Enterprisingly the new Discover International label here offers the most complete version of Walton's entertainment yet, using a group of Belgian instrumentalists under Silveer van den Broeck. With a natural feeling for the young composer's tongue-in-cheek parodies, they point rhythms deliciously in a clean-cut way.When the reciter, Pamela Hunter, has made a speciality of reciting these Edith Sitwell poems, not exactly imitating Dame Edith herself but observing the strictly stylized, rhythmically crisp manner originally laid down, it makes a delightful disc, made the more attractive by its super-budget price.
On looking at the list of items I was excited to see no fewer than 13 that were not included in the most complete Facade available up to now, the one in the Chandos Walton series. In that the composer's widow and Richard Baker memorably give Facade 2 as well as the original entertainment, 29 poems in all. Alas for expectations, eight of the 42 poems on the new disc are recited unaccompanied, for the music is lost. But that leaves five, given complete with Walton's music, which are new to disc, and for that much thanks. Three were in Walton's first collection of resurrected items, Facade Revived, given to celebrate his seventieth birthday in 1977, a precursor of Facade 2, which came two years later. In preparing the score for publication Walton had second thoughts, replacing three out of the eight. The rejected ones are all sharply characterful, which makes me wonder whether second thoughts were right. ''The Last Galop'' for example (here misprinted as ''gallup''), is a breathtaking moto perpetuo, and to my mind one of the very finest of the early Facade movements. ''Small Talk I'' and ''Springing Jack'' are the two which come complete with music, though they didn't appear in either of the two Walton supplements. An irritating omission is the ''Fanfare'' which always prefaces the regular Facade entertainment.
Sensibly enough, the first 18 items-only five of them in the regular 21-movement Facade-are given in the order in which they were performed at the first private performance at 2 Carlyle Square, London in January 1922. From then on, through till 1928, Walton added to the collection, with performances varying the selection of movements and the ordering. Pamela Hunter's note gives a fair outline, but for a full account go to Stewart R. Craggs's intensive Walton Catalogue (OUP: 1990), or the splendidly clear table given on the LP from Oxford University Press of Facades 1 and 2 (the Cathy Berberian/Robert Tear version-OUP201, nla). What one registers here, even more than with Facade 2 alone, is that the early settings are more experimental and less sharply parodistic than the later, well-known ones, though I was fascinated to realize that the accompaniment to one of them, ''Aubade''—''Jane, Jane, tall as a crane''-has a clear tongue-in-cheek reference to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. With the recording more sharply focused than in the Chandos version, with the voice in front of the players yet obviously in the same acoustic, the clarity and point of the solo playing, notably from the flute and clarinet, are splendid. Pamela Hunter is excellent too, happily characterizing with a minimum of 'funny voices', though it is odd in ''Valse'' to find her taking breaths in so many perversely wrong places. At the price, a disc to recommend to all.'