Remembering Adrian Boult
The BBC Symphony was created back in 1930, and for most of his tenure Adrian Boult was the chief conductor during the regular season. Henry Wood, the founder of the Proms, was the chief conductor of the Proms season. However after the war, in the late 1940’s, Adrian Boult took over as main conductor of the Proms for just a few years until he reached the BBC Symphony’s retirement age of 60, in 1950. Some retirement: He spent the following 32 years conducting orchestras all over the world, and ironically, he conducted at many more Proms as a guest than he did with the BBC Symphony.

Adrian Boult died in 1983, months before his 94th birthday. He had a long and astonishing career; in 1919 Gustav Holst asked him to conduct the first performance of part of his suite The Planets. He conducted the premieres of many famous works by English composers Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arthur Bliss and Herbert Howells. Elgar himself wrote to Sir Adrian and told him that he felt sure the future of his music was safe in Boult’s hands.

Nicholas Kenyon, author and controller of the BBC Proms, remembers this about Adrian Boult:

I wrote a book about the BBC Symphony Orchestra some many years ago when Sir Adrian was still alive. I wrote him a letter saying that I was about to write this book, and if he could get in touch with me over the next month or two I’d be very grateful and at 9 a.m. the next morning the phone rang, this voice said “Adrian Boult here. I hope you realize I’m very old, we’d better start now.” [laugh] So I had a long and fruitful series of conversations with Boult about his years at the BBC. I think he was one of music’s great gentlemen, really. He wasn’t a conductor who was fiery, who got angry; he delivered a huge range of music with a fantastic musicality.

Schubert’s Symphony No. 8; the Unfinished.
Begun in 1822, never completed, and not premiered until 37 years after Schubert died, in 1865 in Vienna. Though Schubert abandoned the symphony before it was completed, somehow it just doesn’t sound “unfinished,” - its two movements are enough for us. As Philip Hale wrote: “Let us be thankful that Schubert never finished his work. Possibly the lost arms of the Venus de Milo might disappoint if they were found and restored.”

Georges Bizet; Jeux d'enfants
Bizet served in the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War, and in the second year of the war, in 1871, composed his Jeux d’Enfants (Children’s Games). The subject matter could not be less bellicose—childhood scenes depicted musically. Bizet originally wrote the pieces for four-hand piano duo, but later Bizet orchestrated some of them and this set of 5 is what we’ll hear: (Trumpet and Drum), (The Doll), (The Spinning Top), (Playing House), and (The Ball).

Maurice Ravel: Daphnis & Chloé No. 2
For three painstaking years Maurice Ravel worked on his ballet Daphnis and Chloe. Sergei Diaghilev, the ballet impresario who commissioned it in 1909 for his Ballet Russes, was not impressed with Ravel’s slow progress, nor with the music. He nearly cancelled the first performance and it wasn’t premiered until 1912. The choreographer for the premiere, Mikhael Fokine, had disagreements with both Ravel and his lead dancer and quit the company after Daphnis and Chloe premiered—not exactly a dream premiere.

Diaghilev and Fokine had hoped that the music would evoke ancient Greece, as did their sets and costumes, but Ravel had other ideas.

"My intention," Ravel said, "was to compose a vast musical fresco in which I was less concerned with archaism than with faithfully reproducing the Greece of my dreams, which is very similar to that imagined and painted by the French artists at the end of the eighteenth century."

“Ser-gei Dia-ghi-lev… Ser-gei Dia-ghi-lev… Ser-gei Dia-ghi-lev…” The dance company found it necessary to chant their impresario’s name in rhythm so they could keep track of the complicated 5/4 rhythm in the finale of this piece.