Sir Adrian Boult

Sir Adrian Boult was born in Chester in April 1889 and educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. After Oxford he studied conducting at the Leipzig Conservatory under Arthur Nikisch in 1912–13 — an experience he later credited with the foundation of his entire conducting technique, particularly Nikisch’s economy of gesture. He returned to England and worked through the war years as a section assistant at Covent Garden and an occasional conductor at the Royal Philharmonic Society.

He became the first chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra at its founding in 1930, holding the post for twenty years and using it to introduce British audiences to a substantial body of contemporary repertoire — Vaughan Williams, Holst, Walton, Bliss, Bax, and the central works of Mahler and Schoenberg. He gave the world premieres of Vaughan Williams’s Fourth, Sixth and Ninth Symphonies, Holst’s *The Planets* in its first complete public performance, and Walton’s First Symphony. He served as conductor of the London Philharmonic from 1950 to 1957.

Boult was knighted in 1937 and appointed Companion of Honour in 1969. He retired from public conducting in 1981 and died in Tunbridge Wells in February 1983. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his work with the BBC Symphony, London Philharmonic and other British orchestras across six decades of recorded performance.