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

Reviewed by: Ralph Vaughan Williams and Adrian Boult by Nigel Simeone Julian Onderdonk Ralph Vaughan Williams and Adrian Boult. By Nigel Simeone. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2022. xxi, 307 p. ISBN 9781783277292 (hard-cover), 75; ISBN 9781800106376 (ebook: EPDF), 24. 95; ISBN 9781800106383 (ebook: EPUB), 24. 95. Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. What a pleasure to have this lovingly detailed portrait of two giants of twentieth-century English music! That one was a composer and the other a conductor specifically associated with that composer's music makes for an intriguing exploration of one of the most profound mysteries of the art: the process by which musical notation, appearing prosaic on the page, is transformed into miraculous sound that has power—and poetry—to move us. Nigel Simeone is well appointed to the task. First, he knew Adrian Boult personally and was granted access to his private music library for this study, including the very conducting scores that Boult used in his Vaughan Williams performances. Second, he is an experienced music bibliographer, with a wide knowledge of music publishers and thus of the special difficulties involved in the transfer of print into sound. Known especially for his work on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century French music, he also extends his expertise to Leoš Janáček and Broadway as well as to the British scene, as a recent edited collection on Charles Mackerras suggests. Further, Boult has been a long-standing interest. As related in his preface, Simeone was but ten years old when he first heard and saw the conductor, and the experience "ignited a lifelong passion for music" (p. xiii) that later attendance at Boult's performances of Vaughan Williams's music only fanned. Given this background, we can well believe the author's assertion that this book has been "a labour of love" (p. xiii). At the heart of the study is the joint portrait of the two men. Starting with where and how they met—at Oxford in 1908, when Boult was singing in the chorus of an undergraduate performance of Vaughan Williams's Toward the Unknown Region, attended by the composer—Simeone traces the stages of their story: Boult's first experiences conducting Vaughan Williams's music (Sound Sleep and The Wasps overture), the early premieres (the second version of A London Symphony Symphony no. 2 in G Major, the orchestral version of The Lark Ascending, and the Pastoral Symphony Symphony no. 3), and the close working relationship that developed while Boult was BBC director of music and conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1930–50). It was in this last capacity that Boult premiered the Fourth and Sixth symphonies. After leaving the BBC, Boult became principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and recorded his first complete cycle of the symphonies, all under Vaughan Williams's direct supervision. The "relationship" continued after the composer's death, as Boult continued to perform and record the music until his own retirement in 1981. The last work he conducted in public—by any composer—was the Sinfonia Antartica (Symphony no. 7). The story is not exactly new. Its basic outlines can be gleaned from Boult's autobiography My Own Trumpet (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1973) and Ursula Vaughan Williams's biography R. V. W. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), as well as from Michael End Page 663 Kennedy's The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964) and Adrian Boult (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987). But Simeone has neatly extracted and rearranged the relevant facts while also richly supplementing them with primary sources. He uses Vaughan Williams's correspondence, in particular, to great effect. My personal favorite is a 1955 letter from the composer to his publisher Alan Frank at Oxford University Press (OUP), in which Vaughan Williams shows a touching solicitude towards Boult in the wake of his increasing regard for the conductor John Barbirolli. Boult's private papers in the British Library yield important letters too, as well as diaries and notebooks that give added insight. Boult's ruminations in the notebooks about his deeply held Unitarian beliefs, for example, prompt Simeone to speculate convincingly on a spiritual kinship with Vaughan Williams's own nonconformist. . .