Rutland Boughton and the Glastonbury Festivals.

The convention, born of good manners, that biographers do not appear in their works is flouted here, happily for good reason. For the personal postscript that concludes this radically revised and significantly enlarged version of Hurd's original biography of Boughton, Immortal Hour (1962), contains a fascinating glimpse of Hurd's involvement with Boughton and his music--almost an obsession, as Hurd confesses. He charts the development of his friendship with Boughton (which began in 1949), the neglect of Boughton's music during the 1960s and early 1970s, and its subsequent revival culminating in the Hyperion recordings of The Immortal Hour (1983), the First Oboe Concerto and Third Symphony …