HMV Classics- Vernon Handley conducts Elgar Symphonies 1 and 2; Wand of Youth

Daily Telegraph Sep 2008:



Vernon Handley, who died yesterday aged 77, was one of the best-loved of conductors and a great champion of British orchestral music; a protégé of Sir Adrian Boult, he was renowned for holding fast to two principles – an undemonstrative technique and an unfashionable repertoire.



While he was by no means alone in promoting the underdogs of British music, no one did more than 'Tod' Handley to bring them to the attention of the mainstream. His aim was to include at least one British work in all his concerts. Nevertheless, he would acknowledge that "One man can't put it right," adding: "But I've done as much as I could, and I'm going to keep trying."



At the same time he would insist forcibly that he could – "and would" – conduct the whole repertoire. Like George Szell, his speciality was to specialise in nothing. Many of his concerts and recordings included such mainstream fare as violin concertos by Beethoven and Bruch, overtures by Dvo?ák and symphonies by Schubert.



Handley was principal conductor of the Ulster Orchestra (1985-89) and principal guest conductor, later conductor emeritus, of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra (1989-95) – he will be remembered particularly for his recordings of the complete symphonies of Vaughan Williams and of Herbert Howells's Hymnus Paradisi, both with the RLPO. Although he had been associate conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra since 1994, he never held the top position with a London orchestra.



Despite this – or perhaps because of it – he was a firm favourite among orchestral musicians, who valued his surefootedness, commitment and humanity. His good humour and self-effacing nature endeared him to his players as much as it did to his audience. When acknowledging the applause at the end of a concert he would often point to the score, as if to pass credit to the composer.



He was renowned for exchanging wisecracks and jokes with his players, urging them to "enjoy the music". With student orchestras, notably at the Royal Academy of Music, he was patience personified, yet not without pithy observations: "Do you know the most expressive way to play a triplet?" he asked his students. "In time!"



Handley unashamedly aligned himself with composers who had fallen from favour and, indeed, with some who had never been in favour. They included Arnold Bax, Granville Bantock, Edmund Rubbra, Robert Simpson (who dedicated his 10th symphony to Handley) and EJ Moeran. He even championed Sir Malcolm Arnold at a time when the composer couldn't keep his own life in tune, let alone his music, and persuaded audiences to sit through works by Holst other than The Planets – such as the composer's Choral Symphony, which he revived in Liverpool in 1994.



His relationship with the music of Sir Arthur Bliss, the Master of the Queen's Music, was one of his most endearing. The two were close friends in Bliss's later years, and in 1973 Handley conducted the première of the older man's Metamorphic Variations. What Bliss demands from a conductor, said Handley, is "absolute clarity of vision". It was a vision that Handley was willing and able to provide.



He was also the best Elgar conductor of his time, arguably the best since the composer himself.



His recording of the Violin Concerto with Nigel Kennedy, then an emerging star, won Record of the Year at the Gramophone Awards in 1985 (one of three he would win). It helped to establish Kennedy's career and brought comparisons with Elgar's own recording, made with the precocious Yehudi Menuhin in 1932. More recently (in 2007) Handley recorded the Cello Concerto with Natalie Clein and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.



Few, if any, understood Elgar better than Handley. As one reviewer suggested, when comparing his recording of The Dream of Gerontius (with Anthony Rolfe Johnson) with Barbirolli's reading of Elgar's affirmation of the Christian faith, if Barbirolli was an Old Testament prophet, then Handley was the high priest, noble and exalted.



George Vernon Handley was born at Enfield, Middlesex, on November 11 1930 into what he once described as "a very, very working-class family". He was a Celt, and proud of it. His Irish mother had taught piano "rather badly" and bred Newfoundland dogs; his Welsh father, who had had once been a tenor at Llandaff Cathedral, worked in a paper-making factory.



By the age of 18 months the young Vernon could sing perfectly in tune. The name "Tod" came because he was born with his feet turned in. "I'm pigeon-toed," he told The Daily Telegraph in 2007. "So is my elder brother [Graham, a commentator on 19th-century novelists], and my father said, 'They toddle'."



As a child Tod wanted music lessons but was always told that the family, "notwithstanding the cost of maintaining its canine collection", was too poor. In any case, an injury to his hand at the age of eight curtailed any hope of playing the piano, so he retreated to his own world of recordings and scores.



As he proudly pointed out, Beecham, Boult and Elgar were also largely self-taught. "By the time I was 12 I was reading harmony pretty accurately. By the time I was 14, I was very, very deeply into trying to score-read in the armchair, with no help but your inner ear." He was helped by a kindly music master at Enfield School, who secured him a pass to watch the BBC Symphony Orchestra rehearsing in Maida Vale, often under Boult.



After National Service Handley went up to Balliol College, Oxford, to read Philology, but he "read more English music than I did Philology". Even his finals year was spent conducting music societies, orchestras and choirs.



On coming down in 1954 he took an assortment of odd jobs, working on the roads, in hospitals and doing supply-teaching in schools in order to be free in the evenings to conduct "any old amateur choir or orchestra that I could find".



Eventually he wrote to Boult asking to be allowed to attend the older man's rehearsal for a concert of music by Holst at the Royal Festival Hall. Some days after the event, Boult invited Handley to his office in Welbeck Street. There, after a couple of hours of rigorous counterpoint and harmony, Boult opened a score of Bax's Third Symphony, which fortunately the young man had prepared, gave Handley a stick and asked: "How would you deal with that?"



Handley began to conduct. On the third beat Boult reached out and caught his wrist in an iron grip: "Would you do that again?" Handley did, and Boult took away the score and stick, turned to his secretary and said: "We'll help this one, Mrs Beckett."



It was on Boult's recommendation that Handley secured his first professional engagement, with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in 1961. Although he recalled being honoured with a standing ovation and glowing reviews it was, he later claimed, almost 14 years until he was invited back.



For many years Handley remained close to Boult, a magnificent Edwardian character whose dictum on the podium was "less is more". He recalled how "Boult's personality, through the eyes and by the intensity of movement of the stick, produced a tremendous passion and impact on the orchestra".



Handley also remembered the day that a rehearsal finished early, "so we went across to Paddington Recreation Ground where he consumed ice cream after ice cream after ice cream! He must have had four ices, I think, but during that time, during the ice creams, there would be a lot of wisdom."



Like Boult's, Handley's conducting action was minimal. He used an unusually long baton that he controlled with remarkable agility. "It's all in the stick, just watch" was one of his favourite phrases. Where he departed from Boult was in his championing of British composers. Boult, he recalled, "disapproved of Bax and Delius because they were promiscuous and roustabouts and so on". Handley stuck to his guns. His first London concert, with Morley College Symphony Orchestra, included Bax's Third Symphony and Delius's Dance Rhapsody No 1.



In 1962 Handley was appointed musical director of the Guildford Philharmonic Orchestra, which offered him a blank canvas upon which to build an important professional reputation.



Funds were limited, however, and rehearsals would take place in the morning and afternoon, with a performance in the evening. "I used to go back into my dressing room and slide along the wall to the floor," Handley recalled of the exhaustion he felt. He left Guildford in 1986, to be succeeded by Sir Charles Groves.



Handley was one of the few conductors to make a genuine recording (Bax's Symphonic Variations, in 1970) with Joyce Hatto, the pianist whose husband faked many of her recordings. "She was very, very good as a solo player, and a very nice person, but she had a very doubtful sense of rhythm," Handley recalled when the scandal emerged in 2007.



Part of the 1990s were spent in Australia, where Handley was chief guest conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (1992-95) and chief conductor of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra (1993-96). Once, having programmed the West Australian première of Vaughan Williams's Fourth Symphony, he had to plead from the podium for the somewhat conservative audience to show "broad-mindedness" in the face of "this strange and horrifying symphony". He also made a highly acclaimed recording of music by Sir Eugene Goossens with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.



On disc, Handley's complete cycles of the symphonies of Simpson (on Hyperion), Arnold (Conifer) and Bax (Chandos) were remarkable achievements and a tribute to the farsightedness of their respective record companies. He was a popular fixture at many Proms, including, in 1985, the Last Night; an electrifying Belshazzar's Feast in 1986; the re-creation in 1994 of a Sixties Prom in tribute to Sir Malcolm Sargent (with the veteran pianist Moura Lympany); and the second night of the season in 1995, when he conducted the centenary performance of Elgar's Organ Sonata, orchestrated by Gordon Jacob.



He also collected numerous honours, including the Arnold Bax Memorial Medal for Conducting in 1962 and lifetime achievement awards from Gramophone magazine in 2003 and the Classical Brits in May 2007. He was appointed CBE in 2004, having previously declined an OBE in 1988.



Handley was a keen ornithologist, spending several weeks a year studying and photographing birds in their natural habitats. "The bird is complete and expert in its world, and I am always reminded they are cleverer. They get everything right, while we humans stumble along," he once said. "Conductors are used to being a bit puffed-up, so being reminded of my minuscule size is what the birds do for me."



He also grew old-fashioned roses in the garden of his cottage in Monmouthshire where, in 1993, he was instrumental in a campaign to prevent an old building being turned into a model farm tourist attraction that, he said, "would destroy one of the most beautiful, gentle slopes in the Wye Valley". He had a passion for Donegal tweed, travelling to the north-west of the county to seek out individual weavers.



Despite many years of illness and two serious car accidents (in Brisbane in 1991 and in Munich in 2005, when his taxi driver was killed), Handley remained active almost to the end, conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in its annual Proms season in August 2008.



With his closely-cropped hair and stocky features he perhaps looked more like a boxer than a conductor. To him, however, it was the music that mattered.



Tod Handley was thrice married: first, in 1954, to Barbara Black, with whom he had a daughter and two sons, one of whom died at 13 months in a cot death; secondly, in 1977, to Victoria Parry-Jones, with whom he had a son and a daughter; and thirdly, in 1987, to Catherine Newby, a flautist, with whom he had a son.