When tackled on why there was such a long gap in his output of major works between the Violin Concerto of 1939 and the String Quartet, first heard in 1947, Walton used to say he was doing his war-work. This record gathers together many of the fragments that might be missed. The Spitfire Prelude and Fugue, from Walton's film music for The First of the Few, was immediately turned into a highly successful concert-piece, but we owe it again to Christopher Palmer and his delving into the film archives, that we now have A Wartime Sketchbook, drawing material from three of the wartime films, plus scraps that Colin Matthews did not use in the suite from the much later Battle of Britain film music, sadly and scandalously rejected by the film company.
Even more than the first instalment of film music in the Chandos Walton series, coupling Hamlet and As you like it ( (CD) CHAN8842, 6/90), this is a heartwarming record for Waltonians. Among much else it demonstrates as clearly as could be that Walton was at least the equal of Elgar in writing patriotic march tunes. I even begin to think of the march theme from the credits of Went the Day Well?—a wartime film based on an idea of Graham Greene's—as the most throat-catching of all Walton's patriotic tunes. I remember seeing the film as a boy, and, even not knowing who the composer was till afterwards, I was bowled over by it. Memory is here confirmed, I am glad to say, though Palmer's use of a sequence from the film, Next of Kin, as the trio is not ideal. Curiously, no mention is made in the ''Foxtrots'' movement that one of the tunes is a well-known wartime number, All Over the Place, but having no less than 25 minutes of new Walton is a delight.
The other items are much briefer. From Olivier's film of Chekov's The Three Sisters Palmer has selected three short items, including more than one setting of the Tsar's Hymn and a charming imitation Swan Lake waltz used in a dream sequence, and evidently culled from music Walton had written for a C. B. Cochran revue in the 1930s; the rest dates from well after the war. Escape me Never was the first of Walton's film-scores, written in 1935 in a more popular idiom. But the war-inspired music is what this delightful disc is really about, and Marriner and the Academy give gloriously idiomatic performances guaranteed to stir the blood with their panache. Dare I suggest that the Last Night of the Proms is an obvious place to have such items as these?'