Boult Ill Served by LPO “Musical Legacy” Album

courtesy of PIAS

At the end of last year, the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) released a five-CD boxed set of historical recordings conducted by Adrian Boult. In the preceding months the individual albums had been released digitally. The project had been timed to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Boult’s appointment as the LPO’s Principal Conductor.

The story behind that appointment has been nicely summarized on Boult Wikipedia page as follows:

Forced to leave the BBC in 1950 on reaching retirement age, Boult took on the chief conductorship of the LPO. The orchestra had declined from its peak of the 1930s, but under his guidance its fortunes were revived. He retired as its chief conductor in 1957, and later accepted the post of president. Although in the latter part of his career he worked with other orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and his former orchestra, the BBC Symphony, it was the LPO with which he was primarily associated, conducting it in concerts and recordings until 1978, in what was widely called his "Indian Summer".

Boult’s career was extensive and diverse. One of his earliest commitments involved conducting for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and he also conducted opera and ballet performances at the Royal Opera House in London. By the time he came to the LPO, he commanded an extensive and diverse repertoire, meaning that a collection of five CD’s can barely scratch the surface of that repertoire.

Thus the very first CD presents two symphonies that amount of “previews” of more extensive projects. The first of these is Edward Elgar’s Opus 55 (first) symphony in A-flat major, which, as far as I am concerned, is better appreciated in 19-CD box set of the complete EMI recordings of Boult conducting Elgar’s music. Similarly, the second offering is Ralph Vaughan Williams’ sixth symphony in E minor, which has its own complete EMI recordings release of thirteen CDs. (Out of fairness I should point out that, back in the days before CDs, I had the vinyl versions of both of these Boult collections.)

The title of the second CD is Beethoven and Beyond. Beethoven is represented only by his Opus 55 (“Eroica”) symphony in E-flat major. The “beyond” is a rather odd pairing of Max Bruch (the Opus 47 “Kol Nidrei”) and Ernst von Dohnányi’s Opus 25 “Variations on a Nursery Tune.” Any reflections on Beethoven are purely coincidental; but most listeners know that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had already composed a set of keyboard variations (K. 265) on the theme Dohnányi had selected.

The third CD is entitled Music from the Ballet, and it probably offers a relatively satisfying profile of Boult’s approaches to working with both Diaghilev and the Royal Opera House. There is considerable focus on Léo Delibes with excerpts from his most familiar ballet scores for Sylvia and Coppélia. This is also the only CD offering music by Igor Stravinsky, but the music has nothing to do with the composer’s Ballets Russes period. Rather, the “Circus Polka” was composed in 1942 for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Balanchine had been approached to create a ballet that was performed by fifty elephants and fifty ballerinas; and the full title of Stravinsky’s score was “Circus Polka: For a Young Elephant.”

The remaining two CDs are both highly varied assortments. The title of the fourth is The Versatile Conductor, beginning with the familiar trumpet voluntary from Jeremiah Clarke’s suite in D major and concluding with George Gershwin’s “Cuban Overture.” The one composition of extended duration is Béla Bartók’s “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.” The final CD is entitled “Champion of British Music,” surveying selections by Charles Villiers Stanford, Malcolm Arnold, George Butterworth, and Arnold Bax. The collection then concludes, as it began, with Elgar, his Opus 50 concert overture “In the South (Alassio).” Unfortunately, this final track consists only of roughly the second half of the composition. It almost seems as if the original had been on a set of 78s, one of which had been overlooked during the remastering process!

The bottom line is that Boult’s legacy has been much better served by the extensive catalog of recordings he made for EMI. To the best of my knowledge, there has yet to be a “complete edition” of these recordings similar to the one that Warner Classics released for John Barbirolli. However, the Amazon Web pages for the two aforementioned EMI anthologies include hyperlinks to the Warner Classics releases of other Boult collections, any of which are likely to do far greater justice to the Boult legacy than can be found in the LPO’s own production efforts.