Sir Malcolm Sargent OBITUARY , 0 Sir Malcolm Sargent, who died yesterday in London, at the age of 72, was of all British conductors in his day the most widely esteemed by the lay public. Among musicians he was admired for his versatility and his practical. eminently businesslike approach to the preparation of musical perform- ances. He was a fluent, attractive pianist, a brilliant score-reader, a skiiAul and effective arranger and ochestrator of other composers music; while as a conductor his stick technique was regarded by many as the most accomplished and reliable in the world. As a public figure he wvas celebrated for his sar- torial elegance, and his seemingly infallible ability to converse know- ledgeably and wittily on all manner of topics. Harold Malcolm Watts Sargent was born on April 29, 1895. While still a sohoolboy he obtained his diploma as Associate of the Royal College of Organists. In 1914 he took his degree as Bachelor of Music and obtained his first musical appoint- ment, as organist of Melton Mow- bray parish church, a post which he held untii 1924, though it was in- terrupted by war service with the 27th Durham Light Infantry. In 1919 Sargent became the young- est Doctor of Music in the country. Composition and pianism (he was a pupil of Moiseiwitsch) shared his musical energies with the organ and the church choir. One of Sargent's orchestral compositions, Impressions on a Windy Day, found a place in the 1921 season of Henry Wood Promenade Concerts, and the com- poser was invited to conduct it. The success of the composition encour- aged Wood to include a Nocturne and Scherzo by Sargent in the 1922 Promenade syllabus; but it was the conductor who made the principal impression. Sargent held the post of conductor to the Leicester Symphony Orchestra and Choral Society from this year 1922 until 1939. In 1923 he was appointed to the teaching staff of the Royal College of Music. In the fol- lowing year Sargent's career as a conductor made two significant strides: he was invited to become conductor and introducer of the Robert Mayer concerts for children, a function which he discharged bril- liantly and unchallenged until 1939; and he conducted the first perform- ances, for the British National Opera Company, of Holst's At The Boar's Head and Vaughan Williams's Hugh the Drover. He was hitching his wagon, challengingly, to the emer- gent constellation of new British composers. When in 1925 Sargent was engaged by the Royal Philhar- monic Society he chose an all British programme with Bax. Howells, Ire- land. Vaughan Williams, and Berners. In 1926 he began his famous association with the D'Oyly Carte company. Sargent insisted on having access to Sullivan's full orchestral scores, and by his deft, sympathetic handling of their music showed how much they deserved the admiration of musicians. He remained with the D'Oyly Carte company for three seasons, rejoined I'them during the Festival of Britain season in 1951, and made occasional guest appear- ances in recent years, as well as conducting complete recordings of Savoy operettas. Sargent's powers in choral music obtained him in 1928 the posts of musical director to the Bradford Festival Choral Society and to the Royal Choral Society in London, whose annual performances under his conductorship of Messiah, The Dream of Geronltius. and Christmas carols have remained among the most popular of London's musical events. In 1931 he was engaged to conduct the first performance of Walton's Belshazzar's Feast at the Leeds Triennial Festival; his com- pletely persuasive direction of this has passed into the history of British amateur choralism. and his associa- tion with the Leeds festivals was regular until the 1950s. From 1932 Sargent also held the musical directorship of the Huddersfield Philharmonic Choir, the most famous of all the crack Yorkshire choral bodies. In 1928 Sargent had collaborated f founding the Concert Club. The Courtauld-Sargent concerts, which grew out of it, continued until the outbreak of the Second World War, and gave rise in 1932 to the forma- tion of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, an enterprise in which Sargent was joined by Sir Thomas Beecham, who became the orchestra's principal conductor. Sargent re- mained closely associated with the L.P.O. for many years; it was he who took the orchestra on a tour of the country, performing in music- halls and cinemas during the war. Sargent's activity during the 1930s was interrupted by treatment for tuberculosis He made a complete recovery, and during this decade made guest appearances in Palestine, Australia and New Zealand and at home with the Haild Orchestra, and with the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, whose musical director- ship Sargent was to hold between 1942 and 1948. In 1936 he made his Covent Garden debut conducting Charpen- tier's Louise. He did not reappear at Covent Garden until 1954. when he conducted the first performances of Walton's Troilus and Cressida. The suspension during wartime of some of Sargent's musical activities seems hardly to have left him less busy. Apart from his post in liver- pool he made many guest appear ances-including, extra-musically, a number with the B.B.C. Brains Trust. With the end of the war, Sargent resumed those tours abroad which caused him to be dabbed unofficiaUy Britain's Ambassador of Music. He was frequently to be found conduct- ing throughout Europe and the Commonwealth. in America, and the Far East: more recently he took British orchestras to Russia and other Soviet territories. At home he con- tinued to introduce new British works,-Vaaighan Williams's sixth and ninth symphonies. Rawsthorne's second piano concerto, Britten's Youn-g Person's Guide to the Orches- tra (in the original film version of which Sargent allso spoke the cor- mentary)-but the single step which sealed his national fame was his principal conductorship of the Pro- menade concents from 1950, a task in which he assumed, both person- ally and musically, the mantle of Henry Wood, who had died in 1944. He had returned to the Proms. as a guest in 1947, the year in which he was knighted. In time, he became the matinee idol of thousands of youthful promenaders, among others. In 1950 the conductorship of the B.B.C. Symphony Orchestra fell vacant and Sargent accepted the post. which he held until 1957. It was in this capacity that he conducted the concerts which opened the Roval Festival Hall in 1951. After 1957 Sargent held no major orchestral post, though in that year be was made president of the National Youth Orchestra. which he frequently trained and conducted. In April, 1966, he went to Mel- bourne to spend two inonths as principal conductor of the Mel- bourne Symphony Orchestra' He was back for the start of the Proms in July-the opening concert was the 500th Promenade concert he had conducted. and the B.B.C. gave him an etching by Rembrandt to mark the occasiom In December. Sargent was in hospital with back trouble and jaundice. He returned to the rostrum in March this year to conduct Beet- hoven's Missa Solemnis at the Albert Hall. In July a recurrence of gastro- enteritis prevented him from con- ducting the opening promenade con- cert-he was operated on. Be made a surprise five-minute appearance at the last-night promenade concert ia September to a loud ovatioa As a musical interpreter Sargent was sometimes the victim of his own versatility and his passion for effi- ciency-and of his taste, which was moulded by the Victorian cathedral tradition into vwhich he was born. This last was more clearly perceptible in his readings of Handel and Bach than in nineteenth-century music (Elijah for example), where bis vigour avoided any suspicion of sanctimoniousness. The same could sometimes be felt in his readings of standard classic and romantic works; Sargent had prepared his interpretations down to the last detail, but after several de- cades the vitality of the music tended to become hardened and unexuber- ant. He became impatient, too, of music from which be could not at once draw an effect: this led him to retouch the scores of the past with a self-will which scholarly musicians could not condone. Repetition did not stale his communicable under- standing of the music composed within his lifetime: his performances of Elgar, Holst, Vaughan Williams, and later British composers remained lucid and continually compelling. Sargent was married in 1923 to Eileen Laura Harding, by whom he had one son and one daughter. SIR MALCOLM SARGENT''^'-''' -' Brilliant conductor who won promenaders' acclaim