Review of Maestro Glorioso, by John Holden

 

Maestro Glorioso: Ten Essays in Celebration of Sir John Barbirolli, by John Holden (Kennington, the Barbirolli Society, 2021). Price £20.

 It’s amazing how the magic of John Barbirolli’s conducting still entrances, 50 years after his death.

Partly that’s because of the recordings he made in the later years of his life, captured as they were with the technical quality to be completely rewarding in today’s digital age. But for those of us who saw him in person, in action, there’s more than that, something completely mesmeric about his personality and platform manner that never leaves the memory.

Who can forget his entrances, hand on breast in ‘Little Corporal’ style (and he would never even walk on to a platform unless there was complete silence in the auditorium), his royal-style waves, his conducting of the National Anthem facing the hall as if daring all present to join in – and of course the electric charge in his every movement once the music proper began?

He was a ‘showman’, people said. Yes, but a showman in the service of great music: everything arose from his earnest, sincere dedication to his craft. And he was a complete professional: performances that often seemed full of spontaneity were prepared in painstaking detail and rehearsed so lovingly that the music felt spontaneous, and the ‘affection’ and even ‘indulgence’ that critics described in his readings were always finely calculated and intentional. There was a feeling about so many pieces that when you heard the way Barbirolli did them, there could really be none better.

That’s an aspect of what Raymond Holden has described in these anniversary essays, published recently by the Barbirolli Society. He brings the insights of a practising conductor and the thoroughness of a scholar. Some of his chapters (which are based on his lectures, broadcasts and articles over the years) comprise details of Barbirolli’s life and career that are relatively well known and available in other sources – though always cogently assembled.

But the most interesting chapters, to me, are those where he analyses the marked performing scores that JB used, now available to researchers in the British Library, and the outcomes of his preparation as we hear them in some of his greatest recorded performances – in Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ symphony, Bruckner’s eighth and Elgar’s In the South in particular. You can see his musical mind at work – not just in his ever-meticulous bowing of the strings’ parts (which he never tired of and which undoubtedly had much to do with the famous ‘Barbirolli sound’), but also in his tempo calculations and dynamic control. 

His approach to great musical structures was one common to the great 19th century maestros from Richard Wagner onwards and also the early 20th century conductors from whom JB learnt directly – ‘architectonic’ is a word Raymond Holden uses frequently to describe it – and saw tempo change as essential to building shape, and highlighting each work or movement’s supreme climax (look at Mahler’s scores to see how he intended these to be patent in performance).

The reference notes to these essays are magisterial and many-faceted: though one little oversight seems to have crept in, as he describes Barbirolli’s famous 1964 recording with the Halle of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius as a ‘studio recording’, though I think there are those who still remember it being made, at least mainly, in the Free Trade Hall.