Mahler’s Ninth Symphony conducted by Sir John Barbirolli was the first recording made by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and a British conductor since 1937, when Sir Thomas Beecham made his famous Berlin recording of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. Barbirolli’s annual association with the Berliners was one of the happiest and one of the most artistically fulfilling events of the last decade of his life, but it had begun some years earlier with three concerts at the 1949 Edinburgh Festival. He had been invited to Berlin as a guest conductor the previous February, but illness had compelled him to cancel the engagement. He went there first in April 1950, when the major work in his programme was Brahms’s Fourth Symphony.

In 1956, illness again intervened and he had to withdraw from conducting a performance of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius. He did not return to the city until January 1961, by which time Herbert von Karajan was the Philharmonic’s chief conductor. The invitation came not from Karajan but from the orchestra’s new general manager, Wolfgang Stresemann, who had been in America during Barbirolli’s period with the New York Philharmonic (1936–42) and had admired his work. After Sir John’s first rehearsal on 17 January, several of the Berlin players urged Stresemann to ‘engage this man as often as you can’.

At that time, just before the opening of the new Philharmonie, the orchestra’s concerts were given in the Musikhochschule, where Barbirolli’s programmes included symphonies by Brahms, Sibelius, Haydn and Dvorák. It was not until January 1963 that he conducted Mahler’s Ninth, which was the first Mahler symphony he had ever conducted (with the Hallé in February 1954).

Mahler was then little played in Berlin and the orchestra did not much like his music. But Barbirolli won them over - and also the critics, one of whom wrote: ‘Not since Furtwängler have we heard such human warmth and soul combined with superb musicianship.’ The ovation lasted 20 minutes and the orchestra asked to record the work, which they did a year later, in the cold January of 1964, in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem. On arrival, Barbirolli inspected the recording schedule and told the producer: ‘I see you’ve got the last movement, the Adagio, down for a morning session. You can’t expect people to perform that sort of music in the morning. It must be done in the evening, when they’re in the right mood.’ And so it was.

‘Barbirolli brings out the grotesque brilliance of the second movement beautifully, is entirely at home in the clattering uproar of the Rondo-Burleske, and digs deep into the emotion of the music in the final heart-rending Adagio. All in all, this is an extremely fine issue of the Mahler Ninth.’ - Gramophone