MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2023
Approaching 60,000 reviews
and more.. and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             


OBITUARY

Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

Acte Prealable Polish recordings

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

TROUBADISC
Troubadisc Weinberg- TROCD01450

All Troubadisc reviews


FOGHORN Classics

Alexandra-Quartet
Brahms String Quartets

All Foghorn Reviews


All HDTT reviews


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews



all tudor reviews


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger



VERNON HANDLEY
1930-2008

When my telephone rang at 11.00 a.m. on Wednesday 10 September, and Lewis Foreman told me that he had just heard from Roger Wright that Tod Handley had died two hours earlier, my reaction was one of great sadness, but tinged with a feeling of frustration – frustration that something was unfinished, that there was so much still to be said and done.
 
He was a great musician who never quite achieved the fame he deserved – and, perhaps, so much desired. The reason for this was a combination of ill-health (some of it self-induced) and bad luck. So many were the occasions that I had beaten a path to some out-of-town concert to hear Tod conduct, sometimes involving an overnight stay, only to find that he had cancelled and someone else – who did not fulfil expectations in quite the same way – had stepped into the breach at the last moment. The last straw was perhaps the car accident in which he was involved while conducting in Germany, resulting in frequent spells in hospital at Abergavenny, near where he lived, and the necessity for crutches or sticks to aid mobility. I remember talking to him on the telephone in hospital one Christmas morning and, at around 11.15, as our conversation was drawing to a close, he said, ‘And now I must deal with this Christmas pudding!’, an indication that even this great man was not exempt from the strange chronology of hospital catering!
 
I first got to know him when I was secretary of the Elgar Society London Branch and he gave a marvellous one-day course at Guildford in the early 1980s called ‘Elgar from the conductor’s point of view’ (though he quickly made it clear that it was really ‘Elgar from this conductor’s point-of-view’). This was a real tour-de-force for, although he had his programme worked out, and recorded illustrations all arranged in the correct order, to be managed by his assistant Alan Forrow of the Guildford Philharmonic Society, his own delivery appeared to be entirely spontaneous and without reference to notes. Comparisons of various recorded interpretations of Elgar’s music were involved, and how they matched (or didn’t match!) the printed score. He brought the house down, and had us eating out of his hand, by stating early on that he was not going to identify the conductors of the various excerpts, for ‘after all, some of these idiots are my friends’!
 
Tod had immense musical integrity, and for him – as with his mentor Sir Adrian Boult – the score was always the starting point, resulting in superb performances that reject the endless recycling of received opinions and get back to what is actually on the page, often with revelatory results. I remember a small but utterly illuminating moment in one of his brilliant talks to the Elgar Society, where he pointed out that at the words ‘The mind bold and independent’ (The Dream of Gerontius, fig. 44), almost everybody, in recorded and live performances makes the note value of ‘The’ a semi-quaver, whereas it is actually a quaver. He was right – and the difference is actually very telling!
 
What also attracted me was of course the stick technique – an example of ‘real’ conducting rather than ‘waving yourself about’ in front of an orchestra. After the death of Rudolf Kempe in 1976 I had felt that there was no-one else who conducted properly any more, but Tod filled the gap, I think with a marvellous performance of Rakhmaninoff’s Second Symphony with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall, where I realized that beneath all those big romantic tunes so much was happening to give the music a whole new dimension of passion and excitement. I’ve always admired those successful disciples of Nikisch who could say so much with their sticks and so make the music more powerful and telling as a result. The art that conceals art.
 
So once again my post-Kempe thought gloomily returns: ‘Who else conducts like that now?’ – Hilary Davan-Wetton perhaps? Bryan Fairfax (but alas he doesn’t conduct any more)? Very few, I think …
 
It was also apparent that after so many of Tod’s performances, orchestras – jaded or played out, perhaps – seemed utterly invigorated, though it is for the members of those orchestras to say whether or not this is correct. When he was invited back as guest conductor of the First Orchestra at the Royal College of Music (where he had previously been Professor for Conducting), the students had been impressed not only by his rehearsing and conducting, but also by the fact that he had taken the trouble to memorize the names of players and so addressed them personally (‘Marcus’, rather than ‘First Trombone’) as required during the rehearsals. This was another occasion where he did not appear at the actual concert owing to being taken ill, the excellent John Forster (an ardent disciple of the maestro) standing in at very short notice.
 
In the latter years he would often look terrible, and totter to the rostrum for rehearsals, concerts, or recordings but, as soon as the stick came down and the music began, the years would fall away and energy and inspiration would emanate from him. I remember the same experience at Sir Adrian Boult’s concerts towards the end of his career.
 
On a personal level he was always approachable, though he did not always follow up the things he said. When he rang up to congratulate my wife and me on the birth of our daughter in 1998 he promised to call in on the way back from that year’s bird-watching holiday with ‘a gift for the little one’, but this never happened. However, once in response to the news in our Christmas letter that we had decided to home-educate our daughter, he rang and spoke at length to both my wife and me with great enthusiasm about this, congratulating us on our decision, which shows, at least, that he had read the letter! My wife has never forgotten this, and my friend Andrew Neill tells me how much Tod loved children, and I bitterly regret that my daughter, now a ten year old cellist and singer, never met her ‘Uncle Tod’ or saw him conduct. We had hoped this might have come to pass at Prom No. 2 this year.
 
I tried to pin him down of several occasions over my idea for a book called Vernon Handley and the art of real conducting, which appealed to him greatly, but would have involved a high level of personal input from him. Nothing came of it because of the difficulty of arranging the necessary meetings. Perhaps something along these lines may now appear posthumously. He deserves to be remembered and honoured for his contributions to music in so many ways additional to his performances, live and on record. I shall miss him enormously.
 
Garry Humphreys © 2008

www.garryhumphreys.com

see also Richard Adams interviews Vernon Handley
 

 


Advertising on
Musicweb


Donate and keep us afloat

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical
All Naxos reviews

Hyperion recordings
All Hyperion reviews

Foghorn recordings
All Foghorn reviews

Troubadisc recordings
All Troubadisc reviews



all Bridge reviews


all cpo reviews

Divine Art recordings
Click to see New Releases
Get 10% off using code musicweb10
All Divine Art reviews


All Eloquence reviews

Lyrita recordings
All Lyrita Reviews

 

Wyastone New Releases
Obtain 10% discount

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing

 

 


EXPLORE MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL

Making a Donation to MusicWeb

Writing CD reviews for MWI

About MWI
Who we are, where we have come from and how we do it.

Site Map

How to find a review

How to find articles on MusicWeb
Listed in date order

Review Indexes
   By Label
      Select a label and all reviews are listed in Catalogue order
   By Masterwork
            Links from composer names (eg Sibelius) are to resource pages with links to the review indexes for the individual works as well as other resources.

Themed Review pages

Jazz reviews

 

Discographies
   Composer
      Composer surveys
   National
      Unique to MusicWeb -
a comprehensive listing of all LP and CD recordings of given works
.
Prepared by Michael Herman

The Collector’s Guide to Gramophone Company Record Labels 1898 - 1925
Howard Friedman

Book Reviews

Complete Books
We have a number of out of print complete books on-line

Interviews
With Composers, Conductors, Singers, Instumentalists and others
Includes those on the Seen and Heard site

Nostalgia

Nostalgia CD reviews

Records Of The Year
Each reviewer is given the opportunity to select the best of the releases

Monthly Best Buys
Recordings of the Month and Bargains of the Month

Comment
Arthur Butterworth Writes

An occasional column

Phil Scowcroft's Garlands
British Light Music articles

Classical blogs
A listing of Classical Music Blogs external to MusicWeb International

Reviewers Logs
What they have been listening to for pleasure

Announcements

 

Community
Bulletin Board

Give your opinions or seek answers

Reviewers
Past and present

Helpers invited!

Resources
How Did I Miss That?

Currently suspended but there are a lot there with sound clips


Composer Resources

British Composers

British Light Music Composers

Other composers

Film Music (Archive)
Film Music on the Web (Closed in December 2006)

Programme Notes
For concert organizers

External sites
British Music Society
The BBC Proms
Orchestra Sites
Recording Companies & Retailers
Online Music
Agents & Marketing
Publishers
Other links
Newsgroups
Web News sites etc

PotPourri
A pot-pourri of articles

MW Listening Room
MW Office

Advice to Windows Vista users  
Questionnaire    
Site History  
What they say about us
What we say about us!
Where to get help on the Internet
CD orders By Special Request
Graphics archive
Currency Converter
Dictionary
Magazines
Newsfeed  
Web Ring
Translation Service

Rules for potential reviewers :-)
Do Not Go Here!
April Fools




Return to Review Index

Untitled Document


Reviews from previous months
Join the mailing list and receive a hyperlinked weekly update on the discs reviewed. details
We welcome feedback on our reviews. Please use the Bulletin Board
Please paste in the first line of your comments the URL of the review to which you refer.