Barbirolli Mahler 2, 12 March 1959

[David Boxwell]

The Barbirolli Society has just issued a live recording of JB's Mahler 2, with his Halle Orchestra and Chrous (Zareska, Elliot as soloists).  Location: Free Trade Hall, Manchester.
Paul Baily does what he can to make it listenable.  But it's nobody's finest hour, so I am mystified why the Society would risk tarnishing the legacy.  The brass are in very bad shape that night, the conducting is erratic (JB seems to feeling his way through the score page by page), and the singing is tentative and only occasionally transcendent.  Much, much more rehearsal was needed, obviously.  Still, the audience applauds heartily.  (At roughly the same time, Bruno Walter across the pond actually gets it all so much more right).

[waderice]

Can anyone elaborate on how much Mahler JB had performed before this date?  If not much at all, he was probably getting his "feet wet" in the repertory, so to speak.  If so, maybe a bit premature on his part.

Wade

[barry guerrero]

Perhaps, but we have to be honest and face the fact that the Halle was not a particularly good orchestra in those days. Maybe there were OK for standard rep. and English music.

[David Boxwell]

Michael Kennedy's biography of Sir John reports he was memorizing the "choral finale" (as JB refers to it) in October 1956.  The notes to this JB Society release seem to indicate that this was the first time he performed the Resurrection, programmed sometime in 1957 to crown the Halle's centenary season (58-59).

He actually had (comparatively) a lot of prior Mahler experience, dating back to 1931, when he accompanied Elena Gerhardt in the Kindertotenlieder.  He programmed the 5th's Adagietto several times in NY in the 30s, started performing the 9th in 1954, and recorded the First with the Halle for Pye in June 1957 (recently re-issued by the JB Society, in a first-ever stereo release).  That performance is perfectly competent, so I'll reiterate my dismay at this Mahler 2 release.  The booklet writer calls it "thrilling", but it's really more of a dispiriting white-knuckle ride the whole way. (Better get 1970 Stuttgart on EMI Great Conductors of the 20th Century for the definitive JB Mahler 2).

[waderice]

Better get 1970 Stuttgart on EMI Great Conductors of the 20th Century for the definitive JB Mahler 2.

This same performance appeared in the early 1990's on the Arkadia label, along with a performance of M3, if you're lucky to locate a copy somewhere.  There is another Barbirolli M2 from 1965 with the Berlin Philharmonic on the Testament label.

Wade

[akiralx]

Michael Kennedy's biography of Sir John reports he was memorizing the "choral finale" (as JB refers to it) in October 1956.  The notes to this JB Society release seem to indicate that this was the first time he performed the Resurrection, programmed sometime in 1957 to crown the Halle's centenary season (58-59).

He actually had (comparatively) a lot of prior Mahler experience, dating back to 1931, when he accompanied Elena Gerhardt in the Kindertotenlieder.  He programmed the 5th's Adagietto several times in NY in the 30s, started performing the 9th in 1954, and recorded the First with the Halle for Pye in June 1957 (recently re-issued by the JB Society, in a first-ever stereo release).  That performance is perfectly competent, so I'll reiterate my dismay at this Mahler 2 release.  The booklet writer calls it "thrilling", but it's really more of a dispiriting white-knuckle ride the whole way. (Better get 1970 Stuttgart on EMI Great Conductors of the 20th Century for the definitive JB Mahler 2).

I don't have the biog to hand (it is a great read) but I recall that actually in 1959 (maybe after this concert) he gave a superb performance of M1 in Prague with the Czech PO, a concert which he never forgot? 

[Voice of Reason]

And that performance with the Czech PO of Symphony No 1 has just been released via the Barbirolli Society.

It is a performance of great conviction and intensity and the CPO are superb. I fully share the high rating it was given in the December BBC Music magazine.

[Didsbury37]

Sorry for coming in late.  I heard Barbirolli's 1954 Free Trade Hall Ninth, and his revival of Das Lied with Richard Lewis and Kerstin Meyer,  but by 1959 other things kept me away from most Halle concerts.   However, just about the time of this Mahler Second I got out of Wellington Barracks, Bury, where I was doing basic training for National Service, and made it to the Free Trade Hall for the Mahler Second.    But the conductor was Rudolf Schwarz and the orchestra was the BBC Symphony.    Schwarz had credentials in this work - he'd learnt all the Mahler symphonies while under Nazi arrest in 1939-40, and performed it in Berlin in 1940 or 1941, for the short-lived Jewish Cultural organisation Goebbels had set up.  The performance itself wasn't enormously earth-shattering but very well-prepared and delivered.  I had not known of the Barbirolli performance until I found the CD  and since then I have been looking for confirmation of the date of the Schwarz Manchester performance.  Unless memory is playing tricks they must have been extremely close together.  How could it have happened?

 So far, no luck.   I'd be grateful if anyone can pinpoint it.  I did, however hear the Manchester performance of its companion on the CD, in the regular 1957 season - The Symphony of Psalms.   I wouldn't like to comment on how good or bad the Halle was in 1959, but when I occasionally managed to get to  the Free Trade Hall in the 1960s it was a different orchestra with an exceptionally good woodwind section.  I think by then Barbirolli had also adopted the practice of getting the orchestra to respond on the beat, rather, as he tended to do in the 1950s, slightly after it.  Ensemble in the sixties was much tighter.   But it's a great loss that no recording of the Manchester or Edinburgh 1954 performances of the Ninth - the Edinburgh one was broadcast - has survived.  Even Cardus admitted that there were rough edges in the Edinburgh Ninth, but he argued in Mahler they didn't matter.   But after hearing the Manchester performance (which Cardus introduced with an analytical discussion) i've always found the Berlin recording a disappointment.