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The doyen of British conductors Adrian (Cedric) Boult was born in Chester (England) on 8 April 1889. He died on 22 February 1983 at the age of 93 after a long and distinguished career. He studied music at both Christ Church, Oxford and, during 1912 and 1913, the Leipzig Conservatory, and was able to observe there the legendary conductor Arthur Nikisch in rehearsals and at concerts. Between 1919 (during which year he conducted for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes season in London) and 1930 Boult was a member of the teaching staff of the Royal College of Music (returning there in the 1960s) and in 1924 he was appointed Conductor of the City of Birmingham Orchestra (as it was known then: ‘Symphony’ was added to the ensemble’s designation in 1948). In 1930 Boult was invited to become Director of Music at the recently formed British Broadcasting Corporation (with a knighthood following in 1937), a rôle that required him to establish the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which he led as Chief Conductor until 1950. Following enforced retirement from the Corporation – a traumatic time for Boult – he then became Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, until 1957, although he would continue to conduct the orchestra regularly until he officially retired in 1979. His final recording, for his regular but not exclusive company, EMI, was of music by Sir Hubert Parry (including Symphony No. 5 and Symphonic Variations). His last public engagement was to conduct a run of performances of The Sanguine Fan – with music by Elgar – for English National Ballet at The Coliseum in London, the latter carried out with typical self-effacement, even the final performance of all. It is said that he merely put down his baton, collected his overcoat and went home!
It is for his conducting of British music that we probably first and foremost think of Boult. He was a great champion of such repertoire and numbered Holst, Elgar and Vaughan Williams among his closest friends. He was often in charge of important premières, Holst’s The Planets, for example, and several of Vaughan Williams’s Symphonies. Although Boult conducted and recorded much British music, his repertoire was large and diverse and involved numerous other premières. These included the first performances in the UK of Berg’s Wozzeck (much praised by its composer in a letter to Boult), Busoni’s Doktor Faust (both operas were given as concert performances), Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 (which is now commercially available). Boult was interested enough in Mahler’s music to travel to Amsterdam when Mengelberg undertook a Mahler festival in 1920 (the composer had died in 1911). As well as having an open mind to the latest music, Boult was a master of the conductor’s technical craft. In 1920 he wrote A Handbook on the Technique of Conducting, which he subtitled The Point of the Stick; originally designed as something for colleagues, this slim tome was made a general publication in the late-1960s. Boult’s discography is sizeable. It includes not only much British fare but also copious examples of core repertoire, including Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, Brahms’s four Symphonies, Schumann’s four Symphonies, Mahler’s Symphonies Nos. 1, 3 and 8 (Nos. 3 and 8 as posthumous releases), music by Beethoven and Mozart (wonderful ‘late’ accounts of their respective Pastoral and Jupiter symphonies, for example), as well as Berlioz, Rachmaninov, Schubert, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky and Wagner. Late in his life, Boult expressed a wish to record music by Fauré, which sadly would not be realised.
In this FHR collection, Boult is to be found conducting his signature repertoire – Elgar, of course, the second of his five recordings of Symphony No. 2, and the second of his three versions of Falstaff. Music by Britten and Walton features less prominently in Boult’s discography, but he was no less sympathetic to it, as these Westminster sessions reveal (the Britten works are Boult’s only studio recordings of the composer’s music).
Anyone who saw Boult conduct in the flesh – this writer witnessed Royal Festival Hall (London) accounts of Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 9 (London Philharmonic Orchestra) and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 with Stephen Bishop- Kovacevich (as he was at the time) – will recall Sir Adrian’s long baton, his authoritative and lucid conducting style (always focussed on the music and the needs of the orchestral musicians) and his perceived-whole accounts of the music he conducted as well as a respect for what the composer had written into his score. At the time of the two afore-mentioned occasions, Boult was in the ‘Indian’ summer of his career and usually conducting just one half of concerts; in the case of the Vaughan Williams Symphony No. 9, the first half of the evening was conducted by one Simon Rattle, then on the cusp of what would become a meteoric career.
If one thinks of Boult as masterly (musically and technically), unassuming, and dedicated to the composer at hand, this is not to say that he was without emotional temperament and, indeed, not without a temper either. Yet Boult always served music rather than himself, and recording upon recording shows his cohesive and appreciative approach to the numerous and varied scores that he conducted, whether a great classic or something fresh from the pen of a composer who may not have been a household word. Take Elgar’s symphonic study of Falstaff, for example, a programmatic and picturesque piece, but one tightly organised, a rigorous aspect that Boult would have understood and for which he finds the ‘through line’ as well as being conscious of Elgar’s attempt to find more in the character of Falstaff than mere buffoonery. Falstaff was first heard at the 1913 Leeds Festival conducted by the composer who was then at the height of his powers; in terms of orchestral supremacy alone, Falstaff is a masterpiece, and is also a vivid narrative brimful of striking invention. A depth of complexity also informs the Symphony No. 2, first heard in May 1911 at the Queen’s Hall, London, the composer again in charge, this time of music dedicated to the memory of King Edward VII, the allegiance at its most overt in the elegiac second movement. The quiet epilogue of the work, which had begun 50 or so minutes earlier with such a burst of energy, its course covering many emotions and moods, may be viewed as a fond farewell to the end of an era. Also included in this set is a particularly jolly and affectionate account of Cockaigne, an orchestral picture of the London that Elgar knew, and the London that was; this is a particularly rare part of Boult’s discography and its revival here is gratefully received. If Elgar’s music and Boult are synonymous, then it is perhaps less so between this conductor and the output of Benjamin Britten (1913-76) and William Walton (1902-83). There is no lack of intensity and identification, however, with the Four Sea Interludes from Britten’s Peter Grimes, a landmark in the history of British opera and this composer’s career. The Interludes are so evocative of Britten’s own east coast of England; to which is added the rigorous Passacaglia that, descriptively, seizes upon the restless machinations and on-setting schizophrenia of the misunderstood and reviled fisherman Grimes himself. By contrast, the confection that is Britten’s witty and affable treatment of Rossini’s music in Matinées musicales and Soirées musicales is light music at its best, tuneful, foot-tapping and agreeably lyrical, Britten’s re-creative powers, and his orchestral prowess, shining through. Boult’s narration for The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra may seem a little stilted to our celebritysated ears (when a name will do irrespective of that person’s ability to add intrinsic value), but is unaffected and beautifully enunciated. He does the job, if you will, somewhat like a schoolmaster, maybe, and the performance itself is full of character and nicely observed detail, not least in the closing Fugue, here very articulate as the orchestra is put back together for the rousing coda as Purcell’s tune is majestically re-stated and Britten’s darting writing dances hither and thither. Also included here is Boult’s 1950s’ version of William Walton’s Symphony No. 1, an astonishing piece that time cannot dim. Boult had conducted at the coronations of King George VI (1937) and Queen Elizabeth II (1953). On both occasions Walton had supplied a Coronation March – Crown Imperial in 1937, and then Orb and Sceptre, both in the grand manner of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches, but with a Waltonian twist while retaining the need for glorious full-hearted melodies at their core. There was certainly an association between the two men (and Boult had already recorded Belshazzar’s Feast for Nixa and would later document a fine version of Portsmouth Point). In Symphony No. 1 (first heard complete in 1935 conducted by Sir Hamilton Harty: the work had been previously heard without the finale), one might regret that Boult does not always punch the music home as much as one would like – or, to be fairer, he maybe pushes through too much. Perhaps the scherzo could be more malicious (although it is up to speed), but there is no doubt that Boult has the structural measure of the work, and the melancholic slow movement is rivetingly intense (and at a tempo that one recognises as the marked Andante). The composer himself spoke approvingly of this recording, the first of Symphony No. 1 to be made in stereo. And, of course, Boult admires the score to treat it as written (unlike Herbert von Karajan who in an otherwise idiomatic account, given in 1953 in Rome, made at least one significant change of orchestration and also administered three irritating and pointless cuts in the first movement!). Boult conducting Walton 1 was not a one-off; a friend of the writer recalls Boult including the work in a Hallé Orchestra concert in the late-1960s, and then returning to it in December 1975 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a broadcast concert from the Royal Festival Hall. The latter was subsequently released on compact disc, following the conductor’s death.
Thus we reach the surely inescapable feeling that, like the Swiss maestro Ernest Ansermet (1883- 1969), who also left us a treasurable discography, Boult was a man for all seasons and all repertoires; not that he should be a considered a jack of all trades. Boult was a master, taking his understanding from the score, for which he had a deep and thorough training as well as an innate ability to appreciate and communicate what made each composer tick as individual creators.
© 2010 Colin Anderson

Issue note
These recordings were set down by the American label, Westminster, in conjunction with its British partner, Nixa Records (owned by the electronics company, Pye), at Walthamstow Assembly Hall between August 15 and 31, 1956. With the London Philharmonic Orchestra recording as the Philharmonic Promenade Orchestra – its nom de disque for ‘out-of-contract’ engagements – the sessions comprised not only the works on this FHR reissue, but the four Schumann Symphonies and the ‘complete’ Berlioz Overtures (omitting the Prelude to Les Troyens à Carthage).1 They were produced by Kurt List, Vice President and Music Director of Westminster Records, and, most unusually for the period, engineered only in stereo by Herbert Zeithammer, assisted by Mario Mizzaro, using a two-track Ampex recorder and a simple setup of ‘two Altec microphones with the left-hand microphone placed half-way along the first violin section and the right-hand microphone similarly placed by the cello section’. (John Snashall, ‘The Nixa/Pye story Part Two’, International Classical Record Collector, September 1995, pp.57-58).2 These were not only the first stereo tapings of all but one of the works recorded3 but Sir Adrian Boult’s only stereo recordings for the Nixa- Westminster partnership.4 Mixed down mono versions of the recordings were derived from the stereo masters at the Nixa and Westminster editing suites in London and New York.5 Utilising its own edited masters,6 Westminster issued all of the recordings on stereo LP in the USA in September 1958, the record sleeves and labels bearing the legend ‘Nixa licence – A Westminster recording made for the Nixa Company of London’. Nixa limited itself, however, to a partial release of mono versions only. Both companies used the pseudonymous title Philharmonic Promenade Orchestra. It was not until 1964 that any of the original stereo recordings were first released in the UK, in Pye’s Golden Guinea series, the orchestra now correctly called the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
These issues, comprising Walton’s Symphony No. 1, Elgar’s Symphony No. 2 and Falstaff, and Britten’s Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia from Peter Grimes were taken from the Pye Nixa tapes edited by John Snashall and Robert Auger, which present slight differences from the 1958 Westminster LPs.2, 6 With the exception of Falstaff, they were first released on compact disc in 1986 and 1987 by PRT (Precision Records and Tapes, the new name for the Pye label from 1980), and in 1988 and 1989 by PRT-Nixa. Mono versions only of Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (with narration by Boult), the Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia from Peter Grimes, and the Rossini-Britten Matinées musicales and Soirées musicales, also remastered from the Pye Nixa tapes, were first released in the UK on EMI Phoenixa CDM 7 63777 2 in 1990. A transfer from LP of Elgar’s Falstaff was released on the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s own label in 2007. The Cockaigne Overture has not previously been released in the UK. The source tapes now held by EMI, which acquired the Pye Nixa catalogue in 1990 following the break up of PRT, are incomplete and, in some cases, suffer from high hiss levels which are difficult to reduce without compromising the sound quality. The Westminster master tapes for Elgar’s Symphony No. 2, Falstaff, and Cockaigne Overture, Walton’s Symphony No. 1, and the Rossini-Britten Matinées musicales and Soirées musicales, used for these FHR transfers, have been made available courtesy of the Universal Music Westminster archive7 at Gütersloh, Germany, and are here issued on compact disc for the first time. Despite exhaustive searches, the stereo master for The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra has not been located and the recording is here transferred from the Westminster stereo LP (WST 14010). Since this, the only stereo version of the recording, omits the narration, the mono version with Sir Adrian Boult’s commentary is also included in this set.

1 For release as Volume 2 on FHR. Volumes 1 and 2 constitute for the first time on compact disc the complete August 1956 stereo recordings made by these artists in Walthamstow Assembly Hall.
2 For a fuller account of the chequered history of Nixa/Pye, as well as an informative and, at times, amusing account of Boult’s 1956 Walthamstow see ‘The Nixa/Pye Story’, John Snashall, (International Classical Record Collector, May, September, November 1995).
3 The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra was first recorded in stereo by Capitol, with The Concert Arts Symphony Orchestra conducted by Felix Slatkin, on August 18 and 20, 1956.
4 Boult’s first studio recordings with the LPO were made for HMV in 1949, while his first Decca sessions early in 1952 followed his appointment as the orchestra’s Principal Conductor. Both companies
evidently regarded him as a safe accompanist and reliable advocate for British music, but seemed hesitant about offering him core symphonic repertoire. Nixa-Westminster began similarly in 1953 by confining Boult to Holst, Walton and Vaughan Williams. But the next year they allowed him a Brahms cycle, with Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Berlioz to follow. In the late 1950s, Vanguard engaged him for some Sibelius plus some Beethoven Symphonies and Everest for Mahler, Hindemith and Shostakovich. After his retirement Boult recorded with the LPO for another two decades, HMV eventually letting him range from Bach to Wagner, while Lyrita recorded much more of his British repertoire. Even today his LPO recordings far outnumber those with any other conductor, a worthy legacy from their first President (1965-83).
5 Mario Mizzaro, who was Second Balance Engineer on the sessions, has confirmed that separate mono recordings were not made.
6 Ursula Franz (née Stenz), who joined Westminster as Music Editor from 1955 and can be seen in the photograph reproduced on the inner page of the digipack, was married to Kurt List, who died in 1970. Affectionately known as ‘Golden Ears’, she was present at the sessions in the rôle of assistant to the producer and has confirmed that Westminster edited its own versions of the master tapes. She recalls an amusing exchange between her husband and Sir Adrian, when the former asked for a section with horns to be repeated as the instruments were out of tune. “Sir Adrian responded gently: ‘Shocking, isn’t it!’”
7 Founded in New York in 1949, Westminster Records ceased regular operation in 1965, having been acquired by ABC-Paramount Records in 1961. In 1979 MCA Records acquired ABC Records together with its Westminster subsidiary. Ownership of the Westminster catalogue passed to Universal Music in 2000.
Peter Bromley