PROFILE Music Wherever John Barbirolli Goes

Press, Issue 29236, 21 June 1960, Page 22

PROFILE Music Wherever John Barbirolli Goes

[By

SIMON KAVANAUGH

LONDON.

There is something of Napoleon in the way he stands, prinking his bow tie and eyeing his stocky sft 2ins in the mirror of Dressing Room A His audience discern it at once as he bustles to the rostrum, scans them with a darkly flashing eye, and raises his baton in eloquent fingers high above his shock of unruly hair. He does not have to wait for silence. It comes at once. They all know their huge indebtedness to the little man’s Napoleonic dash.

Because of it the Halle of Manchester, Britain’s oldest orchestra, swept triumphantly to its centenary through five final years that out-dazzled all the other 95. More than that: without dapper little Sir John Barbirolli, its principal conductor, there might, not have been any centenary. Or any Halle. The Four Telegrams You could say that four telegrams tell the story of John Barbirolli’s life. Exept that this would be to reckon without the audacity, cool confidence, and sweltering hard work that lifted him clear of theatre-pit drudgery to command New York’s premier orchestra for £15,000 a year. The pattern hangs, though, around those telegrams. The one that began' it all is a treasured relic, yellow with age. It reached London from the La Scala, Milan, in 1878, 21 years before young John was born. It offered his grandfather the leadership of the famous orchestra.

Grandfather did not take up the big chance. But the offer fired a soaring boyish imagination. John Barbirolli felt a new kind of fulfilment when, flourishing the ancient telegram at the airport, he left last year to conduct the La Scala Orchestra, Milan. It was hardly surprising that music, and the smell of scenery, were always in the blood of the youngster christened Giovanni Battista by an Italian father and a French mother. His grandfather and father shared the first fiddle desk at the old Empire, Leicester Square, during the last gas-lit tiara days. John was sitting through rehearsals and “Palm Court” afterdinner concerts at four. Debut with Cello At IJ, wide-eyed and touslehaired in a sailor suit, he was amazing fellow-students with hideously difficult cello solos. At 12 he made his cello debut at the old Queen’s Halt Four years later, John Barbirolli was there again, the youngest recruit to Henry Wood’s Queen’s Hall Orchestra. The critics liked the gifted Royal Academy scholarship boy.' They called him a future Casals. But John Barbirolli could not live on flattery. So, in his middle teens, he hawked his cello from cinema to cinema, accompanying silent thrillers at under two shillings an hour. He played in theatre pits: eight shows a week, at half a guinea a time; in cafes, music-

hall, pantomime. He played everywhere exept on the street. When he first knew he wanted to conduct, there was only one way to do it. He formed his own small string group, and gave modest concerts around London. Men who mattered saw him then. And at 27, John Barbirolli was Jerked from below the footlights for good to conduct for the British National Opera Company for £l2 10s a week. Within five years he was appointed musical director at Covent Garden.

The second telegram, in 1936, arrived from New York for the still-obscure young Briton of 37. He had never conducted a major London orchestra, and was currently rallying the fading strength of Glasgow’s old Scottish OrchesBut Toscanini had resigned from the mighty New York Phil-harmonic-Symphony. Would John Barbirolli replace him? Americans Sceptical When he grasped the prize, Americans were sceptical. Who was this unknown little cockney of Latin blood? But “Gentlemen, are you with me or against me?” Barbirolli demanded frankly of the crack, hardboiled musicians at their first rehearsal. They liked that. They were with him. So was America, when concertgoers saw in astonished admiration how breathtakingly the little man delivered the musical goods. He had gone for one season. But, basking in his new international success, he stayed for seven. The third telegram, in 1942, could have been sent to John Barbirolli only by someone who knew his man. It asked him to exchange his rich, glamorous appointment for a sentence of hard labour at less than half the pay to return to Britain, during her darkest wartime days, to rebuild the Halle.

It offered him £5OOO a year to take on an orchestra riddled by money worries, its hall a blitzed ruin, with only a tiny core of players left. Much less pay, for much more work. But it was the kind of job the restless little revitaliser of a man had always wanted to tackle. Above all, he wanted to be with Britain in her ordeal. Again he said yes. Rebirth of Halle

It was hard going, pulling the Halle out of the ditch. Barbirolli, although as always eating and sleeping frugally, seemed to draw energy from thin air. His wife, the oboeist, Evelyn Rothwell, took a typing course so that she could take over the business problems of the initial 200 concerts a year. But he did it. Under his magic baton-touch, Britain’s oldest orchestra became one of the world’s greatest.

Through 17 years, his stocky strength turning slowly to gaunt frailty, Barbirolli has resisted many tempting offers to mount the world’s great rostrums. He would never leave the Halle, he said often, so long as it was maintained fully as a national orchestra.

But then, the other day came the fourth telegram; a mystery, this one; but supposed widely to l> a ye invited him to succeed Leopold Stokowski as musical director of the Houston, Texas, Symphony Orchestra.

“Parsimonious Patronage” John Barbirolli said nothing. Until, leaving the other day for concerts behind the Iron Curtain and in Israel, he lashed out against J?®.. Parsimonious partronage of British music.

h ?. d s ®® n , the slow moneyrot stealing his best young players c hey could not be paid enough. Seven of them had left in a fortnight He had had fa«..

tastic offers from America, and he was "fedup” with Britian’s musical attitude.

He would quit at the end of this year unless a general financial inquiry into the state of Britain’s national orchestra was made.

Britain has taken him up fast. Already, plans are being formed hastily for the inquiry Barbirolli wants. The other Napolean could hardly have calculated a campaign better. This one, whether he goes or stays, will certainly always be reviving musical corpses somewhere: demonstrating a point on a fiddle held cello-style; buying pints of beer all round for a deserving male-voice choir; clearing a concert-hall before he will reprimand an off-peak orchestra. For this airdent Napoleon there will be no Elba. Wherever there is Sir John Barbirolli there will be music.—(Express Feature Service).