No conductor can aspire to greatness unless the works of Beethoven are firmly in his repertory. Sir John Barbirolli may be best known as an interpreter of Elgar, Sibelius, Mahler, Brahms, Vaughan Williams and others, but the symphonies and concertos of Beethoven were never absent from his Hallé programmes and he brought a keen temperamental interpretative skill to their performance. Although he declared that if he could choose the last music he was destined to conduct it would be Elgar’s Second Symphony, fate decreed that the last symphony he conducted in public, at King’s Lynn in July 1970, was Beethoven’s Seventh. No elegiac coda, then, but a joyous, frenetic outburst of rhythmical fervour. Strangely, it was also the last work conducted by the man who gave J.B. his first professional job in an orchestra, Sir Henry Wood. Although Sir John rejected the 1948 offer of the conductorship of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he remained one of its guest conductors whenever engagements allowed. He took it to Eastern Europe and Russia in 1967. Two years earlier he had conducted it in a performance of the Eroica Symphony which excited the players enormously and led to a recording in May 1967. If this lacks the extra frisson of the ‘live’ performance, it is still a remarkable performance. Barbirolli’s An Elizabethan Suite was the result of the time he spent, happily, in Vancouver in 1942. His friend, the composer Arthur Benjamin, drew his attention to certain examples from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, a remarkable collection of 297 early 17th century English keyboard compositions preserved in the Fitzwilliam Library of Cambridge University. Some would say that today’s passion for ‘authenticity’ and period instruments renders arrangements such as these redundant. But the tasteful scoring and musical sensitivity, comparable with Sir Hamilton Harty’s and Elgar’s Handel transcriptions, surely guarantees them a sympathetic hearing from all but the bigoted purists. Sir John recorded the suite with the BBC Symphony Orchestra also in May 1967.
