Ralph Vaughan Williams after Boult, Sargent and Barbirolli are Vernon Handley, Richard Hickox, Sir Mark Elder and Sir Andrew Davis. Record companies with extensive lists of Vaughan Williams recordings include EMI, Decca, Chandos, Hyperion and Naxos. Vaughan Williams refused a knighthood at least once, and declined the post of Master of the King's Music after Elgar's death. The one state honour he accepted was the Order of Merit in 1935, which confers no prenominal title: he preferred to remain "Dr Vaughan Williams". His academic and musical honours included an honorary doctorate of music from the University of Oxford (1919); the Cobbett medal for
Symphony No. 9 (Vaughan Williams) to Sargent's as having been "an unsatisfactory first performance." Percy Grainger, however, who was in Carnegie Hall for the US premiere, told Ursula Vaughan Williams that Stokowski's performance "seemed a perfect one in every way and the exquisite beauty and cosmic quality of this immortal work struck me as being ideally realised." Alain Frogley considers Vaughan Williams's last symphony to be one of his greatest works. Hugh Ottaway and Alain Frogley call this symphony "the most impressive achievement" of Vaughan Williams's final decade and remark that "both outer movements employ highly original structures – the carefully graded and layered engineering