This discography lists all Boult’s commercial recordings of Vaughan Williams along with broadcasts that are known to exist, preserved in the British Library Sound Archive or in private collections; these are included in order to demonstrate the extent of Boult’s recorded legacy of Vaughan Williams and, in due course, some of them will no doubt be published. Commercial recordings are listed here with the catalogue number of the first UK release (on 78 rpm discs or on LPs) and what is intended to be the most helpful CD reissue. In the case of Boult’s EMI, HMV and Parlophone recordings, these were all gathered together in a 13-CD set by EMI (now Warner Classics) in 2013: Sir Adrian Boult: Vaughan Williams, The Complete EMI Recordings (EMI 903567–2). The Decca recordings of the symphonies (along with the Everest recording of No. 9) were issued in a digitally remastered 5-CD set by Decca in 2002 (473 2412) and, more recently, with Boult’s other Decca Vaughan Williams by Eloquence in 2022 (484 2204). Where relevant, CD numbers refer to these large sets.

For full details of Boult’s Vaughan Williams recordings (including alternative catalogue numbers, matrix numbers for 78 rpm recordings and sources for unpublished material), readers should refer to Philip Stuart’s Adrian Boult, 1889–1983: A Chronological Discography (Sheffield: CRQ Editions, 2016, rev. 2020). At the time of writing, this definitive publication is available as a free download from crqeditions.co.uk. It reveals some anomalies in Boult’s Vaughan Williams discography: though there are surviving broadcasts, he made no commercial recordings of major works such as Sancta civitas and the Five Tudor Portraits. A recording of Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus was planned by EMI in 1975 but never realised; and although Boult conducted the premiere of the Piano Concerto in 1933, his only recording is of the arrangement for two pianos and orchestra.

The extent of these recordings is testimony to Boult’s devotion to Vaughan Williams, with two complete cycles of the symphonies, multiple versions of favourite works such as Job and the Tallis Fantasia, and recordings of pieces that Boult thought neglected, notably Dona nobis pacem and The Pilgrim’s Progress.

This is a chronology of all Boult’s Vaughan Williams performances that it has been possible to trace. Much of the information is taken from the performance lists in Boult’s scores, and further details have been taken from his private papers as well as The Times, Radio Times and other newspapers, Boult’s My Own Trumpet, Michael Kennedy’s Adrian Boult and Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Philip Stuart’s Boult discography. Listings include such information as is available about each event; in many cases halls or other details are unknown. In this list, * after an entry denotes a broadcast and ** denotes a commercial recording.

Vaughan Williams composed his Symphony No. 5 in D major between 1938 and 1943, and conducted the premiere on 24 June 1943, at a Promenade Concert in the Royal Albert Hall with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. The first recording was made by John Barbirolli and the Hallé Orchestra on 17 February 1944, though Barbirolli had little contact with Vaughan Williams at the time: their close friendship developed a few years later.

Boult’s involvement with the symphony started several months before its first public performance. He wrote to Vaughan Williams on 11 February 1943:

Vaughan Williams replied on 15 February, thanking Boult for his ‘most kind’ offer but noting that the piece wouldn’t be ready ‘for some time yet because the orchestration has got to be revised and then the parts copied’. Work began on copying the parts in March 1943 and, on 1 May, Vaughan Williams was able to make firm arrangements with Boult:

Less than a week later, matters were settled. Vaughan Williams wrote to Gwen Beckett, Boult’s secretary, on 6 May:

Thank you for your letter containing Sir Adrian’s very kind message – May 25 (Tuesday) at Maida Vale will suit me admirably, either morning or afternoon, whichever suits Sir Adrian best.

Boult was extremely sparing with conventional markings on his scores, always believing them to be unnecessary if the score had been learned thoroughly by the conductor in the first place. This makes the annotations of his Vaughan Williams scores all the more interesting as many of the markings stem directly from the composer and are described as such (usually with ‘RVW’ next to them). They derive from discussions with the composer either during meetings or at rehearsals, and – for most of the symphonies – from comments made by Vaughan Williams at the sessions for the Decca recordings. Boult was an assiduous spotter of misprints and in some cases made exhaustive lists of them, for instance on his copy of the miniature score of Job. Boult’s annotations provide fascinating evidence for the composer’s thinking or rethinking about particular works and movements (even for something as important as the speed of the last movement of the Sixth Symphony). The annotations discussed here do not include occasional indications of bowing. It is suggested that anyone consulting these lists should do so with copies of the relevant scores to hand. The annotated scores described below include all the symphonies, the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Flos campi and Job.

A Sea Symphony

Full score [1924]: Stainer & Bell Ltd., 58 Berners St., London W1. 4 vols (one for each movement), folio, music on pp. 3–323 (continuous pagination), plate number S. & B. 3036. Each volume signed ‘Adrian C. Boult / 1924’ on the front cover.

This was the score Boult used for all his performances. Apart from his handwritten performance list, there are several interesting annotations. On the page listing the orchestration, Boult has noted ‘Misprints 61, IV 219’. Both of these have been corrected in the score: p. 61, bar 3, chorus basses, rhythm for ‘a spi-ri-tu-al’ changed in red pencil from misprinted version to 1920’. The title page inscribed: ‘To Adrian Boult / from R Vaughan Williams’. There are minimal markings by Boult apart from a few bowings. On p. 79, five bars before Fig. D: above vn 1 Boult has written ‘(vibrato)’, and at the foot of the same page ‘very little daylight’.

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) and Adrian Boult (1889–1983) had one of the longest and most productive musical friendships between any composer and conductor. Theirs began in 1909 when Boult was still an undergraduate at Oxford, and from 1918 onwards Boult became one of Vaughan Williams’s most important interpreters: performing and recording almost all his major works, programming them in concerts and broadcasts not only at home but also abroad (Vienna, Amsterdam, Prague, Boston, Chicago, New York), working in close collaboration with the composer on many projects including the premieres of three symphonies (the Pastoral, No. 4 in F minor and No. 6 in E minor) and conducting the first complete recorded cycle of the symphonies with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. The sessions were supervised by the composer, apart from the Ninth Symphony, which was recorded a few hours after his death. Boult continued to be the most devoted advocate of Vaughan Williams’s music to the end of his long career: recording a second cycle of the symphonies in stereo and fulfilling a long-cherished wish when he made the first recording of The Pilgrim’s Progress. In August 1977, his final appearance at the Proms was a performance of Vaughan Williams’s Job, and at his last public concert two months later he conducted the Sinfonia antartica. Touchingly – and very appropriately – the finale of Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony was the last music Boult ever heard, two days before he died in 1983.

The regular collaborations between Vaughan Williams and Boult have been discussed in biographies of both musicians, but this book is the first detailed study of Boult’s relationship with Vaughan Williams and his music. An important impetus for the project came from the opportunity to study Boult’s working copies of Vaughan Williams’s scores. These provide fascinating insights into the conductor’s attention to the composer’s wishes, as well as documenting Boult’s numerous performances. It was Boult’s custom to note down every time he conducted a particular work (date, place and orchestra) and these performance lists provide the raw material for a thorough documentation of his advocacy of Vaughan Williams’s music.

Writing this book has been a labour of love. As a ten-year old boy, the first orchestral concert I ever attended was in March 1967, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult in Reading Town Hall. Simply put, that evening – and particularly the performance of Brahms’s Third Symphony at the end of it – ignited a lifelong passion for music. During my teenage years I had the pleasure of seeing and hearing Boult conduct on many occasions in London, and music by Vaughan Williams was often on the programme. I sat spellbound at the Vaughan Williams Centenary Concert in the Royal Festival Hall on 12 October 1972, and still have powerful memories of Boult’s performance of A London Symphony earlier the same year, as well as several Proms: the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Tallis Fantasia, and above all Job in August 1977, a memorable concert made all the more poignant in retrospect for being Sir Adrian’s last ever appearance at a Prom. As an enthusiastic schoolboy, I wrote to Boult about the early versions of A London Symphony in 1972 and received a wonderfully detailed reply by return of post. Later, during my student years at Manchester University, I corresponded with him regularly, and after his retirement he invited me to his flat in West Hampstead on several occasions. It was on those visits that I first encountered his music library, housed in an enormous breakfront bookcase, carefully organised, and with correspondence from composers tucked inside many of the scores. Boult was also assiduous in noting down when he had performed each work, and long lists of performances were to be found in many of his scores, including those of Vaughan Williams. With my university friend Simon Mundy, I compiled a book of tributes for Sir Adrian, published in 1980, but I always hoped to delve deeper into his extraordinary career, particularly his performances of Vaughan Williams. Little did I imagine that more than forty years later I would be able to write about Vaughan Williams and Boult, drawing on those same scores that I had found so engrossing in the 1970s, still kept in the same huge breakfront bookcase, now in the care of his step-grandson, the composer Anthony Powers.

Musical life in nineteenth-century Wales was characterised by the active dissemination of ideas through the publishing of original Welsh music and musical journals. The latter in particular sought to educate as well as to inform, at a time when formal musical education at college or conservatoire was not available. The growth of musical education in Wales was greatly assisted by the emergence of tonic sol-fa as a popular medium, which in turn supported the growth of congregational and choral singing. The chapter discusses the significance of these developments and the extent to which they fostered a Welsh musical tradition. The first part of the chapter considers the relationship between religion, music and education by examining a range of landmark publications, including Cyfaill mewn Llogell (1797). The second part examines the influence of the tonic sol-fa notation system and its popularity in Wales, considering how educational and religious aims coalesced with technological developments to embed the system in the popular musical culture of Welsh communities. It also considers the reasons why some musicians viewed the system negatively and saw it as limiting the progress of Welsh musical practice. The chapter concludes with a survey of music publishing and sales in Wales in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

The chapter examines the relationships between music, sport and Welsh identity. Focusing on the national rugby union and football teams, it explores the ways in which performances of ‘Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau’ by players and supporters have contributed to a cohesive sense of national identity. Examples range from its first recorded use prior to the rugby team’s famous victory over the New Zealand All Blacks in 1905 to its part in the Football Association of Wales’s efforts to galvanise supporters during the team’s successful Euro 2016 campaign. It also considers the adoption of popular hymns such as ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah’ and ‘Calon Lân’ by supporters, investigating the extent to which affiliation to the national team takes on a spiritual quality. Drawing on the contributions of popular Welsh artists such as Max Boyce, the chapter also assesses the self-referential nature of connections between musicality and sporting pride in corporate expressions of national identity. It considers the ways in which language, religious practice and social structures encouraged and maintained a culture of massed patriotic singing, and how this has been reimagined and perpetuated in the twenty-first century through a combination of institutional support, technological developments and the influence of social media.

Like most countries around the world, Wales saw a flowering of popular music in the 1960s. Following the ubiquitous contemporary Anglo-American model, the popular music that emerged in Wales during that decade signalled a number of cultural shifts, both musical and linguistic. This chapter surveys the roots and developments of Anglophone and Welsh-language popular musics from the 1960s into the twenty-first century, focusing on shared traditions, political engagement, the attitudes of the ‘official’ institutions of both Welsh- and English-language culture (including the eisteddfod, the chapel and the media), and the impact of Welsh devolution; and revealing Wales’s contributions to fifty years of global musical dialogue. It considers the careers of several Welsh stars who ‘crossed over’ into the Anglo-American mainstream, including Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones, and the rise of the bands of the so-called ‘Cool Cymru’ era - prominent among them Catatonia, Super Furry Animals, Manic Street Preachers and Stereophonics. These bands achieved a new level of sophistication and cultural importance for Welsh pop, the clearest signal of which was the release of Super Furry Animals’ internationally acclaimed album Mwng (2000), a collection of songs sung entirely in the Welsh language. Post-devolution Wales has offered a greatly enriched cultural environment and infrastructure for pop music that has ensured the mainstream success of a new generation of Welsh artists such as Gwenno.

This chapter is shorter than the others and takes the form of a postscript devoted to the state and organisation of music in Wales at the time of the book’s publication. It is shaped around the coincidental but simultaneous occurrence of two key historical moments: the devolution of many segments of administrative authority from the UK government to Wales and the establishment of a Welsh Parliament (Y Senedd), and the ubiquitous adoption of digitisation in the service of cultural communication and creativity. This latter development was not, of course, a uniquely Welsh phenomenon, but in Wales, because of the country’s geography and bilingualism, it had an especially important impact. Digitisation facilitated the ambition of Wales’s devolved governments to express the country’s cultural distinctiveness within the UK and globally. Devolution had the ancillary effect of elevating the importance of the creative industries, including those devoted to or including music. Additionally, the legal framework that underlined devolution led to an increased protection of the Welsh language and consequently the music cultures which had flourished within it. The chapter deals with the consequences for Welsh music of two decades of devolution and its impact on traditional and the modern agencies and institutions concerned with Welsh music: music education, performance, the curation of Welsh historical materials and the associated scholarship.