This article: Giovanni Battista Barbirolli was born in Southampton Row, Holborn, London, the second child and eldest son of an Italian father and a French mother. He was a British national from birth, and as Southampton Row is within the sound of Bow Bells, Barbirolli always regarded himself as a Cockney. His father, Lorenzo Barbirolli (1864–1929), was a Venetian violinist who had settled in London with his wife, Louise Marie, née Ribeyrol (1870–1962). Lorenzo and his father had played in the orchestra at La Scala, Milan, where they had taken part in the première of Otello in 1887. In London they played in West End theatre orchestras, principally that of the Empire, Leicester Square.
The young Barbirolli began to play the violin when he was four, but soon changed to the cello. He later said that this was at the instigation of his grandfather who, exasperated at the child's habit of wandering around while practising the violin, bought him a small cello to stop him from "getting in everybody's way". His education at St. Clement Danes Grammar School overlapped, from 1910, with a scholarship at Trinity College of Music. As a Trinity student, he made his concert debut in a cello concerto in the Queen's Hall in 1911. The following year he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, which he attended from 1912 to 1916, studying harmony, counterpoint and theory under Dr. J. B. McEwen and the cello with Herbert Walenn. In 1914 he was joint winner of the academy's Charles Rube Prize for ensemble playing, and in 1916 The Musical Times singled him out as "that excellent young 'cello player, Mr Giovanni Barbirolli." The principal of the Academy, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, had forbidden students to play the chamber music of Ravel, which he regarded as "a pernicious influence". Barbirolli was keenly interested in modern music, and he and three colleagues secretly rehearsed Ravel's String Quartet in the privacy of a men's lavatory in the Academy.From 1916 to 1918 Barbirolli was a freelance cellist in London. He recalled, "My first... contains an answer for the question: What is the full name of the person that started to play the violin at age four?, what is it ?


Giovanni Battista Barbirolli