There is not so much a world of difference between these two performances of the Eroica Symphony as an intergalactic space. Barbirolli’s unashamedly modern-sounding 1967 BBC SO recording has a plain-spoken grandeur about it and as stately a pace in the opening Allegro con brio as any on record. (Barbirolli is even slower here than Klemperer in his 1959 stereo remake). Jordi Savall, by contrast, uses instruments of the period, and after two bee-sting opening chords races along at the speed of the printed metronome marking: 60 bars a minute. (As opposed to Barbirolli’s 42. The ideal here is probably 52, Toscanini’s usual pace and Szell’s in his superb 1957 Cleveland recording.)
There is a real sense of burgeoning excitement at the start of Savall’s performance; and the sound of the orchestra really does conjure up the sense of one being transported back to some dusky Viennese concert room c1805 where the musicians are as dangerous a crew as the militias roaming the mud-filled streets outside. Yet as the musical arguments begin to multiply and deepen, so the performance gets more garbled. For all Savall’s skill in moulding and modifying the pulse, there’s a jauntiness about parts of the first movement development section which muddles and trivializes the music. Barbirolli, by contrast, dull at first, tends to get further under the skin of the first movement the longer it goes on. The huge coda is superbly ‘produced’ on the orchestra. Its climax (the real one at bar 671, not the one most conductors aim at shortly before that) is unerringly placed: a properly terrific consummation.
Trevor Harvey began his review of the Barbirolli recording in these columns in March 1968 with the words, “I cannot remember that I have ever been so moved by a performance of the Marcia funebre”. That is a subjective judgement which I cannot say I share, not least because the BBC SO, inadvertently or at Barbirolli’s behest, do not colour the music in any special way. Again, in the Marcia funebre, the Savall performance is astonishing for the mood it conjures. The drum (calf skin head, hard sticks) is fierce and seductive, an instrument of war that suggests also the soft thud of death. Savall’s brass are similarly remarkable, at once brazen and mellow-sounding. The horn section alone – Thomas Muller, Raul Diaz and Javier Bonet – deserves an award for the way the players colour and characterize this astonishing music.
There is no disguising the fact that Savall’s thinking about tempo is controversial. It is all very modern: post-modern, even. (After Savall, conductors like Norrington and Gardiner sound distressingly ‘safe’.) It is typical of Savall that though he conducts very quick, very earthy, very exciting accounts of the Eroica’s Scherzo (those horns again!) and finale, he still slows up pretty massively for the finale’s oboe-led Poco andante at bar 348. It is a performance, none the less, that I shall hang to for the sonic profile alone. The Auvidis recording is first-rate: warm and immediate.
To hear Barbirolli conjuring up ‘period’ atmosphere you have to go to the fill-up on the present disc, Barbirolli’s own Elizabethan Suite, arrangements of music by Byrd, Bull and Farnaby. Not in any way ‘authentic’ but fascinating none the less. In the Eroica, the EMI engineers have opened up the Abbey Road Studio No. 1 acoustic so as to give the performance the maximum amount of air and space. The result is very grand and a bit chilly. You will need to scroll on to the Elizabethan Suite to catch any real hint of that special warmth and depth of sound which was always so treasurable a feature of Barbirolli’s conducting.'