The Cambridge Companion to Conducting by José Antonio Bowen

Author:José Antonio Bowen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2003-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

Barbirolli and Klemperer

As a young rising star, John Barbirolli (1899–1970) succeeded Toscanini at the New York Philharmonic in 1937. The verdict of the New York Times critic, Harold C. Schonberg – “though clearly talented, [he] was not ready for so demanding a position”37 – was widely shared, though not always so charitably expressed. But his achievement in rebuilding the war-devastated Hallé Orchestra, and transforming it into what Beecham is said to have called “the finest chamber orchestra in the country,”38 remains one of the great inspirational stories in the history of British conducting.

Then there is Otto Klemperer (1885–1973), principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra from 1959, and the orchestra’s saviour when founder Walter Legge attempted to disband it in 1964.39 Klemperer was responsible, along with the Ukrainian-born Jascha Horenstein (1898–1973), for spearheading the Mahler revival in Britain in the early 1960s, and for bringing what some saw as a valuable re-injection of solid German values into British conducting. The rhythmic energy of his Beethoven – despite his often slow tempos – stemmed, Klemperer felt, from his stress on the importance of the upbeat: “it’s the upbeat and not the downbeat that makes an orchestra attentive. Then the first beat always has a certain weight …”40

But the “weightiness” of Klemperer’s performances, especially in his last years, also provoked antagonism, and gave added impetus to a revolution that had been fermenting for some time. Although Klemperer took a limited notice of modern scholarship when it came to orchestral forces in Bach, his performing style came in for growing criticism. For the critic of the Times, his 1960 cycle of the Brandenburg Concertos was “a curious mixture of modern loyalty to history and traditional suet pudding … Much of the music sounded humdrum, or uncharacteristic of Bach’s thought as our age conceives it.”41 Klemperer’s typically ferocious disapproval of the attempts of the harpsichordist George Malcolm to decorate the continuo parts certainly did nothing to dissuade Malcolm from his efforts to find a more historically aware performing style in the music of Bach and his contemporaries.

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