regularly performed works by contemporary composers including Bax, Moeran, Sibelius, Richard Strauss and Walton. Kennedy numbers among the outstanding occasions of Harty's conductorship the English premieres of Mahler's Ninth Symphony (1930) and Shostakovich's First Symphony (1932), the Halle's first performances of Mahler's Fourth Symphony (1927) and Das Lied von der Erde (1930); and the first public performance of Constant Lambert's The Rio Grande (1929), with Harty as pianist and the composer conducting. As a composer, Harty's best-known works from this period are his lavish reorchestrations of Handel's Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks. Harty was knighted in 1925. In 1926 he commissioned a symphony from Moeran, whose Symphony in G minor (1937) was the result, but Harty was too ill to conduct the premiere. Last years In 1932 Harty accepted the post of artistic adviser and conductor in chief of the London Symphony Orchestra. The committee of the Hallé felt that this appointment was "not compatible with the whole-hearted devotion to the interests of the Hallé Orchestra", and it decided not to renew Harty's contract when it ended in 1933. In 1933, he was conferred an honorary Doctor of Laws by Queens University Belfast. The Hallé committee made its decision public in a way that Harty found distressing. He had his revenge by encouraging his new orchestra to poach eight of the Hallé's leading players to replenish the LSO's ranks, which had recently been depleted by defections to Beecham's new London Philharmonic Orchestra. In London, however, Harty did not prove to be a box-office draw, and according to a historian of the orchestra, Richard Morrison, Harty was "brutally and hurtfully" dropped in 1934, as an LSO predecessor, Sir Edward Elgar, had been in 1911. In the Spring of 1934 Harty sailed for Australia. A fellow passenger on the ocean voyage was a young woman, Lorie Bolland, with whom Harty rapidly fell in love, though there is no evidence of reciprocity on her part. Harty dedicated two piano pieces to her: Spring Fancy, composed for her birthday on 23 April 1934, and Portrait, written at sea and dated 9 July 1934. These pieces commemorate an episode in the composer's life which had remained private until their rediscovery among Bolland's papers in 2010. In 1935 Harty seems to have still been well, taking part in five concerts at the British Musicians' Pension Society convalescent home in Holmwood, possibly as conductor