"live" Barbirolli M6 on Testament (1967)

[barry guerrero]

Hi there. Barbirolli's "live" M6 recording is taken from BBC broadcast tapes from the concert at Royal Albert Hall in August of 1967. By this point, the Philharmonia Orch. had become the New Philharmonia Orch. Still, they play very well on this. Naturally, the sound isn't nearly as good as it is on Barbirolli's studio recording on EMI (Kingsway Hall). But the live performance is definitely faster. Timings are: I - 19:04 (no expo. repeat); II - 14:00 (andante); III - 12:08 (scherzo); IV - 29:33.

In terms of the "feel" of the performance, the biggest differences are in the finale, which is like a symphony on to its own anyway. In the first three movements, Barbirolli starts with tempi that are more consistent with his studio recording, but then speeds up along the way. It's difficult to guess if this is simply because Barbirolli conceived them one way before hand; then felt differently going into them, or, if the orchestra just chose to ignore him in the heat of battle. I'm inclined to believe that the tempo modifications were Barbirolli's own doing.

If there were an exposition repeat, I'm guessing that the timing for the first movement would fall somewhere between 23 and/or 24 minutes.

Anyway, this speeding up effect is quite noticeable in the slow movement, where Barbirolli takes the climactic passage at a relatively fast clip. The scherzo too, also speeds up quite a bit. In fact, the numerous trio sections end up being nearly as fast as each variant of the scherzo proper. Strange, but it works.

For the most part, the finale is quite good. Even the hammerstrokes are pretty strong (and it sounds as though there may have been a half-hearted attempt at a third hammerstroke - hard to tell). My only complaint about the finale is that Barbirolli whisks right through the few critical bars near the end of the last Allegro, "charge" passage - the subsection that I refer to as, "the false victory parade". Yet, this little subsection gets muffed up on a number of recordings. As if to make up for that, Barbirolli takes the final A-minor outburst at the very, very end of the symphony, quite slowly. Kudos for that.

Testament recordings are very expensive in the U.S., so I would not recommend that everybody just run out and buy this. However, if you're a big Barbirolli maven, you'll probably want to add this to your collection. Frankly, it came out better than I had anticipated (the program notes make a big deal about Barbirolli defiantly performing M6 in the "correct" order of Andante/Scherzo).