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These performances by the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York conducted by John Barbirolli are off-the-air recordings made during his first and second seasons, 1936-7 and 1937-8, as the orchestra’s principal conductor and music director in succession to Arturo Toscanini. We hear so much about Barbirolli’s ‘failure’ in New York that it is pertinent to recall words written by a distinguished American critic, Lawrence Gilman, about a performance of Beethoven’s Second Symphony during JB’s first few weeks in America. It was, Gilman said, ‘like all that we have heard thus far from him, vital, clear, distinctly felt and perceived - perceived with the eye on the object: on that is to say, the music. This conducting has unassailable integrity. It is never phoney, insincere, external. It is the product of a musician who seems to have but one concern, the highest possible to an interpreter: the unobstructed and unadorned conveyance of the master’s thought’. That sounds like the JB we knew with the Hallé and Berlin Philharmonic. The New York Philharmonic directors a few weeks later reported on ‘the public’s enthusiasm, evident in an amazing growth in attendance, especially at the Sunday afternoon concerts’. Compare Gilman with the splenetic hostility of Virgil Thomson which, together with Olin Downes’s subtler venom, is the root cause of the legend of Barbirolli’s American years. Here we have a critic who could write that ‘no listener has ever lost much’ by missing Beethoven’s Egmont overture, could describe Elgar’s Enigma Variations as ‘an academic effort… a pretext for orchestration’ and could dismiss Sibelius’s Second Symphony as ‘vulgar, self-indulgent and provincial beyond description’ (Thomson went on to assert that he had never met an ‘educated professional musician’ who liked Sibelius’s music. Poor fellow!). Downes later wrote that Elgar’s Second Symphony gave ‘the sensation of a worn-out culture which died at the roots a long time ago… You pray for the end’. I dig up all this rubbish because it illustrates the hostile atmosphere to his programmeplanning in which Barbirolli worked and because it puts into context the Barbirolli Society’s admirable policy of letting us hear the evidence – the orchestra and its conductor making music together.

These recordings were made in Roma in 1958 and 1959.

Christian Ferras (1933-1982) was, alongside Jacques Thibaud, Zino Francescatti and Ginette Neveu, one of the great violinists who had a determining influence on the Franco-Belgian violin school: an art of playing the violin which is often associated with sensuality, elegance and a refined sound quality. Following his début in Paris in 1946 with the “Symphonie espagnole” by Édouard Lalo and Beethoven’s violin concerto, Ferras launched an international career.

Together with the pianist Pierre Barbizet he formed a congenial duo which lasted for three decades. His cooperation with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic during the 1960s marked the pinnacle of his career. Ferras had made his début with the Berlin Philharmonic as early as 1951. Under the baton of Karl Böhm, he performed the Beethoven violin concerto at the Titania Palast. On this occasion a studio recording was made at the Jesus-Christus-Kirche in Berlin which is presented here. It is fascinating to experience the beauty and confident serenity of Ferras’ interpretation of the solo part when he was only eighteen years old.

A live recording from 1964 with the Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin under the baton of the Italian-American conductor Massimo Freccia is an impressive document of Ferras’ reading of the Alban Berg violin concerto: he saw it as a primarily romantic work which he performed with great expressiveness to striking effect. Ferras’ career took a tragic turn when, towards the end of the 1960s, he began battling with depression and alcoholism which resulted in a gradual withdrawal from concert life. In 1975, he accepted a professorship at the Paris Conservatoire and in the following years he no longer performed publicly. Ferras returned to the concert platform once more in March 1982; however, only three weeks after his final concert on 25 August 1982, at the age of 49, he took his own life.

Performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 (STEREO) RAI 1960, the concert was conducted by Torini Mario Rossi. Clara Haskill also performs Schumann’s Piano Concerto taken from her concert in Strasbourg 1955 (MONO). Conducted by Carl Schuricht.