Vernon Handley is a man whose enthusiasms are infectious. Since I'm Irish, when we're on the phone setting up our interview, he sidetracks merrily into a discussion of Donegal tweed. He's travelled to the north-west to seek out individual weavers and likes cloths with bright and unexpected colour combinations. It's got to do, he jokes, with the fact that, since his speciality, British music, is unlikely to win him great attention, at least his clothes will make him stand out.
When we actually meet, one of his other passions - birdwatching - serves as the launching pad for a prolonged philosophical contemplation of animal behaviour and consciousness. Handley, known as "Tod" (a childhood nickname) to all and sundry, has a reputation as one of the quickest workers in the business. Many conductors like to talk - and talk, and talk - in rehearsal. Handley is of a different school. He's happy to rely on his technique and let his stick do the talking. Stick is what conductors and musicians call the "baton" (just as the podium is always referred to as "the box"), and when Handley talks of other conductors, an assessment of their stick technique tends to be paramount. Some have none at all, a category which by no means excludes the famous and successful. Others have it in varying degrees, natural or acquired, effective or limited. In a sense, it all boils down to a question Handley used to hear from his own mentor, Adrian Boult: "Does he have fingers?"
But before Boult came into the story, there were some unusual twists to young Tod's musical development. He was born, as he puts it, "into a very, very working-class family" in which there was always music about. His mother taught piano, "rather badly", he says, and always liked remarking how her son had been able to sing perfectly in tune at the age of 18 months.
His father had been a tenor in Llandaff Cathedral Choir. "I just wanted to be a musician, from a very early age, but I was told that we were too poor a family for me to have music lessons, something I found hard to believe since my mother's hobby was the breeding of Newfoundland dogs. They weigh about 200 lbs apiece, and she was able, right through the war, to keep six or eight of these dogs, but I couldn't have music lessons."
So he did what any enterprising youngster would do, he taught himself, leaning on the kindness of a music master at school who provided him with books and answered the questions he came up with. "My earliest memories," he says, "are of trying to create in my head what the wonderful piece of music looked like on the page when I'd memorised it from a film score or something. Wanting to see what it looked like, and hear what it looked like. I wanted to see the thing, so I could decide how it went.
"By the time I was 12, I was reading harmony pretty accurately. By the time I was 14, I was very, very deeply into trying to score-read in the armchair, with no help but your inner ear." These early endeavours laid a solid foundation for a conductor who likes to be able to hear what he sees, without the crutch of a recording or a piano reduction.
It was a lot later, however, before that business of conducting was to come into the picture. "I was a normal, grammar school boy in the war years. I played cricket and soccer and tennis. I chased girls. And of all the things in my life, my love of English literature was probably the top thing." When the war ended, normal musical life began to resume, "and when I went to concerts, I couldn't understand what on earth the man in front of the orchestra was doing. And that would be a fair description of what a number of lay people feel today".
His curiosity, however, was aroused. He managed to get an opportunity to conduct the school choir and, eventually, the music master got him a rehearsal pass to hear the BBC Symphony Orchestra at work in Maida Vale. "They were working with an old man, or so he seemed to me, who sat on a stool, with an immensely long baton, and who said very little. While I was watching Sir Adrian Boult, for that is who it was, I had the feeling, not that I was discovering how to do it, but that I was remembering how to do it. "I thought, yes, if you want more from the cellos, you just lean towards them. No need to say anything. If he wanted a long phrase, and we were in 4/4, he would almost leave the third beat out, get to the fourth beat early, then describe an arc which was very long indeed, and this showed every player, not through explanation but just by the course of that stick, that they needed to take a pretty big breath for what was coming. He didn't say a word, he just did it. I was walking on air. I could see how you could do it."
Handley is quite open about what he did next. He went to Boult's concerts, watched him, and "I copied him, because it worked". He wrote to the great man, and got a standard reply, intended to put him off. A year or two later, he sought rehearsal passes for an all-Holst concert, Boult remembered the name, and set up a meeting, which became "the most testing morning I've ever had in my life". Having passed all the hurdles of harmony and counterpoint, a score was eventually thrust at him, a finger pointed, and the question raised: "How would you deal with that?" He made the conducting gestures, and by the third beat, Boult had reached out and caught his wrist in an iron grip. "Would you do that again?" Fearing the worst, he did, repeating exactly what he had done before.
Boult took away the score and the stick, turned to his secretary and said, "We'll help this one." And so he came to learn close-up what he had been observing from afar, got passes for all Boult's rehearsals, and even found Boult turning up at some of his own. He learned a style of conducting that is less concerned with wrist or arm movements, than with the movement of the fingers, and he came to relish the question Boult would ask about new or promising conductors: "Yes, but does he have fingers?"
At college - Balliol in Oxford - music had taken up far more of his time than what he had been there to study, English Philology. And once he got his hands on the university orchestra, conducting became his primary concern. On leaving college in 1954, he worked on the roads, in hospitals, did supply teaching, in order to be free in the evenings to conduct "any old amateur choir or orchestra that I could find". After about five years, not long after his initiation rite with Boult, he got his big professional break, a concert with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. It was, he says, a success by any standards. He conducted from memory, got a standing ovation, and rave notices followed. Most importantly, he had shown he could do it. And his reward, he laughs, in illustration of the difficulties conductors face, was a return engagement 13 1/2 years later.
Given Boult's identification with British music, you might expect that dignified Edwardian gentleman to have passed his special affinity on to his pupil. But it was through another route entirely that Handley came to British music. He read and enjoyed a book on Musical Trends in the 20th Century, but was dismayed to learn from its author, Norman Demuth, of valuable British music which "was not appreciated by the public because they didn't get to hear the stuff". So he sought out scores by such composers as Vaughan Williams, Delius and Bax in libraries and found himself "overwhelmed", at first on an intellectual level. "Such originality, such orchestration, and, of course, such form and development. That struck me all of a heap. And then I started to like it. The passion took over, and more and more of British music fascinated me, held me. It still does."
And when it comes to unfulfilled ambitions, British music features strongly. Handley is, he says, the person who has conducted the symphonies of Bax more often than anybody else. Yet fate has conspired to prevent him making recordings of the complete set on two occasions.
His hunger to bring his vision of this music to the widest possible audience is palpably great. His faith in the music seems unshakeable. And it's strange to realise that he can choose to abandon the raw strength of his verbal advocacy when he prepares an orchestra for performances of the music which stirs him most deeply. But, then, the answer to Boult's question about Handley would have been definitive: "Yes, he does have fingers."
Vernon Handley's 70th birth- day concert is at the Ulster Hall on Sunday night, when he conducts Bax's Tintagel, Rachmaninov's Paganini Rhapsody with John Lill as the piano soloist, and Elgar's First Symphony.
