Of all the film scores that deserve sumptuous sound, Walton's for the Olivier film of Henry V stands perhaps the highest of all. How imaginative at the very start to have fluttering flutes unaccompanied to illustrate the Globe Theatre playbill fluttering over Elizabethan London. After that the big crescendo as the wordless chorus enters, with what Christoper Palmer calls ''the Spirit of England'' theme, is all the more thrilling for being treated to one of Chandos's richest, most clearly focused recordings.
Carrying on his good work in preparing so much long-buried material for the Chandos/Walton series, Palmer has here managed to include over 90 per cent of the music Walton wrote for the film, omitting mostly odd disconnected fragments. This he has arranged in a sequence of eight substantial sections, in which Shakespeare speeches and narrations are interpolated, with texts in places discreetly edited, the whole lasting just over an hour. As Palmer says, ''I do not think Shakespeare would have objected''. As to Palmer's work on the score, this is far less 'arranged' than the Suite from Henry V published under Walton's own name: that was in fact ''adapted for concert use'' by Muir Mathieson, a process which involved far more cutting and changing of Walton's music than Palmer's, which as far as possible leaves it as it was in the film. The most controversial change is to 'borrow' the first section of the march which Walton wrote for a projected television series on Churchill's History of the English-speaking Peoples. Otherwise, the chorus's call to arms, ''Now all the youth of England is on fire'' would have had no music to introduce it. ''The tone seemed right'', as Palmer says, but there is still a subtle discrepancy of idiom between the Henry V music and the later march, which has very much the same feel as the Walton coronation marches.
On all these and other textual points, such as the sources of some of the themes, Palmer's notes are a model of scholarship, and as a delightful appendix three pieces are included which Walton used. The first two, played by Ian Watson, are harpsichord pieces, Rosa Solis by Giles Farnaby (source of the chorus introducing the Globe Theatre sequence), and Watkin's Ale (barely identifiable as the source for the Death of Falstaff Passacaglia, when it is in the major). The third piece—with Celia Nicklin giving a magical performance on the oboe—is a Canteloube Auvergne song that Walton used, other than the famous Bailero, which of course comes on the oboe in the Epilogue.
As to the performance of the main work, Sir Neville Marriner caps even his previous recordings of film music in this series (reviewed 6/90 and 12/90), with the Academy matching the sumptuous sound in heartfelt playing and singing. My only reservation is over the very slow speed for the Passacaglia, here as in the film underpinning the deathbed flashback to Falstaff's rejection by the king. Otherwise there is one sequence after the other which has one marvelling at Walton's imagination, and I totally endorse Palmer's praise for the device of unexpectedly using a harpsichord in the menacing ostinato section of the Agincourt charge. Palmer admits to making a few small cuts in the battle music, but they are as nothing compared with Mathieson's. It was Marriner's experience with Christopher Plummer trying to put a comparable Shakespeare sequence together using the regular five-movement suite, and finding it inadequate, that led to this much more comprehensive Shakespeare scenario being created. Plummer in his speeches sounds more at home here on record than he did at the first performance in the Royal Festival Hall last May. He makes an ideal substitute for Olivier, unselfconsciously adopting a comparably grand and noble style, though he earns a black mark at the end of the pre-Agincourt speech for taking a breath between ''St Crispin's'' and ''Day''.
The record of Walton's two wartime ballet scores is equally valuable, when much the greater part of The Quest, based on Spenser's Faerie Queene, has remained unheard for almost half a century. Walton wrote the score, 42 minutes long, in under five weeks in 1943 for performances by the Sadler's Wells Ballet. As he said in a letter to John Warrack—who unearthed the mislaid score in 1958—wartime conditions were ''adverse'', not helped by the fact that the choreographer, Sir Frederick Ashton, was only on limited leave from the RAF, and in addition was dashing about the country with the ballet company. As Walton memorably puts it, the music ''was written more or less as one writes for films, first come first served''. Though John Piper did a memorable neo-romantic set, the ballet was not a success, and the only airing of the score since then has been in the four-movement suite arranged by Vilem Tausky in 1961.
Walton had little sympathy for the subject, but what this excellent performance and full, brilliant recording demonstrates is that his own disparaging comments on the score are not at all justified. Far more than is contained in the Suite deserves to be preserved and cherished. There are certainly anticipations of Walton's film music, but also of the Second Symphony, as well as echoes of Scapino. Walton even in a hurry could not help creating memorable ideas, and with the help of Constant Lambert—not to mention Palmer, who has expanded the instrumentation in line with the Suite—the orchestral writing is often dazzling. Like most ballets it contains substantial sequences of purely illustrative music, relatively fragmentary, but the variations on the Seven Deadly Sins form a strong, substantial movement, and the final Passacaglia is all the more magnificent for being almost twice the length, and much more varied than in the Suite. Walton spoke of echoing Vaughan Williams in that movement, and the clear source of his cribbing at the start is the slow movement of the Fourth Symphony, bitonal in a similarly eerie way. It is still clearly identifiable as Walton's work, even though he is working in what Palmer calls ''an untypical (but perfervidly) spiritual and saintly mood''. Quite apart from the dramatic power of the performance, the sound is superb; among the fullest and clearest I have heard from Chandos.
The sound for The Wise Virgins is less clean, with some hazing thanks to the reverberant acoustic. The performance too, though lively enough, has markedly less electricity, with ensemble not always quite clean. Yet Walton's often-abrasive and always distinctive arrangements of Bach cantata movements remain as fresh as ever. It is only sad to find that the score of the full ballet, which had nine movements instead of the six in the Suite, has been lost. As it is, the sharp use of brass and woodwind brings a bite far closer to the new authenticity than you find in more traditional arrangements.'