Those of us who only heard Adrian Boult conduct at the very end of his long career in the 1970s, think of him predominantly as a superb interpreter of British music, as well as of some of the 19th-century symphonic repertory. But earlier in his career, as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1930 to 1950, he had been an ardent champion of European new music, giving UK premieres to works by Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Bartók among many others. Alban Berg was another of the composers Boult introduced, and in 1934 in the Queen’s Hall in London, he conducted the first British performance of Wozzeck, nine years after the opera’s premiere in Berlin.
