In the very month when the Walton discography of major works is completed with the first recording of In Honour of the City of London (see above), it is good to welcome another choral issue with similarly brilliant singing and vivid recording which brings first recordings of shorter, more intimate works. It was a splendid idea—prompted by the composer's widow when she met Richard Marlow after a performance of Walton he had given with the Trinity College Choir in Italy—to collect these 13 works. Most of them are brief but they include longer items like the unaccompanied idiomatically Italian St Francis of Assisi setting of 1974, Cantico del sole; the Missa brevis written for Coventry in 1966 (deeper than has been appreciated), the Sir Henry Wood memorial, Where does the uttered music go? to words by Masefield (the least characteristic work here), and above all the vigorous, extended Auden setting, The Twelve, written for Walton's old college at Oxford, Christ Church, in 1965. It makes up over an hour of music, characteristically colourful and lively.
Though most of these pieces are little known; even to a life-long Waltonian like myself, what comes out from hearing the whole collection is how much of his vivid musical personality—so strikingly established in the 1920s and 1930s—emerges with undiminished freshness in such choral inspirations at whatever period he was writing. I suspect his working methods in his home on Ischia over his last years responded more readily to the demands of a canticle with its separate verses, each of them striking from him a sharp and memorable idea, as for example in the dramatic settings of the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis written for Chichester, which open the programme.
You may object that many of these works as for example Antiphon, a vigorous setting of George Herbert's famous hymn are mini-Belshazzars, chips off the old block, but what these brilliant, responsive performances consistently demonstrate, is that so far from being tired self-imitations they tingle with Waltonian electricity of the highest voltage.
One marvels afresh at the professional skill and sharp originality of the 15-year-old Walton's anthem, A Litany, to words by Phineas Fletcher, and the four carols to old English words are all delightful. I particularly love What cheer? of 1961 with its up-and-down antiphonies between high and low voices, an effect which Walton uses regularly—like many others—with all the cunning of one who, as a former boy chorister, knows the business from the inside. If in his last years Walton did not always seem to be enjoying the heavy task of composing, and so often became too self-critical instead of letting his imagination simply run, here is an area where his joy is manifest from first to last.
Impressed as I have been by the Trinity College Choir's previous records for Conifer, this one has bowled me over with the sheer brilliance of the singing, with the matching and tonal variety and above all with the phenomenally precise ensemble. The task of making this important collection could not have been fulfilled more satisfyingly. The sound is superb too, vivid and atmospheric with plenty of presence. As well as Christopher Palmer's authoritative and sharply perceptive notes, the booklet includes full texts.'