Those of us who only heard Adrian Boult conduct at the very end of his long career in the 1970s, think of him predominantly as a superb interpreter of British music, as well as of some of the 19th-century symphonic repertory. But earlier in his career, as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1930 to 1950, he had been an ardent champion of European new music, giving UK premieres to works by Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Bartók among many others. Alban Berg was another of the composers Boult introduced, and in 1934 in the Queen’s Hall in London, he conducted the first British performance of Wozzeck, nine years after the opera’s premiere in Berlin.
That concert performance was broadcast by the BBC, and one act of it (all that survives as a recording apparently) has been released on disc. But in 1949 Boult conducted Wozzeck again with the BBC SO, this time at the Proms, and that is the performance that has now been made available for the first time as part of this collection marking the 40th anniversary of the conductor’s death. Most of the roles are filled by British singers – the celebrated Wagnerian tenor Walter Widdop is the Drum Major, for instance – but two outstanding international artists from the years after the second world war, Heinrich Nillius and Suzanne Danco, are a fabulously secure Wozzeck and a rather tremulous Marie. Their voices sometimes have to battle against an over-prominent orchestra, but technically all the performances seem impressively accurate, often more so than in some of the studio-made Wozzeck recordings that would follow in the next couple of decades.
There’s space on these discs too for a pair of almost equally fascinating fill-ups. There’s a rather crackly but rhythmically razor-sharp BBC studio performance with the Australian pianist Noel Mewton-Wood of Stravinsky’s Capriccio for Piano and orchestra from 1948, and, on more familiar Boult territory, an account of Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony from 1965, in which he conducts the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. If none of these performances could ever be recommended as a “library” version, then the set as a whole does throw fascinating new light on a conductor whose important role in British music in the middle decades of the last century is nowadays often rather undervalued.
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