Vernon Handley

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Vernon George Handley , CBE (born November 11, 1930 , Enfield , London , † September 10, 2008 in Monmouth , Monmouthshire , Wales ) was an English conductor . As a student of Sir Adrian Boult , he has made a great contribution to maintaining the British classical music repertoire .

biography

Handley was born to Welsh parents into a musically educated family. During his school days, he visited the BBC recording studios in Maida Vale and watched his future teacher Boult at work. According to Handley's own admission, he learned the skills of conducting technique. The two corresponded in writing in the early 1950s and eventually met in person in 1958 after Handley finished his military service and graduated from Balliol College , Oxford . He vividly remembers that first encounter: "In the course of our meeting, he drilled me in the worst two hours of counterpoint and harmony I had ever experienced."

Boult then presented him with the score of a symphony and asked Handley how he would solve a particular problematic part of it. "I was lucky. It was a page from Arnold Bax 's Third Symphony , a work I knew inside out. ”Handley solved the problem to the satisfaction of the senior conductor, who then agreed to support him. It was also Bax's Third Symphony that was the central work on the program of Handley's first public concert in London with the orchestra of Merton College . Handley was a recognized expert in the field of the music of this English late romanticist , whose complete symphonies and symphonic poems he later recorded for the compact disc .

In 1962, Handley was appointed chief conductor of the young Guildford Philharmonic Orchestra, which he directed for the next twenty-one years. In favor of this task, Handley largely renounced an international career, which explains why, despite his extensive discographic work and the admiration of his colleagues outside of Great Britain, he is only known to a small circle of connoisseurs today. In addition to Guildford, Handley also built the Tonbridge Orchestra . In 1983 he was finally appointed permanent guest conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra . He also directed the Amsterdam Philharmonic Orchestra (not to be confused with the Concertgebouw Orchestra ), the Ulster Orchestra in Belfast and was honorary conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra , one of the oldest orchestras in Great Britain. In numerous concerts, radio recordings and CD recordings, he has conducted all the major London orchestras as well as all the regional orchestras of the BBC. Record companies with which Vernon Handley's career was closely connected are EMI , Chandos Records , Hyperion Records and most recently Dutton . The resurgence of the specialty label Lyrita and the subsequent publication of classic recordings from the 1970s gave Handley's work new attention.

In the course of his five decades of career, Handley has performed countless works by British composers, including the symphonies of Robert Simpson and Granville Bantock , which he also made - mostly in first recordings. His multi-award-winning CD recordings also include complete cycles of symphonies by Ralph Vaughan Williams , Malcolm Arnold and Charles Villiers Stanford , as well as works by Edward Elgar , Arthur Bliss , Edgar Bainton , Alexander Mackenzie and York Bowen , whose instrumental concerts especially in Handley's attention in recent years.

In recognition of his services, Handley received the Classical BRIT Awards on May 3, 2007 . As early as 2004, the British Queen Elizabeth II appointed him “Commander of the British Empire” ( CBE ).

In January 2007, Handley was named chief conductor of the English Symphony Orchestra .

Vernon Handley died on September 10, 2008 at his Monmouth home . In the last years of his life he had u. a. to struggle with severe diabetes and the consequences of a traffic accident in Munich in February 2002 (in which the driver of his taxi died).

Vernon Handley on Arnold Bax

In a detailed interview with Richard Adams for the Sir Arnold Bax website on the occasion of the complete recording of the symphonies, Handley explains his special relationship with Arnold Bax and the fascination of the music of this late English romantic:

“I don't have a favorite composer. But it struck me that the things that I particularly enjoy in Bax's works not only recur with each new encounter, but are even reinforced. More than any other music, it is his works that seem to grow more and more over the time I've been dealing with them - and this aspect has always impressed me very much. My trust in the quality of his music is strong enough that I think I can say that his time will come - simply because Bax is so individual, so original, his ability to capture moods in music and to project these moods outwards so completely different from those of other composers.

My fear is always that a mature work by Arnold Bax will be presented to an orchestra and, however benevolent the musicians may be, they will try to play it as something other than what it is. Namely as a mixture of Sergei Rachmaninoff and Richard Strauss - which is ridiculous, because Bax captures moods and thoughts that these composers have never even come close in their works. No other composer conveys such a mood, shall we say, a kind of melancholic sensitivity counteracted in a flash by glaring pagan reflexes. I don't know exactly how he manages such a balancing act, but whenever I deal with his music again, I notice how it has grown in the meantime.

Bax is a giant when it comes to musical form. But even a composer as astute as Robert Simpson struggled to see. Of course, Simpson's own works are not nearly as sophisticated in their chromaticism as those of Bax. I often ask myself if it is because: every composer speaks a certain accent , and this makes it impossible for him to accept someone else's accent if they can barely understand it. For example, you are in a company of people from different areas and someone from Ayrshire is saying something to you. You can barely understand the content. And then someone from Midlothian speaks to them and at first they think he speaks Hungarian. It's just a different accent - just dialect [sic]! Therefore, even as sensitive artists as Bob Simpson cannot grasp the structure in Bax Musik, because they only listen to the accent that is placed on top. That's what worries me. Even if a work by Bax is formally very clearly outlined, such as The Garden of Fand , really the work of a genius, then people do not recognize the structure. And that although it is a piece with an almost rigorously classical structure - but nobody sees it. "

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Vernon Handley, “Back to Bax. Vernon Handley on His Enthusiasm for a Neglected Composer ". The Musical Times , 133 (1794) , pp. 377-378 (August 1992).
  2. ^ Lewis Foreman: Vernon Handley: Conductor and champion of British music whose extensive discography includes 100 premieres. In: The Independent . September 11, 2008, archived from the original on December 1, 2008 .;
  3. ↑ Richard Adams: Interview with Vernon Handley. In: Sir Arnold Bax website. 2004, archived from the original on September 9, 2012 . ;(Translation: Thomas M + )

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Handley, Vernon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Handley, Vernon George (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English conductor
DATE OF BIRTH November 11, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH London Borough of Enfield , London
DATE OF DEATH September 10, 2008
Place of death Monmouth , Monmouthshire, Wales