SIR HENRY WOOD

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 150, 22 December 1938, Page 4

SIR HENRY WOOD

A NOTED CONDUCTOR

FIFTY YEARS OF HIS WORK

MUSICAL INFLUENCE

At the Albert Hall, London, the jubilee will be celebrated of Sir Henry Wood's career' as a conductor, wrote Neville Cardus in the "Manchester Guardian" recently. Without exaggeration it can be said that he has done more than any other 'musician to make orchestral music of all schools and styles familiar to all branches of the British public. The Promenade Concerts, given each year in Queen's Hall, are the lasting symbol of him; here, night after night, the place is packed and scenes occur of extraordinary enthusiasm. Young men and girls stand for hours, many of them listening gratefully with fresh ears to works which the critics call "hackneyed." Sir Henry goes beyond the specialist scope of conducting; he is a. national figure, a sort of W. G. Grace of the concert hall. He is one of the few people of contemporary public life who can be recognised in the streets. There may be, and there are, several conductors of more than his sensibility; none can excel his gifts as a universal provider, none shares his large repertory, and none his long experience as a technician of the orchestra. Others may feel the masterpieces with awmore poetic intensity; nobody knows them as intimately. HI& CHIEF ASSETS. His chief assets are hard work, precise knowledge, and honesty. He "does not affect to give a "personal" interpretation. Even during the slow movement of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven his baton beats time conscientiously—his large stick emphasises each pulse in each bar. His belief obviously is that if the .notes are faithfully attended to the music and its aesthetic significance will take care of themselves. He gives us a black-and-white map of a great work rather than a full and coloured reproduction; he is like the cartographist of the popular "self-educator"- volume. He is entirely without prejudices. He - throws his heart and soul with equal thoroughness into "Handel in the Strand" and a "Brandenburg" concerto; into the "Solemn Melody" of' Walford Davies or the Prelude to "Parsifal"; into a "Fantasia on British Sea Songs" or a Mahler symphony—and he was conducting Mahler in London thirty years ago, before most of us here had ever heard of Mahler. The auctioneer, said Oscar Wilde, should try to appreciate all schools of art. Sir Henry is the composers' reliable and fair friend and guide. MORE THAN EFFICIENT. It is a mistake to imagine that Sir Henry's genius ends at efficient performance. Most times he has to work under conditions which prohibit more than a working agreement, so to say, with a big work. But given time and rehearsal he is capable of impressive interpretation. Halle audiences will remember his truly moving performance a few years ago of the Requiem of Verdi. The Halle Chorus vftll certainly remember it, and- . remember/also the. valuable instruction given them by.Sir Henry on the art of singing Verdi; his understanding of the style and his.grasp of the. tiniest' detail were matters'to wonder at. Orchestral players admire Sir Henry because he goes straigmVto the technical issues; he leaves to others the windy work of fanciful' (and often bogus) descriptions of the emotional content. British orchestral players are as a class suspicious of the conductor who "talks too much." A few years ago a celebrated Continental conductor began a rehearsal with a long narration on a symphonic poem of Liszt.. In lurid words he spoke of the red ruin and the pillage; of how the music left its trail of smoking horror. The first violin listened for a while, then interrupted and said, "Excuse me, professor, but did all that happen before the war?" "THE ESSENCE OF BEING." There is another instance —a foreign conductor waxed eloquent about a passage which he said disclosed the essence of Being and groped out of a metaphysical void into a glorious Becoming. And the leader of the doublebasses replied, "I understand—you want us to play pianissimo, yes, no?" Sir Henry is always the blunt organiser of the score as set' down on paper in plain notation. He believes in real industry. He himself tells how, many years ago, when English orchestras were not exactly accomplished, he dealt with complaints that the new music (Strauss and Debussy!) was "difficult." "You'll have to play music a hundred? times more difficult in twenty. years from now!" Sir Henry has the faith and the knowledge that move mountains: he is capable of giving, with one or two- rehearsals, the "Sacre dv Pfintemps" of Stravinsky. He is a proof of the value of a training in a severe school. Today young musicians seem to think they can learn the art of conducting in a classroom prettily situated near some peaceful lake in Switzerland. Nearly all the great conductors came out of the honest mill of everyday service in a working orchestra. Sir Henry conducted opera for Arthur Rousbey's company more than forty years ago—at Ramsgate on August Bank Holiday, too! The imagination freezes at the thought of the thin resources put at his disposal during those bitter touring days. But what lessons must have been taught him in quickness of technical adjustment —and in hardihood of hearing. A MUSICAL PIONEER. In the early nineties Sir Henry conducted Tchaikowsky's "Eugene Onegin," a lovely opera which even yet is almost unknown in England^, Thanks to Sir Henry, the Russian composers were introduced to British audiences; at one period he was as closely identified with Tchaikowsky as Beecham today is identified with Delius. If memory is not at fault, Sir Henry was the first conductor to reveal to British audiences the major works, or some of them, of Sibelius, Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss, Max Reger, Scriabin, -Moussorgsky. - And, of course, he has never neglected, the composers of his own country. A famous English composer once said to me "I would rather trust a new work to Sir Henry than to anybody; he might miss a nuance of expression, but all the notes would be there!" During any promenade concerts season we get the impression that all the notes ever composed are there. He cleared the rubbish away from the untilled field of our orchestral life of the nineties. He was one of the first of our conductors to insist on uniform bowing amongst, the*violins (Sir Henry marks his own orchestral parts to the nicest detail), on personal auditions, and, as important as anything else, on the prohibition of deputies. DEPUTIES AT REHEARSALS. The deputy system was deplorable. Important members of orchestras actually did not attend rehearsals but sent a deputy, as though the rehearsal were for the edification of the conductor, "not for the orchestra as a whole. Hence the celebrated story—A Continental ' conductor visited London, and, to his

dismay, noticed that morning after morning there were different faces at the desks. But the first trombone was always the same man^ and -the conductor ■ gratefully said to him, "You. at any rate, have faithfully attended all the rehearsals." "Thank you, pro-' fessor," replied the first trombone, "but unfortunately I won't be able to 1 come to the concert." ■ During the recent season of the promenades Sir Henry has conducted a whole history of music, and night after / • night the 8.8.C. Orchestra has crowned by its resource and skill the efforts of < Sir Henry's fifty busy and invaluable 3'ears.