I don’t wish to steal Jeffrey’s thunder but, if he has got as far as looking at Bruckner in Ralph Hill’s ‘The Symphony’, he’ll find that Richard Capell’s estimation was on the whole fair and not ungenerous for a time when ‘only one of his symphonies – the 4th (12 November 1936) - has appeared in the programmes of the Royal Philharmonic Society’. (As an aside, wasn’t it Tovey, who programmed Bruckner, who ‘forbore’ to quote the lyrical theme of No.4’s finale ‘lest the enemy blaspheme’?]
Not only Geoffrey Sharp but, by implication, Ralph Hill himself had doubts about Mahler. He ends his introduction to ‘The Symphony’ by commenting that ‘after all, size is no criterion of aesthetic and intellectual values. If it were so then Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony would be an inferior work of musical art to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony…’ – and he goes on to list the orchestra that Mahler requires. Would many eyebrows be raised these days if we thought it quite right to mention those two symphonies in the same breath? – and perhaps conclude that Mahler’s view is the more realistic! And did Ralph Hill ever hear the work? – the presumed first performance in Britain, according to Michael Kennedy, was only in a BBC broadcast under Norman Del Mar in 1956, six years after Hill died.
As for the older British school of conductors not taking much interest in Mahler, I think Jeffrey is unfair to at least Wood and Boult. Wood gave several performances in the early days including the first British performances of ‘Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen’, ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ and Symphonies Nos.1, 4 and 8 (with ‘Mrs. Henry J.Wood’ as the soloist in No.4!), and Boult conducted the first British performance of No.3 (with Kathleen Ferrier) in a BBC broadcast in 1947 as well as recording No.1 (my first LP of it and I still think it was pretty good!). He gave several other performances including No.8 with the combined London music schools when he was less than happy with the chorus who ‘did not come up to this high standard [i.e. of the orchestra and soloists]. I have an idea that singing students are inclined to think they can sing anything at sight. The result was that at the final rehearsal in the Albert Hall I sent the orchestra home more than an hour before the end, and kept the chorus and, with the organist’s help, tried to get the music into their heads.’ [‘My Own Trumpet’, P.171]
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