Philharmonic Freshman

With the quick, precise steps of a dancing master, a stocky, dark-haired little man hurried last week across the stage of Carnegie Hall, climbed the podium, bowed to the packed house with such vehemence as to send his hair awry. It was a night of nervousness and novelty. It was the first performance of the Philharmonic's 95th season. It was the first time in ten years that the season patrons could not look forward to a single concert under their beloved Conductor Arturo Toscanini. It was the first time that John Barbirolli, 36, had ever faced an American audience, and this audience that he was tackling at his debut was the most exacting, the most critical in the country. To many in that audience Toscanini and the Philharmonic had seemed inseparable; to nearly all, this young Barbirolli was unknown. They clapped him politely but not prodigally.

Well aware how much on trial he was, Conductor Barbirolli led off with an ornamental curtain-raiser, Berlioz's Roman Carnival Overture. The audience, at once soothed by his meticulous phrasing, his insistence on broad, full tones, was no less impressed by his physical resource. Planting his feet widely, chin down, Conductor Barbirolli swayed his shoulders delicately through the lyrical passages, hunched forward to demand a pianissimo, twitched his kinetic torso and wagged his flying tails to call for quickened tempi. He guided the orchestra carefully through the tenebrous but imitative twilights of a symphonic poem by Arnold Bax, The Tale the Pine-Trees Knew. Like Barbirolli, to whom it is dedicated, the Bax piece had never been heard in the U. S. and on the whole proved an unhappy choice. Critic W. J. Henderson of the New York Sun found that "what those pine trees knew was how to sigh and moan and storm and urge Mr. Bax to deeds of instrumentation. . . . But it was so strung out that one could not help being grateful that Mr. Bax had seen only Norway pines and Scotch firs and had not got into the redwood district of California. Just a few sequoias, say those up at Wawona, might have told him the whole of Gone With the Wind."

Conductor Barbirolli earned better marks, and easily passed his New York entrance examination with a suave Mozart symphony and a heroic Brahms Fourth, wherein New York Times Critic Olin Downes discovered "virility, grip, lyrical opulence, and on occasion the impact of the bear's paw." Said the New York Herald Tribune's, Lawrence Oilman: "He has disclosed himself as a musician of taste and fire and intensity, electric, vital, sensitive, dynamic, experienced; as an artist who knows his way among the scores he elects to set before us, who has mastered not only his temperament but his trade."

Hitherto unheard of in the U. S., young Barbirolli flashed into prominence last spring when he was named one of five conductors for the coming Philharmonic season, and given ten weeks of the 24 (TIME, April 20). Short, Napoleonic, he was born in London of a French mother and an Italian father, came by his music from a long line of Barbirollis. A violin student, he used to pace the floor while practicing, was switched to a cello to make him sit still. At 11 he gave a cello concert in Queen's Hall, later toured the Continent. He first conducted at 26, served for a time with the London Symphony, the Royal Philharmonic, the Covent Garden Opera. Appointed permanent conductor of the Leeds Symphony and the Scottish Orchestra at Glasgow, he pulled these organizations out of the red, lengthened their seasons. A cricket lover, he is very British except on the platform, braces himself with lime juice during intermissions. Always trim in public, at his Bloomsbury flat he relaxes in a disreputable dressing gown with pipe & music scores.

If he makes a go of his ten-week appointment, Conductor Barbirolli may well return to the Philharmonic next year. After Toscanini retired (TIME, May 11) his post was offered to Wilhelm Furtwangler who first accepted, then backed down because of a furor raised by anti-Nazi subscribers. To fill out this season after Barbirolli, the directors have engaged Russian Igor Stravinsky, Rumanian Georges Enesco, Mexican Carlos Chavez, Polish Arthur Rodzinski.

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