralph Moore
MusicWeb International