If any one conductor can be said to have paved the way for the British musical renaissance of the early 20th century, it was Sir Henry Wood. As a conductor -- who also prepared performing editions of many difficult Baroque-era pieces -- and teacher, leader of the London Promenade Concerts, and pioneering recording artist, he was in the forefront of British musicians from the late 19th century until the middle of the 20th.

Henry Wood was the son of a model maker who also sang, and he took his first music lessons from his mother. He was a proficient student of the piano, violin, and organ, and was giving organ recitals at the age of 13. Soon after, Wood was appointed organist at the church of Aldermanbury, and he also spent the years 1886 through 1888 studying at the Royal Academy of Music. He began his adult music career in 1888, which came to include not only work as an organist, but teaching -- which included singing lessons -- and conducting as well. Much of his early conducting experience came from theatrical and touring opera companies. Wood conducted the English premiere of Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin in 1892, and and worked with Sir Arthur Sullivan in the initial stagings of The Yoeman of the Guard and Ivanhoe; additionally, he conducted the premiere of Sir Charles Villier Stanford's Shamus O'Brien 1896. He had a lifelong fascination with singing and the human voice which, in addition to his teaching, manifested itself in his publication of a renowned text, The Gentle Art of Singing.

In 1893, Wood was engaged by the manager of the new Queen's Hall in Langham Place, London, to conducted the first "promenade" concert held there. These became an institution in the cultural life of London, and for the next 50 years, with a permanent orchestra under his control, Wood was one of the dominant figures in the musical life of London, conducting 50 seasons, broken up only by the appearances of conductors leading their own works and one brief part-season absence. Wood used the Queen's Hall Promenade Concerts as a platform from which to bring much deserving old music and numerous modern works into the mainstream of British audiences. He gave performances of new works by Sibelius, Richard Strauss, Debussy, Scriabin, and Bartok when they were still new to the repertory, and brought Schoenberg's music to a level of prominence in the London musical repertory that it otherwise never conceivably could have had. He was not only a forward looking musical thinker but had a sense of humor as well -- during a rehearsal of Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces in 1912, he told his players to stick to it, pointing out that this groundbreaking piece was far easier than what they would be confronted with in new music 25 years hence. In terms of programming, Wood was equally an ardent admirer of the classics by Beethoven (the 1900 Proms concerts included performances of each of the Beethoven symphonies except the final movement of the Ninth, a rare event in those days in London), Bach, Haydn, Liszt, and other recognized composers out of the past, but he also devoted much time to introducing new works by living, younger composers, including numerous English musical figures -- his early include works by Roger Quilter and Sir Arnold Bax. Additionally, he conducted and recorded such overlooked works as Bruckner's Overture in G Minor, at a time when Bruckner was virtually unknown outside of Germany and Austria.

Wood was equally important for raising the standard not only of orchestral playing but of the work done in rehearsals. He insisted that his first-chair players attend all rehearsals (it was customary at the time to send substitutes, the players relying on their presumably superior skills to do what was needed at the concerts themselves), and when this led to an open break, the disaffected members left the Queen's Hall Orchestra to form the London Symphony Orchestra. Such was the level of playing by Wood's orchestra, however, that every major orchestra in London found it necessary to replicate his attention to detail, or risk the displeasure of critics and audiences. At his rehearsals, he was famous for shouting instructions to his players while having the orchestra run through pieces complete and uninterrupted, and he was meticulous as well in his personal annotation of individual players' and singers' scores (he is reputed to have personally put detailed notations into the scores of each of 400 singers ahead of one performance). The excellence of Wood's work, in turn, inspired other conductors as well as numerous composers to write more complicated, serious, and challenging works that were up to this rising standard of performance and competence.

Wood's biggest influence was Artur Nikisch, the legendary German conductor (who also had a hand in training Sir Adrian Boult, among other lions of the British concert podium), from whom he learned this detailed and precise approach to performance. He was considered unusual among his peers in England, partly owing to his bearded, bohemian appearance -- eccentricities notwithstanding, Wood became the first British conductor to achieve major popularity overseas; he was the first British conductor to lead the New York Philharmonic, and was also a much loved guest conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra as well as a popular conductor throughout continental Europe. Only his dedication to the Proms concerts stood in the way of a major, ongoing career in America, where he was in demand from both the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As it was, he was the first English musician to make conducting a full-time activity (though he never stopped teaching entirely), and in many ways paved the way for figures such as Sir Thomas Beecham and Sir Colin Davis as England's premiere international conductors of their respective generations.

Wood was among the first major conductors to record, as early as 1915. Those early recordings are generally considered suspect today, as Wood -- recognizing the practical limitations of the 78-rpm record -- often preserved heavily cut editions of works such as Beethoven's Eroica, among other major pieces. With the advent on electrical recording and other advances during the 1920s and, especially, the 1930s, however, Wood set down some very impressive and completely valid and competitive performances during the last ten years or so of his life. Among the most important of these is the Vaughan Williams London Symphony and, even more so, the Vaughan Williams Serenade to Music, a work written by the composer to honor Wood's 50 years as a conductor -- Wood also recorded this gorgeous choral piece, set to words by Shakespeare, using the 16 soloist from the original 1938 performance. Alas, relatively few of Wood's recordings were of complete, large-scale works -- in the period in which he worked and lived, individual movements and shorter works altogether were more typically recorded. Thus, there are upwards of 50 works recorded by Sir Henry Wood currently available of compact disc, but many are recordings of under five minutes' duration. His recordings of Vaughan Williams' work, however, is in a class all by itself, and despite the mild sonic limitations of the 1930s sound, are competitive with other, more recent recordings.

A tireless worker on behalf of music (his conducting extended to work far outside of London and Queen's Hall), Wood only began to slow down in the late '30s. By the early '40s, his health was in decline, but he continued to conducted the Proms concerts without interruption or any substitution or assistance until the final season, when he accepted help in fulfilling his commitments. ~ Bruce Eder

Collections:

Sir Henry Wood Conducts Vaughan Williams Dutton Laboratories 8004 [8]

Salute to Sir Henry Wood (music of Schubert, Mozart, Bach, Bax)Symposium 1150 [7]

Sir Henry's Theme and Variations (music of Handel et al)Beulah 1PD3 [6]

Sir Henry Wood Conducts Proms FavoritesDutton 8008 [6], Rovi