Ralph Vaughan Williams and Adrian Boult by Nigel Simeone (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ralph Vaughan Williams and Adrian Boult by Nigel Simeone Graham Muncy Ralph Vaughan Williams and Adrian Boult. By Nigel Simeone. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2022. [330 p. ISBN 978-1-78327-729-2 (hardback). £50; ISBN 978-1-80010-637-6 (e-book). £19.99] Ralph Vaughan Williams and Adrian Boult are among the few examples of a close relationship between a composer and a performer/advocate for his works. It began in 1909 when, as an undergraduate at Oxford University, Adrian Boult joined Hugh Allen’s Oxford Bach Choir to perform Vaughan Williams’s Toward the Unknown Region with the composer, a frequent visitor to the city, in attendance. Through Allen, Boult’s tutor, he got to know the composer and sang in the 1911 performance of A Sea Symphony conducted by the composer. Beginning with Boult’s performances of A London Symphony in 1918, he acted as a sort of midwife for the later symphonies as well as other orchestral and choral works, even if he was not conducting the premiere. Vaughan Williams was to attend the recording of Symphony no. 9 on 26 August 1958, which was cancelled when Vaughan Williams died earlier that morning. In this excellent volume, Nigel Simeone, who has written authoritative works on Charles Mackerras, Leonard Bernstein, Leoš Janáček, and Olivier Messiaen, navigates us through Boult’s conducting career in the performance of Vaughan Williams’s symphonies in particular, as conductor of various orchestras from the City of Birmingham Orchestra through the BBC years to his final conductorship of the London Philharmonic. In this remarkable and unique musical odyssey, Simeone records 654 performances (see Appendix 2, ‘Boult’s RVW performances –A Chronology’), documenting public concerts, broadcasts, and recordings of Vaughan Williams’s works in the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., in the years between 1909 and 1977. This figure stands as Boult’s supreme achievement and highlighting this, together with the recording of the physical and intellectual effort to achieve this remarkable figure, mirrors Simeone’s extreme dedication and hard graft in bringing these facts and figures to our attention. As a result of a short friendship with Boult in his later years, Simeone visited the conductor in his home and ‘first encountered his music library, housed in an enormous break-front bookcase, carefully organised, and with correspondence from composers tucked inside many of the scores’. Boult also noted his performances of each work, including long lists of Vaughan Williams’s performances. This unique resource, together with Boult’s Papers in the British Library, the RVW ‘Letters’ database (https://vaughanwilliamsfoundation.org/discover/letters), and archival collections at Oxford University Press, Decca Records, and other similar resources, made this valuable volume possible. The symphonies by Vaughan Williams provide the structure for this volume’s chapters, punctuated by others discussing Job, with its dedication to Boult being of particular importance, ‘Wartime Tensions’, Tallis and other orchestral, choral, and vocal works, and The Pilgrim’s Progress. Along the way but obviously connected, Simeone delves into Boult’s Unitarianism, which of course had a significant bearing on some of his musical and philosophical thinking and attitudes. Again, with a major work like The Pilgrim’s Progress in mind, he also considers the composer’s ‘cheerful agnosticism’. Chapter 3, which covers A Pastoral Symphony, also touches on Boult’s thoughts on the art of conducting. As conductor of the City of Birmingham Orchestra in the 1920s, Boult also founded a journal, The Midland Musician, the first issue of which included his article [End Page 268] ‘Ralph Vaughan Williams as Conductor’—‘It is not proposed here to discuss VW as a conductor of his own works, though he has given fine performances of them. . . Rather still is the composer who is a successful conductor of others and a notable exception to this is VW’. Of course, Vaughan Williams was a long-established conductor of the Leith Hill Musical Festival and the Bach Choir, and many now express regret that he did not record more of his own music, pointing to his classic, incendiary recording of Symphony no. 4 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1937, now considered as one of the pinnacles of the...