Boult spent 1912–13 at the Conservatory in Leipzig where he also attended rehearsals of the Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Arthur Nikisch, whose technique and rehearsal methods were to have a lasting influence. On return to England, he conducted his first professional orchestral con-cert at West Kirby on 27 February 1914, with members of the Liverpool Philharmonic and Hallé orchestras. As well as works by Bach (Branden-burg Concerto No. 2), Wagner (Siegfried Idyll), Wolf (Italian Serenade) and vocal items sung by Agnes Nicholls, the programme also included the first performance of The Banks of Green Willow by George Butterworth, a friend from Boult’s Oxford days. Butterworth was also close to Vaughan Williams who composed A London Symphony at his suggestion, completing it by the end of 1913. After Butterworth was killed in action at the Somme in 1916, Vaughan Williams dedicated it ‘To the memory of George Butterworth’.

Boult worked for a few months as an assistant on the music staff at Covent Garden, but with the outbreak of war in August 1914 he was back at his parents’ home in West Kirby, intending to sign up. His health was pre-carious, however, and he was graded to be fit only for clerical work. When he learned of the financial plight of orchestral players in the Hallé and the Liverpool Philharmonic, he persuaded his father to subsidise a series of concerts with an orchestra made up of thirty players drawn from both orchestras. On 4 December 1914, at the Sun Hall in Liverpool’s Kensington district, the programme included The Wasps overture: it was the first time Boult conducted any orchestral music by Vaughan Williams in public and (as he noted on his score) the first performance of the overture in Liver-pool. A brief notice in the Liverpool Daily Post reported that ‘the fourth of a series of patriotic concerts conducted by Mr Adrian C. Boult was held at the Sun Hall, Kensington, last evening, when again an excellent musical programme was rendered … a special item being the overture The Wasps by Ralph Vaughan Williams, performed for the first time in Liverpool’