Music: Comeback in Manchester

When the flop-haired little man popped out of the wings and strode briskly to the podium, the sedate English audience in Manchester’s green-walled Albert Hall jumped to its feet, cheering like a football crowd. As he bowed time & again, Conductor John Barbirolli’s black mane fell over his eyes and he had to push it back. After five minutes of solid ovation, he turned, with tears on his cheeks, to lead Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra through the night’s concert.

John Barbirolli was the most popular man in Manchester last week, and with reason. A few hours before concert time he had turned down $40,000 a year and one of the most coveted conductorships in Britain—the BBC Symphony—to stick with the Halle at half the salary.

Ankle Low. Barbirolli’s terms for staying were unselfish. He asked and got a raise for his men (none for himself), an increase in the size of his orchestra (to 100 pieces) and a fund for at least one foreign tour a year. The Halle Concert Society was glad to pay. It was a bargain to keep the man who in five years hac hammered and planed their famed but disintegrated 91-year-old orchestra back into top shape—and who, incidentally, hac salvaged his own career in the doing.

When Conductor (and Cellist) Barbirolli and his oboe-playing British wife Evelyn Rothwell packed aboard a Portuguese freighter in New York five years ago, his musical stock was ankle low. At 37, a youngster as conductors go, he had made the tactical mistake of following Arturo Toscanini to a podium that had taken all of the Maestro’s fire and ice to control. As boss of the proud, 106-year-old New York Philharmonic-Symphony, Barbirolli had neither Toscanini’s precise beat nor his fearsome bearing. The musicians were soon in a state of anarchy. Barbirolli left unhappily after seven years.

“Over the Dam.” When he arrived in Manchester in 1943, war had reduced the once-famed Halle to only 23 players—and a concert hall blitzed into rubble. He combed the town for players, plucked his first trombonist (a woman) from a Salvation Army band. He rehearsed his neophytes twelve hours a day; the first concert (in the local Methodist mission) was a success. That year he gave 230 concerts; the next he endeared himself to the British with a battlefront tour at Christmas, playing while the Battle of the Bulge was raging a few miles away.

Now, at a fit 49, and with his Manhattan misfortunes “over the dam,” Conductor Barbirolli says, “I’m on top of the world.” He likes Manchester: “There is not much social life. It gives you time to work.” He concentrates on young people, tries to convince them “that it’s jazz that’s sissy and the real he-man stuff is Beethoven and Bach.” One-third of his audiences are 18 or under. Says Barbirolli: “If Frank Sinatra can have his bobby-sox brigade, why can’t I?”