Barry Forshaw
For classical music aficionados of a certain age, their introduction to the music of Edward Elgar would very likely to have been via the matchless recordings by the conductor Sir Adrian Boult. These readings were classics of the gramophone – and it really was the gramophone then, before the advent of compact discs and streaming. (Fortunately, these classic performances have mostly found their way onto the new media.) One wonders, though, if younger listeners will be familiar with these men who clearly belong to a different and distant age – as the jacket photograph of Nigel Simeone’s excellent study of the relationship and working methods of the two men shows, demonstrating how close a lost earlier age was for both musicians with their imposing period moustaches. But for those listeners privileged to have heard Boult conducting on stage, it was clear that the dividing line between performer and composer was being elided in the most impeccable of fashions. Boult’s precise and measured conducting (so different from the flamboyant style of such musicians as Leonard Bernstein, another Simeone subject) atomised and characterised Elgar’s music, but never at the expense of excitement and exhilaration when required (a function that Boult similarly performed for another great British composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams – and the relationship between the latter and Adrian Boult was also the subject of a Simeone study).
Nigel Simeone, one of the UK’s key commentators on serious music, has long specialised in 20th-century music, and his writing combines impeccable scholarship with a genuine elegance of style that makes the text as pleasurable as it is informative. This new study of the relationship between Elgar and Boult is an essential purchase for anyone interested in one of England’s greatest composers. Whether you regard Elgar or Ralph Vaughan Williams as topmost in the echelons of British composers, it’s essential reading. And if it’s the latter composer, you should also have Simeone’s book on RVW on your shelves.
Edward Elgar and Adrian Boult by Nigel Simeone is published in February by Boydell Press.