Adrian Boult
Brought up in a prosperous mercantile family, he followed musical studies in England and at Leipzig, Germany, with early conducting work in London for the Royal Opera House and Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company.
He gave the first performance of his friend Gustav Holst's The Planets, and introduced new works by, among others, Elgar, Bliss, Britten, Delius, Rootham, Tippett, Vaughan Williams and Walton.
[3] He was educated at Westminster School in London, where in his free time he attended concerts conducted by, among others, Sir Henry Wood, Claude Debussy, Arthur Nikisch, Fritz Steinbach, and Richard Strauss.
[4] His biographer, Michael Kennedy, writes, "Few schoolboys can have attended as many performances by great artists as Boult heard between 1901 and October 1908, when he went up to Christ Church, Oxford.
[10] Later that year Boult joined the musical staff of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where his most important work was to assist with the first British production of Wagner's Parsifal, and do "odd jobs with lighting cues" while Nikisch conducted the Ring cycle.
[11] Boult made his début as a professional conductor on 27 February 1914 at West Kirby Public Hall, with members of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.
[12] Boult was declared medically unfit for active service during the First World War, and until 1916 he served as an orderly officer in a reserve unit.
[13] In his spare time he organised and conducted concerts, some of which were subsidised by his father, with the aims of giving work to orchestral players and bringing music to a wider audience.
In only a short period, Boult was required to master such scores as Petrushka, The Firebird, Scheherazade, La Boutique fantasque and The Good-Humoured Ladies.
This led to his becoming musical director of the City of Birmingham Orchestra,[5] where he remained in charge for six years, attracting widespread attention with his adventurous programmes.
[29] The disadvantages were that the orchestra was inadequately funded, the available venues (including the Town Hall) were unsatisfactory, the Birmingham Post's music critic, A. J. Symons, was a constant thorn in Boult's side, and the local concert-going public had conservative tastes.
Such departures from the repertoire expected by the regular concert-goers depressed the box-office takings, requiring subsidies from private benefactors, including Boult's family.
[42] He later said that this was a rash decision, and that he could not have sustained the two roles at once without the efforts of his staff in the music department, which included Edward Clark, Julian Herbage and Kenneth Wright.
Like Henry Wood before him, Boult regarded it as his duty to give the best possible performances of a wide range of composers, including those whose works were not personally congenial to him.
[1] In 1936 and 1937 he headed European tours with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, giving concerts in Brussels, Paris, Zurich, Budapest and Vienna, where they were especially well received.
[5][8] During his BBC years, Boult did not entirely lose contact with the world of opera and his performances of Die Walküre at Covent Garden in 1931 and Fidelio at Sadler's Wells Theatre in 1930 were considered outstanding.
In 1933, Boult astonished those who knew his notorious shyness with women by marrying her and becoming a much-loved stepfather to her four children; the marriage lasted for the rest of his life.
[57] This move, made as a favour to the composer Arthur Bliss to provide a suitable war-time job for him, later came to be Boult's undoing at the BBC.
Their first recordings together were Elgar's Falstaff, Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen with the mezzo-soprano Blanche Thebom, and Beethoven's First Symphony.
[68] In The Manchester Guardian, Neville Cardus wrote, "Nobody is better able than Sir Adrian Boult to expound the subtly mingled contents of this master work.
The other works were Elgar's Introduction and Allegro, Holst's The Perfect Fool ballet music, Richard Strauss's Don Juan, and Stravinsky's Firebird.
Kennedy speculates that Boult's change of mind was due to a growing conviction that the orchestra would be "seriously jeopardized financially" if Russell remained in post.
[73] A later writer, Richard Witts, suggests that Boult sacrificed Russell because he believed doing so would enhance the LPO's chance of being appointed resident orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall.
The notices were mixed: The Times found a Brahms symphony "rather colourless, imprecise and uninspiring", but praised Boult and the orchestra's performance of The Planets.
After the death of his colleague Sir John Barbirolli in 1970, Boult was seen as "the sole survivor of a great generation" and a living link with Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Holst.
[92] A review in The Observer of Boult's second London concert, in 1918, said, "Having, apparently, a thorough knowledge of the work, he was content to let it speak for itself without having recourse to those aids to success which are a constant temptation to conductors.
"[93] Sixty-five years later, in an obituary tribute, Peter Heyworth wrote in the same newspaper: "From Nikisch he had early acquired an immaculate stick technique and was quietly scathing about conductors who used their anatomy to indicate their artistic requirements. ...
"[96] The trombonist Raymond Premru wrote forty years later, "One of the old school, like Boult, is so refreshing because he will reduce the dynamic level – 'No, no, pianissimo, strings, let the soloist through, less from everyone else.'
[107] In the June 2013 issue of Gramophone Boult was added to the magazine's Hall of Fame which recognises musicians who have made a lasting impact on the world of recorded classical music.
His last recording of The Planets made in May 1978 was taped in experimental digital sound, although technical problems led EMI to release an analogue version.
