These performances by the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York conducted by John Barbirolli are off-the-air recordings made during his first and second seasons, 1936-7 and 1937-8, as the orchestra’s principal conductor and music director in succession to Arturo Toscanini. We hear so much about Barbirolli’s ‘failure’ in New York that it is pertinent to recall words written by a distinguished American critic, Lawrence Gilman, about a performance of Beethoven’s Second Symphony during JB’s first few weeks in America. It was, Gilman said, ‘like all that we have heard thus far from him, vital, clear, distinctly felt and perceived - perceived with the eye on the object: on that is to say, the music. This conducting has unassailable integrity. It is never phoney, insincere, external. It is the product of a musician who seems to have but one concern, the highest possible to an interpreter: the unobstructed and unadorned conveyance of the master’s thought’. That sounds like the JB we knew with the Hallé and Berlin Philharmonic. The New York Philharmonic directors a few weeks later reported on ‘the public’s enthusiasm, evident in an amazing growth in attendance, especially at the Sunday afternoon concerts’. Compare Gilman with the splenetic hostility of Virgil Thomson which, together with Olin Downes’s subtler venom, is the root cause of the legend of Barbirolli’s American years. Here we have a critic who could write that ‘no listener has ever lost much’ by missing Beethoven’s Egmont overture, could describe Elgar’s Enigma Variations as ‘an academic effort… a pretext for orchestration’ and could dismiss Sibelius’s Second Symphony as ‘vulgar, self-indulgent and provincial beyond description’ (Thomson went on to assert that he had never met an ‘educated professional musician’ who liked Sibelius’s music. Poor fellow!). Downes later wrote that Elgar’s Second Symphony gave ‘the sensation of a worn-out culture which died at the roots a long time ago… You pray for the end’. I dig up all this rubbish because it illustrates the hostile atmosphere to his programmeplanning in which Barbirolli worked and because it puts into context the Barbirolli Society’s admirable policy of letting us hear the evidence – the orchestra and its conductor making music together.
