MUSIClassical ALLEGRO
Topic: MILESTONES 2008
Evelyn Barbirolli, a distinguished oboe player and widow of the conductor Sir John Barbirolli, has died. She was 97. Barbirolli died Sunday, 27 JAN 2008, in London. The cause of death was not announced. In 1948, she had the honour of giving the first performance of a newly discovered oboe concerto by Mozart, during a tour of Austria with the Halle Orchestra. Born Evelyn Rothwell, she took up the oboe at 17 to fill a gap in her school orchestra. Though she recalled she could "barely play the thing," within a year she won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. John Barbirolli offered her a position in the Covent Garden Touring Orchestra and they married in 1939. She adopted the surname Barbirolli only after he died in 1970. 
