As an outright classic of recording history the Sitwell/Pears/Collins version of Facade is unlikely ever to be replaced. I suggested as much when I reviewed various other versions in April, and a re-hearing of the 1954 performance in this faultless CD transfer has only confirmed my opinion that Dame Edith Sitwell is virtually unassailable in her delivery of her own poetry. The timing is perfect, the enunciation idiosyncratically ideal and the intonations obviously what she, and no doubt Walton, intended them to be. The force of ''Black Mrs Behemoth'', the nostalgic mystery of ''A Man from a Far Countree'', the elan of the ''Polka'', are all unique and unrepeatable in accent. So is the breezy insouciance of the ''Jodelling Song'', where her reading of the immortal lines ''And to William Tell and Mrs Cow'' and ''Ganymede sells drinks'' has marvellous relish. She recites precisely two-thirds of the 21 pieces. The remaining seven are given to Sir Peter Pears. His diction is as refined and pointed as Dame Edith's and he enters with equal bravura into the heady spirit of the whole work. The only reservation concerns his habit of lapsing into something like sing-song. Probably because as a singer he couldn't resist sometimes moving with the pitch of the music. It is a very small drawback.
Anthony Collins, a busy conductor for Decca in the early days of LP, enters into the spirit of the piece and its performance. The playing of the instrumental ensemble is well-nigh perfect. It is very wrong of Decca to omit the players' names so here they are gleaned from my old LXT sleeve: John Francis (flute and piccolo), Stephen Waters (clarinet), Temple Savage (bass clarinet), Michael Krein (alto saxophone), David Mason (trumpet), James Blades (percussion), Anthony Pini and Terence Weil (cellos)—a pretty distinguished group of musicians. Decca deserve credit, however, for reprinting Edith Sitwell's original notes, but the texts aren't included. As the delivery is so exemplary that hardly matters for once, but I would have thought a portrait of Sitwell on the cover would have been more appropriate than an impressionistic mock-up of jazz musicians giving quite the wrong idea as to the disc's content. Nothing has (mercifully) been done to alter the original, close, slightly dry acoustic, which is far preferable to the seeking after false perspectives on some more recent endeavours in this work.
As this version is hors concours, I feel comparisons are hardly in order. Besides here we have quite different fillers. The 1954 Walton performances conducted by Boult sound remarkably fresh even at this distance of time, and the set of English Dances, actually Arnold's own inventions not folk pieces, is readily welcomed back to the catalogue, especially in such pointed readings.'