Schubert, Britten, Sibelius – Barbirolli in Cologne

Some conductors get filed away too early by history, and Barbirolli is one of them — remembered mostly for Elgar, for that famous Mahler Ninth, for the Hallé years when Manchester audiences forgave him anything. But he traveled more widely than the legend admits, and the tapes that keep surfacing from German radio archives tell a fuller story. This one, from a tour with the old Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester, deserves a place on the shelf next to the studio recordings, not behind them.

The Schubert Tragic Symphony opens the program, and it is the sleeper here. Nobody thinks of Barbirolli as a Schubertian. He should be thought of that way more often. This symphony, written when the composer was nineteen and clearly still under Beethoven’s shadow — those C minor mutterings owe an obvious debt to the Fifth — can plod badly if a conductor takes the repeated cadential figures at face value. Barbirolli does not. He shapes the first movement’s Allegro vivace with a sense of harmonic destination, so that what can sound like note-spinning becomes argument. The Andante breathes. Woodwind color comes through with a Viennese sweetness that never curdles into sentimentality, no small feat, since this particular orchestra’s winds are not, on this evidence, the equal of the Vienna Philharmonic’s. String tone is lean, almost lithe, and the horns, which matter given who joins the podium later, sit well within the balance.

Then Britten’s Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, op. 31, a work that lives or dies on its soloists. Gerald English is a name younger listeners may not know: an English tenor of real intelligence who worked often with Britten’s own circle without quite becoming part of the inner Aldeburgh sanctum. His diction here is exemplary. You get every word of Blake, of Tennyson, of the anonymous Lyke-Wake Dirge without once reaching for the libretto, and the upper register floats with an ease that a lot of more celebrated interpreters, Pears included, could not always manage. Lower down the tessitura the voice thins, loses some color, and Hermann Baumann’s horn, a famous natural-horn specialist later on but still finding his interpretive feet here, tends to swamp him rather than converse with him. The “Elegy” wants a horn that broods; this one mostly just plays loudly. Barbirolli’s tempos wander from Britten’s own markings, sometimes considerably so, yet somehow the music does not seem to mind. This is not a Serenade to displace Pears/Britten or Pears/Barbirolli’s own EMI account, but it argues its case with real conviction, and the “Sonnet” at the close has a hush that stays with you.

The Sibelius Second is the reason most collectors will want this disc, and rightly.

Barbirolli’s Sibelius was never fashionable in the way Beecham’s or later Berglund’s was, too warm, some said, too Italianate, missing the ice. That criticism always struck me as lazy. What you hear in this Cologne interpretation is a conductor who understands that the Second Symphony’s finale, for all its D-major triumph, is earned rather than announced. The pizzicato ostinato and that famous bassoon tune in the development of the first movement build with genuine cumulative logic, not just volume. The playing has grit. You can hear bow-hair on string in the tremolo passages, hear players pushing right at the edge of ensemble in the scherzo’s headlong trio. It is not tidy in the way a studio taping smooths things over, and it is better for that. Some of the inner voices get lost: the balance engineering of the period was not kind to Sibelius’s dark lower-string writing, and there are moments in the slow movement where the cellos vanish into recorded murk. But the shape, the accumulating weight, the sheer rightness of tempo relationships, this is a Sibelius Second built by someone who had lived with the piece for decades and trusted it.

Sound overall is more than serviceable for its vintage, radio-tape ambience and all. Some hiss, some occasional balance oddities, nothing that obscures the musical argument. Anyone assembling a full picture of Barbirolli beyond the Hallé recordings will want this. The Sibelius alone justifies it.