Arts

The great performance

Michael Kennedy 'Quiet stance on the rostrum . . . economy of gesture .. . strong impression of restraint ... rigid self-control . . . disliking all forms of showmanship'. These phrases are from Bernard Shore's excellent essay on Sir Adrian Boult in his classic The Orchestra Speaks (1938); no one will dispute their accuracy. This is the Boult the public knows: the tall erect figure, almost military in bearing and appearance, with always a suggestion of personal diffidence which in no way diminishes the impression of complete musical authority. Like Elgar and Bliss, his appearance suggests the cartoonist's idea of an 'Establishment figure'; and, as in their case, this is easily shown to be false and misleading. That, perhaps, would not matter if there were not a tendency in some quarters to under-rate Boult and to assume that his unsensational demeanour must be correlated to unimaginative and unemotional interpretation. A London orchestral player recently said to me: 'In HoIst's "Mars" the audience only see that straight back and superb stick technique, but the players see his face and I tell you he's almost frothing at the mouth!'

Boult is now eighty-seven and belongs among the distinguished number of his colleagues who have attained a great age while continuing to work and to deepen and widen their artistry. His conducting in the past decade and a half has gained in intensity—and, I suggest, in vitality—while losing nothing of its traditional fidelity to the composer's note-values. Again, fidelity in this context must not be taken to imply an unquestioning, unperceptive inflexibility. `Boult plays Elgar's scores quite literally', wrote Mr Shore. Well, yes; but no one knows better than Boult that what Elgar built into those scores is not their immutability but their constantly fleeting

moods which are peculiarly susceptible to the conditions and atmosphere of each performance. He attended many of Elgar's own performances, carefully annotating the score and noting how Elgar's readings • differed from one performance to another. This is obvious enough from those of his works which Elgar recorded more than once; and Boult rightly does not subscribe to the doctrine which insists on an Elgar conducted recording as the nonpareil of interpretation. He knows better, from experience.

Just consider Boult's experience: as a boy he heard Richter conduct the Halle; he attended the first London performance of Strauss's Ein Heldenleben; he was sixteen when he first met Elgar (1905); he vividly remembers Debussy's visit to England; he studied in Leipzig before the First World War and came under the powerful influence of Nikisch; he heard the Bayreuth of those days and opera at Dresden under Schuch.

It is forgotten that as early as 1914 he was a 'musical assistant' at Covent Garden and that he conducted some performances of Die Walkiire and eighteen of Parsifal for the British National Opera Company in the

1920s. Wagner is not the first composer one associates with Boult, yet his recordings reveal a deep insight into this music and, when it is issued later this year, his Wesendonk Songs with Janet Baker may well have as profound and clarifying an intensity of lyrical expression as does his astonishing new Dream of Gerontius. He had heard three Ring cycles before he was twenty years old, one of them being Richter's performances at Covent Garden, the first Ring to be sung in English.

The kernel of Boult's career is undoubtedly the twenty years he spent as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from its foundation in 1930. He was an inspired choice, for he had not only to train, and keep trained, a new international orchestra but to set about the musical education of the nation, no less, through the new and limitless medium of broadcasting. A conductor who had strongly limited sympathies, however passionately he gave expression to them, would have been a disastrous selection. Other conductors have been known to scoff at Boult's willingness `to conduct works chosen by a committee'—and it is true that he is not as adept as some of his colleagues at building programmes—but it is this very willingness to present works from intellectual as well as from emotional conviction which ranks Boult with Henry Wood—and, before them, with Charles Halle and August Manns—as a major musical educator. He has, rare in a conductor, something of the critic's detached curiosity about music, combined with a sense of historical continuity. Easy to say that with the BBC's financial resources he was luckier than conductors who had to choose their programmes with an eye on their orchestra's bank balance, but the point is that as the first to hold this unprecedented post he set a style and standard which are still maintained. It could have gone the other way, and been a milk-and-water compromise. The work involved in learning and mastering a complicated score is tremendous—and those who know Boult know that he would never turn out a half-baked effort—but only with that in mind can one appreciate the magnitude of his services to twentiethcentury music.

It was, for example he who conducted the first English performance of Bartok's Dance Suite (Birmingham 1926) arld, during the 1930s and 1940s, of his sec°11c1 and third piano concertos, the seccIlid violin concerto, the Cantata profana an the two-piano concerto; it was Boult brought Schoenberg to London in 1931 l° conduct Erwartung and who himself ln. the same year conducted the Varialionsci who introduced Berg's Wozzeck W Enga in a concert performance fifteen Year' before it reached the Covent Garden stage,. and gave the first English performances °' the Three Pieces and the Lidu-symphoilie; who conducted the first English perform:(10 ances of Mahler's Third SymphonY 1947) and of several works by Hindemi'd. Honegger and Martinu. He chamPlolle Busoni even before that remarkable CO poser became a cult; and he conducted th's BBC Symphony Orchestra in performancee of Debussy and Ravel which, long hecer, Boulez and even better than Boule-A. showed that their works can be perforale" with analytical classicism of line and te4t: ture. And there were always, like sheer anchors in the wartime years, those unfer:f gettable performances of Brahms and Schubert's Great C major. His services to English composers are unequalled, even by Wood, GodfrcY; Barbirolli or Sargent. It is well-known thjs m he came to prominence with perforael`; of Vaughan Williams's London SyniPli°"of and Hoist's The Planets in 1918 and,„ Elgar's Second Symphony in 19,. performances which earned him their ce1":: posers' lifelong friendship an and in a very real sense puttdhosgerawti:cm: on the map. But who remembers that he o'f 1919 conducted the first performance, by Delius's Violin Concerto? Yet it is no` Id his first-performance record that he shoo', be judged but by the times he has conducteu the second, third and fourth performan'ti, Championing a work means just that Boult. iota' He took Vaughan Williams's Pas ade Symphony to Prague in 1925 and he 01 ip the Vienna Philharmonic play his Pbrifi 1937 (Arnold Rose playing the solo victed in Elihu's Dance!), he has conchletej Bliss's music in Europe and the Urilay States. When other conductors shied a",/ from Tippett's Second SymphonY ifl.nd Boult conducted it. He discoverect promoted the talent of an unknown Y"„dv, Australian, Malcolm Williamson, Pio Master of the Queen's Musick. 14ch his never taken the easy way out, even wit" fid 'big three', Elgar, Vaughan Williarns 3

Hoist. that

It is through Boult's persistence ps there are now recordings of The AP°I;0 and The Kingdom; only a year or two ',lie he learned a forgotten Elgar score' to delicious Sanguine Fan ballet, in ordel

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restore it to us by a recording; 11. eve!) ate, recording Geroniius he risked givIrle" ds. title role to a foreign tenor, Nicola' 6,ecjody and his courage has been triuMPle vindicated; he has twice recorded the nine V.W. symphonies but also he put the neglected opera The Pilgrim's Progress on disc; in Hoist's centenary year he was not

content to add yet another Planets but recorded the rare Choral Symphony. Howells, Bax, Rubbra, Ireland—all are in BouIt's debt. He can spring his surprises,

too, with the best of them. At his eightieth birthday concert the encore, after an evening Of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, was— The he Dantbusters march! And there is his _memorable squashing of Dame Ethel

4uYth, notorious for her interference at Thearsais of her works—`Good morning, Dame Ethel, and what are your tempi for today?

• The man's range is enormous—and Is taken for granted. What remains? It is .empting to wonder what this paramount interpreter of the Elgar symphonies would Make of their contemporary, Mahler 's Has any impresario thought of finding out? One thing is certain: there as been no conductor, not even Toscanini, ,7,,ud has been so uncompromisingly on the '''e of the composer. The anecdote which saYs most about Adrian Boult is of his conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and —•eountering a textual problem in the parts °f Mozart's G minor Symphony. To ,rresolve it he simply sent someone to fetch `Nr,I,e autograph score: he, but not the Tdnese, had remembered it was housed " IN' rooms away.