Vernon Handley

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Speaker 10:05

For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty four, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:29

This week, our castaway is the conductor, Vernon Handley.

Presenter0:33

How well do you think you could endure loneliness? I could for for a short time. I'm a a handyman, so I think I would enjoy it, and it'd give me a chance to think. But I'd want to get back. You've made many discs yourself. Do you play them? Do you play other people's records? Do you play your record player?

Speaker 10:47

Rick

Presenter0:48

I don't play records as much as I ought, or as much as I'd like. I'm afraid a conductor's career demands that he be conducting or preparing. Did you find it difficult to choose just eight? Terribly difficult. If you had said eighty it would have been difficult, but eight was almost impossible.

Presenter1:03

But I had a few guidelines, you know. I wanted to

Speaker 11:05

Yeah.

Presenter1:07

I wanted to choose works that had meant something to me when I was first studying music, and then works and and ideas on record that would keep me thinking while I was on that desert island. What's the first one?

Vernon Handley1:20

But

Presenter1:21

Well, the first one uh goes right back to my eighth or ninth year, when I'd started to teach myself to sight seeing.

Presenter1:27

and it suddenly occurred to me one day that I was hearing

Presenter1:31

A line that I wasn't singing, and the thrill of this quite intoxicated me, and I got hold of hymn books and, funnily enough, chamber music. Usually one comes to chamber music rather later on in life, but for me it was the first thing, because it was only a few lines that I'd got to look at and hear together, which is what I wanted to do.

Presenter1:50

One of the first works which made a tremendous impression on me was the Schubert Death and the Maiden, and I'd like to hear the first tremendous movement of that regularly on the Desert Island, to start me working all over again.

Presenter2:56

The opening of the Schubert Quartet, Death and the Maiden,

Presenter2:59

Played by the Amadeus Quartet.

Presenter3:02

You are a Londoner, aren't you, Tarl?

Presenter3:04

Well, I was born in North London, but I'd hardly call myself a Londoner. I my father was Welsh from Klanduff, and my mother, although born in Dorset, has, although she doesn't admit it, Irish antecedents. Now I'm settled in Wales, so I'm half Welsh, half Irish. So really you're a Celt? Yes. Were your parents musical? Yes, my father had sung in Llanduff Cathedral Choir and sustained a good tenor voice up to his sixty-fifth year. He was a heavy smoker. And my mother taught piano, but she didn't teach me. Didn't she? No. Why was that? I don't know. I think. Weren't you put to music? Oh, certainly not. No, nobody tried to get me to learn music. It was my own idea entirely. I've always been a sort of self-taught musician and self-taught at the other things I've been interested in in life, and I don't think that my mother relished the idea of teaching me anything. When did you get the first interest, and how was it? Something you heard on the radio? Yes, it was. I was very interested in singing and everything that I heard from a small boy, but when I was about eight, I heard a radio broadcast of Holst's This Have I Done for My True Love, unaccompanied chorus. And it had the most extraordinary effect on me. I almost felt that I was lifted out of my chair. And for a few days, I couldn't catch my breath properly when asked any question about any subject. And it was from that day, I think, that I determined to teach myself and see what music would lead me to. Was there no music tuition at school? Very little in those days. I mean, we're now still speaking of before the last war. Of course, in my teens, I was lucky in having a very, very helpful music teacher at school. And he put me onto the right harmony and counterpoint books, which I sweated through.

Vernon Handley4:38

Yeah.

Presenter4:43

And that was very helpful. But still I was an unofficial musician. You did your national service in the RAF. No music there? No, very little. I was, fortunately, though, posted to London. I was in the Central Medical Establishment in Cleveland Street.

Presenter4:58

And my commanding officer was a wing officer in the WAF, and she thought that this was extraordinary that a chap who was reading scores at every conceivable opportunity should not be doing something musical. And so she sent me off to the Festival of Britain every evening with an early pass, so that I had all the concerts in the Festival Hall when it was new. That's a splendid lady. Yes, tremendous.

Presenter5:21

So you left the RAF and went up to Oxford to read what? English, and um after my prelim exams uh I chose English philology, English course one as they call it. Well, I wanted actually at at Oxford to

Presenter5:36

have to work really hard at something I didn't think I knew anything about.

Vernon Handley5:41

Mm-hmm.

Presenter5:41

Literature I thought I knew something about. I may have been misguided, but it seemed to me that there was an awful lot of opinionating about literature. But philology I knew nothing about. I had to get down to the detective work of reading Beowulf and so on. So it was a very good discipline. Let's have your second record. What's that to be?

Presenter5:59

Well, after I had become intoxicated with this business of hearing several lines at one time,

Presenter6:04

I suppose I was in danger of becoming a vertical musician, just enjoying harmony.

Presenter6:10

And it was only in Mozart that I discovered that I had got to concentrate a great deal on Line, and Line not only just a song,

Presenter6:18

but in these strange things that I was enjoying in opera recitatives. So I think I'd like the um Queen's recitative an aria from the first act of Magic Flute. It meant so much to me, the whole opera meant so much to me when I was a student, and it still does.

Vernon Handley7:05

I'm not sure.

Presenter7:30

An excerpt from the first act, The Magic Flute, sung by Edita Guruborova.

Presenter7:35

While you were at Bailiouletod, you worked a great deal with the University Dramatic Society.

Presenter7:42

Yes, as much as I could. I was for a short time musical director of it, so I was recording incidental music for their productions. I worked more, of course, with the University Students' Orchestra, and that taught me a lot, because I had in it such wonderful instrumentalists as Neil Black, now the principal oboe of the English Chamber Orchestra, and I realized I was conducting people who were far more advanced musically than I was. So it was a salutary experience.

Vernon Handley7:50

Yeah.

Speaker 18:05

Yeah.

Presenter8:08

Were you doing any composing? No, that that's a different impulse. I don't have a creative impulse. I'm a recreator as a conductor. I like to understand the language of composers, and I myself haven't got a musically creative side to my personality. What instruments do you play? Very badly. The double bass, the trombone, and the violin. So excruciating that I dropped them some years ago. No Woodwind? No Woodwind. But of course, I think it came about, you know, because so much of my early time with music from the age of eight onwards was spent in the armchair, working it out in my head. And that is the way I still enjoy it more than any other, I think. You enjoy listening to a score? Oh, yes, very much. I think it's why I do so much unfamiliar music, because I get thrilled so often in my armchair. I want other people to enjoy the things that I've discovered. While you were at Oxford, had you formulated what you wanted to do, what your career should be?

Presenter9:04

Not really. I was conducting, I think, with more enthusiasm than I was doing anything else, and I was finding that all my score reading and harmony and counterpoint preparation was helping me. But I didn't see how an unofficial musician could become a conductor, yet it was what I wanted. And it was really only when I had a few successful concerts there at Oxford that I thought, well, I must ditch everything else and go for conducting.

Presenter9:28

Your third record. Well, now we got on to the business of line. I'd got to learn how to produce line in my conducting and not be too vertical. Well, it's got to be John McCormick, because I think of all the artists that I came into contact with through records, he influenced me more than anyone else in how to sing right through a line. And I want uh I met her in the garden where the praeties grow because he manages to be so expressive with so few breaths.

Presenter9:58

Says I, me pretty Kathleen, I'm tired of single life. And if you've no objection, sure, I'll make you my sweet wife. She answered me right modestly, and curtsied very low. You're welcome to the garden where the freighties grow. She was just the sort of creature, boys, that nature did intend to walk right through the world, me boys, without a Grecian bend. Nor did she wear a chign, I'll have you all to know. And I met her in the garden where the fretties grow.

Presenter10:33

Says I'm a pretty kathleen, I hope that you'll agree She wasn't like your city girls that say you're making free She says I lax me parents and to-morrow I'll let you know If you'll meet me in the garden where the prey grow. John McCormick, The Garden Where the Preties Grow.

Presenter10:52

Todd, I'm calling you Todd because everybody in the music business does. Now, how does Vernon Handley become Todd? Well, it happened when I was quite small, and it continues. I actually walk in a peculiar way. I walk with my feet turned in, and I toddle. And my father said of my elder brother and myself, they are toddlers. And the name stuck so that everybody now calls me Todd. And I was criticised once by a director of the London Symphony Orchestra for walking on to the platform, not so much like a conductor, as a broken-legged footballer. But I still do it, and there's no way out.

Vernon Handley11:24

Keep them

Vernon Handley11:26

No actionable fault.

Presenter11:28

Right. Now you were down from Balliol to be a conductor, to run your own orchestra. How did you set about it? I mean had you got financial backing? No, none at all. And in those days, this is the mid-fifties to 60s, you see, there were not the number of conducting competitions that there are now. Th the thing to do was either to get into an opera house and become a repetitor, or to conduct as much amateur stuff as you could, since my keyboard was so desperately weak.

Speaker 111:36

And what you got?

Presenter11:56

For me, it was conducting amateur choral societies, women's institutes, amateur orchestras, schools, concerts, anything. During which time you had to keep yourself? Oh, yes. How did you do that? Oh, anything. Working on the roads. Yes, petrol pump attendant. Really? Yes, nursery gardens, hospitals, teaching Latin in a school. I don't think they did terribly well. This was pretty exhausting stuff. Having done a day's work, you then had to set off and do what you really wanted to do. Yes, that's right. It was exhausting, and it's perhaps the one period of my life that I really well, I worried about it at the time, because conducting does require a great deal of energy, of course. And also, because one was having to conduct so much at sight. No matter how one tried to prepare, there were still bills to pay, and so one had to do one's work. What sort of orchestras and where? Any particular occasions you remember? I remember particularly actually preparing choirs in that period. There were a number of amateur orchestras that I worked with as well, and youth orchestras. But the thing that remains with me is trying to prepare choirs for other conductors. And trying to prepare, for instance, one of the Croydon choirs, a very, very accomplished choir indeed, for a performance of the creation for Sir Malcolm Sargent, and not knowing how to go about it. That taught me a very great deal in a very short time. How long did you have? Usually, four or five rehearsals, and then the great man would come in, perhaps one rehearsal on the day. And you had to have it more or less right. You didn't want any criticism from him. Absolutely. Sometimes, of course, when one was preparing work, for instance, for Sir Adrian Bolt, it was wonderful because he would go through in detail what he wanted before you saw the choir for the first time. And then it became really a rather pleasant occupation. But some conductors didn't want to talk about the thing because they'd done it so many times. So you did work with, if one may use the phrase, the real conductor before you started?

Speaker 113:39

Say

Presenter13:44

Yes, indeed. I'd been fascinated by Sir Adrian's technique of conducting, because really to me, conducting was not the the power-conscious thing that it seems to be for many people. When I became fascinated by it, I actually wanted to know how it was done. And in watching conductors in London during my teens and the time when I was at Oxford, I couldn't understand how it was done. But when I first saw Sir Adrian, I must have been about fifteen, I think, I thought, oh, I see, that's how it's done, and set about trying to learn his technique, which of course is a very unshowy and economical technique. Did you go to him and ask for his help? Not immediately, but I did write to him from Oxford, and he wrote a charming letter saying, Don't bother to conduct, it's too hard a profession. And then a few years later, when I went to a rehearsal at Works of Holst, actually, in the Festival Hall, he spotted me and he said, Are you the chap I tried to put off from Oxford?

Speaker 114:17

Yeah.

Presenter14:39

and after that was very kind and helped as much as possible.

Presenter14:42

Record number four.

Presenter14:44

Well, I talked about the economy of Sir Adrian Bold. For me, in all art, economy is the most important thing. I think one of the records I'd have to have with me

Presenter14:54

would be to remind me that economy can be used in all art.

Presenter14:58

The only thing that I have about me that is at all creative is that occasionally I can make people laugh, and so I'd have to have a master of making people laugh with me. I'd have to have Rowan Atkinson, and I'd have to have one of his most economical presentations, his roll call of students.

Speaker 215:16

Dinked.

Speaker 215:22

Ellsworth Beast Major

Speaker 215:29

Ellsworth Beast Mike

Speaker 215:34

Yeah.

Speaker 215:37

German

Speaker 215:40

He magluded.

Presenter15:44

Rowan Atkinson's Roll Call.

Presenter15:47

Which composers fascinated you? You have mentioned one or two English composers. Well, early on, of course, it was entirely classical and operatic. That I would say would be from my eighth year through to about my fifteenth or sixteenth.

Presenter16:00

And then, I think starting from one text book, Musical Trends in the Twentieth Century, by Norman Demuth, I discovered a number of names that I really felt I ought to know, mainly because they were British composers.

Presenter16:13

and I started to study the works of Holst, Vaughan Williams, Bax, Delius, Elgar.

Presenter16:19

and they exerted an influence on my development and my appreciation of music which has never waned.

Presenter16:26

So very soon they started to become one of the most important things that I I felt I had to do. I had to study their works and understand why these works weren't accepted the world over.

Presenter16:37

Now, you've told us how you set about learning the job by doing what one can only describe as hack work, by breaking in choirs and orchestras for the conductor who is coming to do the actual job. What was your first breakthrough? When did you have the job to do yourself?

Presenter16:54

Well, I think that early on, just around the turn of the sixties, I'd done so much amateur work which struck people as being quite interesting.

Presenter17:03

That the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra gave me a chance. They gave me a single concert. And it went very well. And as a result of that, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra gave me a concert. That went very well. And gradually it built up. What was your first London appearance?

Vernon Handley17:14

What was your favorite?

Presenter17:16

In actual fact, I wouldn't like to quote the first London orchestra appearance. I'd like to remember the Morley College Symphony Orchestra in 1960 or 61, who gave me the chance to do a whole concert of British music. And uh I always think of that as my first London appearance. So now the way was clear. You were looking for professional engagements from now on. Yes.

Presenter17:38

And they were coming. I mean, I was a very busy conductor from, shall we say, the late 50s onwards. But I suppose the first chance to really work with an orchestra came when I was appointed as musical director to Guildford. Guildford was then an amateur orchestra. It was amateur with professional stiffening, as so many orchestras are in the country. And it was my brief to make it fully professional, so I set about it. I went there in 1962, and by the 1966, 67 season, it was a fully professional orchestra. And of course, did you tackle it? Was it a question of.

Speaker 118:07

And of course it's developed.

Presenter18:09

Repertoire? Well, it was an overall design, of course, that brought it about. Firstly, I wanted to put up the audience attendance tremendously, which we managed to do. We had in an eleven hundred seater concert hall, I think, something like a regular eighty per cent. no matter what repertoire I put on.

Vernon Handley18:25

But some

Presenter18:25

But some well some of the repertoire was so difficult, the orchestra had to improve. And so the technical standard went up. The technical standard of the choirs that I was with there also went up. And so it was a very easy transition to professionalism. And now, of course, it's the orchestra of the southeast. And when I left it a few years ago, it was humming along. It's a very, very happy unit.

Vernon Handley18:29

And so the tech

Presenter18:47

Where did you recruit your orchestra? There was a good nucleus there, but of course when it was seen what repertoire I was doing, quite a number of the players from the London orchestras felt that they could enjoy a rest from Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. And so they let it be known that they'd like to come. And very soon I was able to draw around me a hand-picked orchestra of delightful musicians, many of whom are still playing with that orchestra and taking it on. Is it a year-round orchestra? Well, it's infrequent but regular. That is to say, if you said a concert per month, you'd be understating it. It probably does sixteen or twenty concerts in a year. There was an occasion when you took over the LSO, the London Symphony Orchestra, at one day's notice.

Vernon Handley19:28

Hmm.

Presenter19:28

For a first performance. Yeah, so that was about nineteen seventy. And I suppose that, when one talks of breaks, uh, was the first great break because Poor Andre Prevan had hurt his back, and he'd been working very, very hard, and one of the concerts that he had to do was the first concert in the Swansea Festival with the L S O, and there was a work commissioned from Alan Hodinot called The Sun the Great Luminary of the Universe, and it had to be learned pretty quick.

Presenter19:54

So it was one day's notice and I learned it. A difficult work? Quite difficult because Alan Hodinott is a master of textures and balance is almost the hardest thing with an orchestra. So I took the score to bed with me the night before the first rehearsal because that's all the time I had with it and I worked from half past nine to half past three and then closed it and got a few hours' sleep and then saw the LSO incidentally for the first time. I'd never confronted that orchestra before. A challenge. Yes, but they were marvellous. I mean they were so helpful and responsive that it went very well and that was the first real break. From then everything started to move quite quickly. Record number five. From my earliest times I've been fascinated by wild nature and I always liked to hear masters at work.

Presenter20:37

And I think if I lived well to a hundred years I should never become the master in any sphere of music making that the Nightingale is and as I'm a very keen bird watcher and bird photographer, I'd have to have the Nightingale on the island with me to remind me just what expertise really is.

Vernon Handley21:25

Yeah.

Vernon Handley21:32

Don't do it.

Presenter21:50

The Song of the Nightingale. Todd, you are a Londoner, of course, but you like to live a long way out, don't you? Yes. Well, I think that sanity comes to me the moment I get home. I think the whole business of music-making, in the pressure that we have to make it in our circumstances, can get to a person rather quickly. And I don't mind admitting it gets to me. But the moment I get out into the Wye Valley, to that wonderful, peaceful home, I really feel I'm a sane person again. I believe you are actually on the Welsh side of the border. Yes, about a quarter of a mile into Wales. So my Welsh and Irish blood settles down nicely as I cross the River Wye.

Speaker 122:15

I bought it.

Speaker 222:16

So

Speaker 122:16

Is

Presenter22:26

Wildlife photography. You're also a very good hand in man. Does this go back to the days when you were working with your hands all day? No, I don't think so. It it uh funnily enough it originated when I lived earlier on in the Welsh Mountains. And uh we had a lovely house about twelve hundred feet up and every stick of furniture one put in it seemed wrong. So I thought well I'll have to teach myself to make furniture. I was about thirty at the time and I got a little handbook of designs and taught myself and I found that um the Barthock and the Beethoven were improving immensely while I was planing and sawing so I took up furniture making.

Presenter23:03

Record number six.

Presenter23:05

Now, the last three records in fact were all British.

Presenter23:08

One of my great friends and helpers in music was Sir Arthur Bliss, and I'm devoted to his music, and I would like to have something of his.

Presenter23:17

One of the things that annoys me really about the reception of British music is that people always pigeonhole the composers. Bliss is pigeonholed by critics as being a very outspoken and often overscored composer.

Presenter23:31

I would like something from his meditations on a theme by John Blow. I'd like the little meditation which is called Lambs. I think there are many French composers who would be very proud of this delicate orchestration. I think it's the only record of the eight that I'd like to hear myself conducting because the CBSO worked so very hard at this piece and put in a wonderful result.

Presenter24:51

One of the Meditations on a Theme by John Blow, written by Arthur Bliss, which you conducted.

Presenter24:59

You were a very good imitator of Arthur Bliss, weren't you? In a friendly way. Yes, I I think we're referring back now to the fact that I like to make people laugh. And he had a very characteristic voice, as you remember. And I once uh imitated him on the phone to Lady Bliss, and she was taken in. The great thing was Sir Arthur's own response, which was to fall about inside the telephone box.

Presenter25:22

and then in the ensuing lunch to ask me to do all sorts of things in his voice.

Presenter25:30

We got sidetracked by your activities as a countryman. Let's get back to music. Lots of dates with the LSO, with the London Symphony Orchestra, after the time that you took over and saved the day.

Presenter25:41

And British music whenever you could.

Presenter25:44

Yes, I'm afraid I became like the well, the complaint I've just made about critics pigeonholing composers, I became pigeonholed for British music. Not too many dates with the LSO, just enough to keep me going, but a lot with the other London orchestras, and very nearly always, some British music included. The Composers Guild named you Conductor of the Year for that. Oh, back in 1974. Yes, that was extraordinary. I did 260 scores in public in that year, 60 of which were British, and 14 were first performances. So it was a straightforward pigeonholing that year. But of course, I mean, I'd always worked at the great classical repertoire and wanted to conduct it.

Vernon Handley26:12

So

Presenter26:19

Todd, you're very busy. You're associate conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. You work overseas a lot? Yes, a great deal in in Europe and Scandinavia, and enjoying that immensely, because there's a wide repertoire to do, and the orchestras are all very, very responsive indeed.

Presenter26:35

Mainly Amsterdam, Helsinki, Stockholm.

Presenter26:37

And Berlin for some records. And your sales of discs have been enormous.

Presenter26:42

Well especially of the extraordinary series on Classics for Pleasure with the London Philharmonic.

Presenter26:48

And of course most of those have been British, uh the great series of Elgar, Delias and Vaughan Williams, and I look forward to uh passing several million marks.

Presenter26:56

We've got to record number seven.

Presenter26:58

Delius is reckoned to be a meanderer, a luscious, vague, lack of structure composer, always nostalgic.

Presenter27:06

And I always think of him as a composer of immense strength, always facing the extraordinarily great problems of life.

Presenter27:16

So I'd like to have with me something that would scatter every piece of wild life on the island the moment I put it on, the very opening of his massive life, and I'd have to have Charles Groves's tremendous recording of it, so that that first chorus would push the waves back.

Presenter28:02

The opening of the Delia's Mass of Life, conducted by Sir Charles Groves. You're on this desert island, Todd. We can imagine that you would have a very nicely furnished hut. Yes, splendid. Done any boat building? I haven't done any boat building, but the moment I knew I was coming along to see you, I sketched out a couple of designs, you know, and I think it would be possible to put it together. Do you know anything about navigation? Nothing at all.

Presenter28:25

No, I did do navigation when I was much younger, just in the Air Force, you know. But I've forgotten all that I knew. But I think I would I would trust my sense of direction, which is quite good. Your last record.

Presenter28:35

Well, now that would have to be something of a composer who means more to me personally, I think, than any other composer. When people ask me, you know, who's your favourite composer, I don't name this man, but he seems to have addressed the problems of life and the beauties of life almost in the way that I would have done myself, and that's Arnold Bax. I'd have to have the beautiful tune from his tone poem The Garden of Fand. It means a very great deal to me. It is a gorgeous tune, and Victoria and I named our daughter after Fand, although I would say that my daughter is a much nicer character than the Fand of the Legend.

Presenter30:10

A passage from The Garden of Fand by Bax, the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boat.

Presenter30:17

If you could take only one discard of your eight, which would it be? It'd be the bags. The bags. Yes. And one luxury to take with you. Luxury. One thing of no practical use whatever.

Presenter30:28

Well, I've got one vice in life, and that is one. Yes, only one, but I indulge it richly, and that is fizzy drinks. Presumably there will be a spring fresh water spring.

Speaker 130:31

And that is what

Vernon Handley30:39

Yeah, yeah.

Presenter30:40

Well, I'll have to take a soda stream with me and an unlimited supply of gas cylinders, because I must have Fiz every day. Fizz, yes. You wouldn't like a supply of champagne. Yes, champagne will do.

Presenter30:50

All right, well, whichever you like. And one book. You already have the Bible and Shakespeare.

Presenter30:56

Well, there I'm afraid I have to be a bit stuffy, because if I'm going to be on this island, I would think I would be useless unless I'd be working, ready to come off the island.

Presenter31:05

And it seems to me that I still have a great deal to learn about the principles behind the music that I love and and work with. And so I would take a work called The Principles of Art by R. G. Collingwood, who actually tries to discover what it is that makes art tick. And I find nowadays that so often we just seem to respond to art

Vernon Handley31:22

Hello.

Presenter31:26

With preferences and prejudices. But there actually seems to be a science inside art which makes it work.

Presenter31:37

You shall have it handsomely bound, and thank you, Bernard Handley, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 131:50

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.