In the South Concert Overture / Symphony No 1 (Rec 1949 & 1955)

Of all the British composers that Sir Adrian Boult so tirelessly championed throughout a distinguished career spanning some six decades, it is perhaps with Edward Elgar that he will forever be most indelibly linked. Boult was just 16 when in 1905 he first met Elgar, at the Westminster home of Frank Schuster (a generous patron of the arts and dedicatee of the concert overture In the South), and he had already begun to devour the finest musical fare that Edwardian London could offer. His idol was the great Hungarian maestro Artur Nikisch, and within three years the 19-year-old Oxford freshman was boldly declaring to Dr Thomas Strong (Dean of Christ Church, and soon to be mentor to a precocious youngster by the name of William Walton) that he intended to be a conductor. Thus upon graduating he went to live for a year in Leipzig, where he assiduously attended Nikisch's rehearsals and concerts with the Gewandhaus Orchestra. Boult's first professional engagement followed in February 1914; that same year, he joined the staff of Covent Garden and was awarded his doctorate in music.
Perhaps it was the fond memory of that first meeting with Elgar that prompted Boult to include In the South in his first series of London concerts in early 1918 (four extremely well-received programmes with the LSO, including a significantly healthy quotient of British music). The day before the second concert, Boult visited Elgar in his Hampstead home to run through the score of the overture. In her diary Lady Elgar purred approvingly, 'Mr Boult to tea. Quite a nice quiet man. He really seemed to understand', and 'Really good' was the Elgars' assessment of Boult's interpretation. Two years later, the budding maestro's Elgarian credentials were firmly cemented with his triumphant Queen's Hall revival of the Second Symphony, an event which prompted the composer's now-famous eulogy: 'I feel that my reputation ... is safe in your hands. It was a wonderful series of sounds. Bless you!'
Boult left us two recordings of In the South, of which the present June 1955 account far outstrips the 1972 stereo remake in terms of keen polish, thrusting vigour and wistful poetry. It's a performance which strikes an ideal balance between formal strength and yielding tenderness, the full-throated ardour of the closing pages (which, in less understanding hands, can sound more like Richard Strauss than Elgar) all the more moving for not being overplayed. The LPO's principal viola player, George Alexander, deserves especial praise for his poignant shaping of the fragrant central melody, a 'canto popolare' of Elgar's own invention which irresistibly recalls Berlioz's Harold in Italy. The work's subtitle, 'Alassio', derives from the town on the Italian Riviera where Elgar and his family spent the winter of 1903-4. Despite the inclement weather, Elgar positively revelled in the rolling coastal landscape and ancient history of the region, the Roman bridge and ruined chapel of San Giovanni Batista at Andora proving a particularly fertile source of inspiration. 'Then in a flash,' he later recalled, 'it all came to me - streams, flowers, hills; the distant snow mountains in one direction and the blue Mediterranean in the other; the conflict of the armies on that very spot long ago, where I now stood - the contrast of the ruin and the shepherd - and then, all of a sudden, I came back to reality. In that time I had composed the overture - the rest was merely writing it down.' (Notwithstanding which, the arresting opening idea actually began life as one of several sketches that Elgar dubbed 'The Moods of Dan'; Dan being George Sinclair's bulldog, who plunges so memorably into the River Wye in the eleventh of the 'Enigma' Variations.)
Elgar himself conducted the première of In the South in March 1904 as part of a special festival of his own music at Covent Garden, an event for which he had initially intended to write a symphony commem-orating the hero of Khartoum, General Gordon. The idea of a 'Gordon Symphony' had occupied Elgar on and off since 1898; but by the end of 1905 the composer was much concerned with the issue of descriptive as opposed to absolute music. In one of a series of lectures delivered at Birmingham University, he was unequivocal: 'I still look upon music which exists without any poetic or literary basis as the true foundation of our art...I hold that the Symphony without a programme is the highest development of art.' Moreover, a few weeks after finishing the full score of his long-awaited First Symphony (on 25 September 1908), Elgar described the work thus to his fellow-composer Walford Davies: 'There is no programme beyond a wide experience of human life with a great charity (love) and a massive hope in the future.'
The origins of the symphony (and, more specifically, that noble, long-breathed motto-theme heard at the outset) can be traced back to 27 June 1907, when Lady Elgar noted in her diary: 'E. much music. Playing great beautiful tune'. Next, an entry dated 2 August: 'E. wrote lovely river piece. You cd. hear the wind in the rushes by the water...'. This is almost certainly a reference to the second-movement trio, a passage which Elgar later memorably requested (at an orchestral rehearsal) to be played 'like something we hear down by the river'. Another Italian sojourn followed, this time in Rome, where from December onwards the first movement began to take shape in earnest; the bulk of the symphony, however, was written back at Plas Gwyn in Hereford between May and September 1908. The world première, in Manchester on 3 December 1908 under the work's dedicatee, Hans Richter, caused a sensation. Four days later in London, Elgar's masterwork resounded before a packed Queen's Hall whose audience included the 19-year-old Adrian Boult. Within just over a year, the symphony had notched up 100 performances around the globe.
Elgar's A flat Symphony is an opulent canvas on the grandest scale, at once intrepid and kaleidoscopic in its variety of mood and colour, and, like the Second Symphony and Violin Concerto, open to an extraordinarily diverse range of inter-pretation. Above all, a firm hand on the tiller (always a Boult hallmark) is needed to do full justice to its motivic unity and architectural splendour. Of Boult's three commercial recordings of the work (all with the LPO), it's the present, earliest version from September 1949 that displays the greatest invincibility, dynamism and emotional charge. Though hardly in the best of corporate health at the time, the LPO respond with commendable discipline, dashing application and all the freshness of new discovery. Indeed, here is an important document in more ways than one: not only was it Sir Adrian's very first recording with the orchestra (he was to be principal conductor between 1950 and 1957, and the loyal association lasted until the end of 1978); it was the 60-year-old conductor's first venture into the studio since the announcement of his astoundingly short-sighted, crassly enforced 'retirement' as chief of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (an ensemble he had founded 20 years earlier and quickly moulded into one of Europe's finest).
It is therefore surely not too fanciful to detect rather more than a whiff of defiance about Boult's imperious traversal of the epic first movement; indeed, friends and colleagues have commented how his readings would often acquire an extra bite and majesty when he was piqued or had a point to prove. Elsewhere, felicities abound in this authoritative, unswervingly purposeful conception. Listen to the hint of stately swagger imparted to the scherzo's secondary march-like theme both times round, and marvel at the heady lyricism of the trio section's final full flowering later on (the strings, for once, truly ff ma dolce as marked). Come the Adagio, and Boult's handling of the glorious A major second subject approaches perfection in its heart-warming songfulness. How intuitively judged too is the transition into the coda (such ineffably touching dolcissimo tone from the LPO strings), whose achingly intimate musings really do cut to the marrow here. More crucially, Boult distils a rapt wonder and nourishing wisdom that relate this sublime movement all the more cherishably to the timeless masters (not for nothing did Nikisch hail the symphony as Brahms's 'Fifth').
In the finale, Boult's grip and concentration are unassailable. Eight bars from the close, there's a tremendous sense of organic wholeness as we hear the motto-theme for the final time, the symphony's noble introduction never more clearly glimpsed in my experience; the cumulative effect is both exhilarating and profound (rather like reaching a remote mountain-
top and marvelling at just how far one
has trekked to get there). A tiny touch, admittedly, but one that could hardly be more characteristic of a conductor of boundless integrity who always put the music first, as well as a fittingly perceptive summation to a great performance of a great symphony.
© Andrew Achenbach, 2001