Hamilton Harty was taught music by his father who instructed him in piano, viola and counterpoint. When he was only twelve he became the organist at Magheracoll Church in County Antrim, going on to hold various further posts as an organist in Belfast and Dublin. Here he received assistance from Michele Esposito, an Italian composer who was also professor of piano at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. Harty moved to London in 1900, and became well-known as an accompanist and as a promising composer; in fact his initial appearances as a conductor were in directing his own works with various London orchestras. His Comedy Overture was first performed at a Promenade Concert in 1907, and in 1909 Josef Szigeti gave the first performance of his Violin Concerto in London. In 1913 Harty’s cantata The Mystic Trumpeter was first performed at the Leeds Festival and in the same year he conducted Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at Covent Garden. During World War I he served in the Royal Navy, and also appeared in Manchester with the Hallé Orchestra.
In 1920 Harty was appointed permanent conductor of the Hallé on the recommendation of Sir Thomas Beecham, and was to remain with this orchestra until 1933, making it arguably the best in the United Kingdom during this period, certainly until the formation of the London Philharmonic Orchestra by Beecham in 1932. In Manchester Harty gave the first performances in England of several notable works, such as Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 in 1930 and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 1 in 1932; he also participated in the world première of Constant Lambert’s The Rio Grande in 1929, playing the piano. He enjoyed success conducting his popular orchestrations of Handel’s Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music as well as major compositions of his own, such as his Irish Symphony. Harty toured the USA as a conductor in 1931, returning every year thereafter; and following his departure from the Hallé he visited Australia in 1934.
During his final years, which were sadly dogged by ill-health, Harty worked mainly in London, often with the London Symphony Orchestra, of which he was chief conductor for a season. He gave the first performances of Walton’s Symphony No. 1 in its three- and four-movement forms (1934 and 1935). Following his knighthood, which was bestowed on him in 1925, he received the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gold Medal in 1934. Harty was a natural musician of great accomplishment, whose vitality and spontaneity still live on in his gramophone recordings. Like many conductors of the period he was an extremely flexible interpreter in terms of phrasing and tempi, with a frequent natural and stylish use of rubato. He recorded prolifically for the Columbia Graphophone Company during the late 1920s and prior to its merger with the Gramophone Company in 1931 to form EMI.
Outstanding among his recordings are his accounts of Walton’s Symphony No. 1, recorded relatively late in his career for the then-young Decca company, and his numerous accounts of short works by Berlioz, recorded with both the Hallé and the London Philharmonic Orchestras. He was a superb accompanist, as his recorded partnerships with Sammons and Tertis (in Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola), Solomon (in Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1), Szigeti (in Brahms’s Violin Concerto), and Archie Camden (in Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto) clearly demonstrate. As was common for the period during which he was active, many of his recordings were of short works or excerpts, and one of the most commercially successful of these was his account of Nymphs and Shepherds Come Away. This was published by Columbia to rival the runaway success of HMV’s Hear My Prayer with Master Ernest Lough, to that company’s surprise its biggest seller in 1927. Of his own works Harty only recorded the Scherzo from his Irish Symphony and his symphonic poem With the Wild Geese, together with his arrangements of Handel and the traditional Irish folk song, the Londonderry Air. He recorded several large-scale works complete, amongst which his accounts of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 and of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 ‘From the New World’ are especially dynamic, while his conducting of Elgar’s Enigma Variations and cello concerto, with W. H. Squire, is clearly deeply felt. Harty’s recording career may be partly seen as a casualty of the Columbia-HMV merger, but his surviving recorded legacy is fortunately still large enough to give a good indication of his brilliance both as conductor and as musician.
