Edwardian Dandy, savvy Savoyard and Imperial Father of the Proms, Sir Malcolm Sargent (1895 -1967) has, like many great musicians of the past, been all too easily typecast. Even before his death, Sargent aka ‘Flash Harry’ was seen by many as a kind of musical Lord Fauntleroy: the John Mills of conductors replete with slicked-back hair, cut glass accent and carnation adorned pin-striped suit. Alongside illustrious podium rivals like Sir John Barbirolli or Sir Adrian Boult, Sargent seemed by comparison a rather cheap, superficial musician, whose peacock mannerisms hindered any genuine development of either artistic or personal integrity.
There was no doubt that Sargent was in many ways a showman – more ringmaster than maestro, and yet, beneath the flamboyant celebrity-driven figure, who hobnobbed with Royalty, film stars and heads of state, lay a musician who possessed a much greater sensitivity, versatility and humanity than most people gave him credit for. Indeed, much of this self-conscious, star-struck behaviour was really a compensation – in Sargent’s eyes – for his humble family origins.
Born into a working class Stamford family, Sargent’s father was clerk to a local coal merchant, being an amateur musician in his spare time, while his mother was matron at the town’s high school for girls. Winning a scholarship to Stamford School, the young Sargent, with the encouragement of his piano teacher – the appropriately named Mrs Tinkler – actually made his conducting debut in 1910 at the age of only 14: as an emergency substitute for a local production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘The Yeoman of the Guard’. Sargent went on to become an articled student to the formidable Haydn Keeton as organ pupil at Peterborough Cathedral – a tough, Kapellmeister-style training that was already waning in Britain – prior to becoming, at the age of 24, the country’s youngest Doctor of Music following studies at Durham University.
All the above were achieved via a mixture of natural talent, boundless passion and sheer hard work. There was certainly none of the ever-present nepotism, brown-nosing or covert bribery that has eased lesser talents through the musical establishment as we know it today. As a practical musician, Sargent was as sound as a bell and his training continued for several years first as a provincial organist and then as a composer and jobbing conductor. Indeed, his big podium break came in 1921 when Sir Henry Wood invited Sargent to conduct his own tone poem, ‘Impressions of a Windy Day’ at Leicester’s de Montfort Hall with the visiting Queen’s Hall Orchestra. Duly impressed, albeit more with Sargent’s actual conducting, Wood invited Sargent to make his London Proms debut with the QHO that same year.
From this point on, Sargent’s service to both British music and musicians became the backbone of his career. He helped Sir Thomas Beecham create the London Philharmonic Orchestra (later saving it and the livelihoods of its musicians years later after Beecham abandoned them, a role he reprised when taking the Royal Philharmonic on a vital international tour after Beecham’s death in 1961).
The paradox of Sargent is that for all his undoubted snobbery and social climbing he hated any kind of elitism in classical music – a sickening social entity that remains firmly in place today as a recent visit to the Wigmore Hall on my part revealed to suffocating and depressing effect last year. In Sir Malcolm’s case Music was for people from all walks of life. Children’s concerts, charity concerts and above all The Proms, where he made it his personal mission as the institution’s music director from 1948 to 1967 to bring the classical repertoire to young people at an affordable price.
The Proms under Sargent was a very different event to the one we have come to know today. It was a sincere and joyful festival designed to present music and musicians to an ever widening audience. Even the Last Night, so understandably hated today for its combination of political and commercial agendas fused with zeitgeist narcissism – was back Sargent’s day simply a fun end-of-term party for harmless eccentrics. While in post-war Europe, Herbert von Karajan was creating a self-made, image-conscious monument using left-over dregs of Nazi propaganda, Sir Malcolm got by with toy trumpets and bit of bunting.
Throughout his career, Sargent was also very much the impresario. Although his repertoire was far wider than the ‘Messiah and Mikado’ tag that stuck so firmly to him during his life and afterwards, he also knew his limitations. A famous example of his unexpected pragmatism occurred during one of the famous Sargent/Courtauld charity concerts when he invited a certain Dr Otto Klemperer to London to give the British premiere of Bruckner’s 8th symphony in 1928. Years later Klemperer remembered how, having expressed his displeasure at the ineptitude of the London Symphony Orchestra’s brass section, Sargent -using his regal connections – replaced them with players from the band of the Coldstream Guards. That did the trick and paved the way for the special relationship Klemperer was to enjoy with the British to legendary effect decades later.
In fact, thanks to Sargent, a succession of great international conductors made their UK debut, which combined with London’s growth as recording capital of the world, effectively launched them on their way to the international fame listeners would enjoy well into the 21st century. In essence, without Sir Malcolm’s enterprise, the artistic legacies of Pierre Boulez, Bernard Haitink, Carlo Maria Giulini and Sir Georg Solti might well have been very different from how we know them today – not to mention the iconic Indian Summer of Leopold Stokowski.
With regard to recordings, Sargent was one of the first to commit his interpretations to disc – beginning nearly a century ago in 1926. Engaged more on an ad hoc basis as opposed to a contractual one, Sargent amassed a large and surprisingly varied discography by the time of his last sessions in 1966. Closely associated with EMI, Sargent also made a small but significant number of recordings for Decca, which have recently been remastered and released in a 16CD box set by Eloquence Classics. Whether in Haydn or Holst, Rawsthorne or Rossini, the music-making is always smart, lively and refreshingly no-nonsense, with tempi that pre-date the Period Performance movement by more than half a century.
The problem with Sargent’s recordings however – which led to the scarcity of so many of them today – is that when he released a new performance of say, a Beethoven symphony or a Sibelius tone poem, a competing version of the same piece would appear (sometimes on the same label) from a rival conductor and trump Sir Malcolm every time. So apart from his cycle of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas and certain light classics – which his podium contemporaries largely eschewed- Sargent’s performances have been almost entirely forgotten.
However, all is not lost. With the 60th anniversary of his death approaching in 2027 and the inevitable revival that forgotten conductor legacies have enjoyed in recent times, Sargent will indeed carry on once more.
Robert Kenchington
(The author will present an illustrated talk on Sargent’s Decca recordings at Stamford Arts Centre on September 12th, 2025 at 7.30pm with proceeds given to the Click Sargent cancer charity.)
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