Sir John Barbirolli was a British conductor, and was one of classical music's most compelling figures of his era.
His London Times obituary termed him "a virtuoso conductor in the tradition of those spellbinding artists who made the conductor the centre of popular devotion for concertgoers in the twentieth century. "
Background
Giovanni Battista Barbirolli was born in 1899 in Southampton Row, Holborn, London, United Kingdom. His father, Filippo Lorenzo Barbirolli, an orchestra violinist, had met his wife, Louise Ribèyrol, in Paris while working as a musician and brought her to London when he and his father settled in the city in the 1890.
From a young age, Barbirolli accompanied his father when he went to rehearsals, and Barbirolli loved watching the conductor.
Education
At the age of 11 he won a scholarship to Trinity College of Music in London.
The following year he made his public debut on December 16, 1911, at Trinity College's annual concert.
Soon after he won a scholarship to the prestigious Royal Academy of Music, where he studied from 1912 to 1917.
Career
From 1916 to 1918 Barbirolli was a freelance cellist in London. He was decommissioned from the army in 1919. On re-entering civilian life, Barbirolli resumed his career as a cellist. His association with Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto began with its première in 1919, when he played as a rank and file member of the London Symphony Orchestra.
At the Three Choirs Festival of 1920 he took part in his first Dream of Gerontius, under Elgar's baton, in the LSO cellos. He joined two newly founded string quartets as cellist: the Kutcher Quartet, led by his former fellow student at Trinity, Samuel Kutcher, and the Music Society Quartet (later called the International Quartet) led by André Mangeot.
In 1924, Barbirolli founded a Chelsea chamber orchestra with members of the Guild of Singers and Players and served as its conductor.
He would remain with the company off and on until 1929, gaining experience with such classics as Madama Butterfly, Aïda, and Romeo et Juliette.
Barbirolli's star rose on one fortuitous night in December 1927 when he stepped in for the famed Sir Thomas Beecham, conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.
In 1927 he was guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Society concerts.
He debuted at Covent Garden in 1928, working regularly with the Royal Opera until 1933, when he became the regular conductor of the Scottish Orchestra in Glasgow.
There he started to tackle the canon of major symphonic works, from Beethoven to Stravinsky and began to display great flair at the podium.
Over the next few years, Downs occasionally granted Barbirolli a grudgingly favorable comment, but rival music journalist Virgil Thomson of the New York Herald Tribune was usually brutal.
One example of his vitriol came after the opening night of the 1940 Philharmonic season, in which Barbirolli led the group in a program that included Beethoven and Elgar.
"The concert as a whole, both as to programme and as to playing, was anything but a memorable experience, " Thomson asserted, according to the Reid biography.
"The music itself was soggy, the playing dull and brutal. "
A New York Times profile by S. J. Woolf noted: "One instinctively knows as the maestro leans over his stand and asks for more volume, as he crouches low with bent knees in subdued passages, as he shifts his baton to his left hand and with his right wheedles greater feeling into the music, that he is working harder than any member of his orchestra.
"Barbirolli was under contract to the New York Philharmonic when Britain and Germany went to war in 1939, the year he wed Evelyn Rothwell, a renowned oboist in her own right.
He was still with them when the United States entered World War II in 1941.
The American Musicians' Union urged him to take U. S. citizenship, but he was homesick for England, which was being attacked regularly by German bombers.
Despite his Italian and French heritage, Barbirolli considered himself thoroughly English and was a follower of cricket.
He championed works by British composers like Elgar and Benjamin Britten as well.
His schedule after that required just 70 concerts a year, and he began to take more international work.
From 1961 to 1967 he was the conductor of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, and he spent twelve weeks of the year in Texas.
He also appeared with the Vienna and Berlin philharmonics and at Austria's prestigious Salzburg Festival. Barbirolli retired from Hallé in 1968, though he was given the title of Conductor Laureate for Life.
His retirement from Hallé did not bring a less taxing schedule, however.