"Boult's Elgar - The Forgotten Recordings", highlights Sir Adrian Boult's lifelong commitment to the music of Edward Elgar. Oboist and musicologist Lani Spahr has brought these lost treasures back to life through his outstanding work in sound restoration. Boult conducted the concert overture "In the South" for the first time in 1918, shortly before the end of the First World War, and a second time in 1944, in the middle of the Second World War. The radio concert with the BBC Orchestra can be heard here
listened to here. Elgar had initially conducted his Symphony No. 2 himself in 1908 - with massive success. Adrian Boult conducted it nine years later, on March 16, 1920 with the London Symphony Orchestra. Elgar thanked him and wrote that his music was in safe hands with him. And so Boult performed the symphony more than seventy times. It was largely thanks to his efforts that audiences began to warm to the work. The present recording, released here for the first time on CD
was recorded with the Scottish National Orchestra in September 1963, a few months before Boult's 75th birthday. Some of Boult's earliest conducting experiences were with choirs during his student days at Oxford. The second part of the album contains BBC radio broadcasts from July 1967 of ten unaccompanied choral songs composed by Elgar between 1907 and 1914, with Boult conducting the BBC Choir. As a bonus, the album also contains three revealing
Interviews with Boult from the BBC. These include a conversation between Boult and Elgar's daughter.