Appreciation by Ron Mitchell

It was a great pleasure to finally welcome Nigel Simeone to the Society, after he had had to cancel on the scheduled day due to illness. The 25 or so members packing the Keene Room had a memorable evening.

Nigel's interest in Sir Adrian Boult goes right back to when his ten-year-old self attended his first orchestral concert. Boult and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, he said, there and then ignited his life-long passion for music.

Later, as a student, Nigel's letter to the ever-courteous Boult began a correspondence. Much later, after Boult had retired, he invited Nigel to his flat, and showed him the large bookcase where he kept his music library, with notes and letters from composers, including Vaughan Williams, carefully filed between the pages of the scores. Later again, a chance meeting with Boult's grandson gave Nigel the opportunity of access to Boult's musical library once more. This provided the impetus to begin work on the book 'Ralph Vaughan Williams and Adrian Boult'. The few copies which Nigel brought to the meeting were eagerly snapped up by members.

Nigel brought us a fascinating set of recordings, containing many items not available to the general public. (See the playlist below.) We began by hearing Boult's moving radio tribute to Vaughan Williams on the very evening of his death on 26th August 1958. Poignantly, it was the day before they were both to have begun work recording the ninth symphony.

The rest of the evening was book-ended by the London Symphony, first in a recording off radio straight to disc, with VW himself conducting the beginning of the 4th movement at a brisk pace. It ended abruptly when, as Nigel put it, 'your man's acetate ran out'. Then we heard Boult with his BBC Symphony Orchestra continuing the movement in a slower, but no less powerful manner.

Because we were listening to Boult's recordings, the focus was inevitably on Boult. A picture emerged of a decent human being, guided to good deeds by his very privately held Unitarian Church principles, also of a thorough and dedicated musician. Dedicated supremely to the music of Vaughan Williams, for whom he gave many premieres, including those of the third, fourth and sixth symphonies and the revised version of the second.

This friendship over half a century gave Boult a unique insight into Vaughan Williams' work which Nigel illustrated in two ways. Vaughan Williams declared that Boult had made musical sense out of the slow movement of the fourth symphony which he, the composer, had not been sure was there. And the conductor David Lloyd-Jones once told Nigel that he couldn't understand how Boult was able to get a sense of swinging from bar to bar in the music of Job, which he had found elusive in his own performances of the work.

The evening ended with 'a bang', a stirring rendition of the culmination of the 'London' given during Boult's 1966 summer residency in Tanglewood, Massachusetts. However, it was not given, as Nigel had written in his recent book, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, although Boult had indeed been conducting them that same week. A member of the then 'Tanglewood Festival Orchestra' wrote to say that this student orchestra had in fact been the one Boult conducted in the 'London'. Once more the extract showed how Boult was able to rouse players to splendid heights.

Nigel's manner was engaging, advancing from behind the desk into the room to speak directly to us, with scarcely a reference to his notes except to verify the odd date. He communicated his enthusiasm for a subject which he not only knows from top to bottom but is clearly very much in his heart. It was a joy to share it.