Even more than the Meridian version of the Piano Quartet with John McCabe the incisive pianist, this one with Hamish Milne in the Chandos Walton series makes one marvel that such music could have been the inspiration of a 16-year-old. Admittedly Walton revised the piece at various stages later—most recently for the OUP score in 1976—but here plainly is music which instantly grabs the ear, with striking ideas attractively or dramatically presented in each movement. Nor is the boy Walton simply an inventor of good openings: his ability to argue, to develop moods and tensions, is already impressive, with the finale in particular, marked by sharply percussive cluster chords presumably learnt from Bartok, giving clear indications in its rhythmic energy of the mature Walton. This is a sharper focused reading than the Meridian one, both in the performance and in the recorded sound, with speeds generally flowing more freely and strongly and the string sound more satisfyingly resonant.
The two principal performers from the quartet make a warmly sympathetic rather than highpowered duo for the Violin Sonata of 1949. With its two long movements, both around 13 minutes, a lyrical sonata-form and a set of variations, it is a difficult work to hold together, more waywardly argued than most Walton. That is largely because the proportion of sharply incisive music to romantically lyrical is lower than usual, but the combination of Sillito's ripely persuasive style and Milne's power, clarifying textures and giving magic to the phrasing, keeps tensions sharp. The satisfyingly full sound helps too.
One problem for Walton may have been that this piece, commissioned by Menuhin for him and his brother-in-law, Louis Kentner, to play, was written over a longish period involving the death of Walton's long-time friend and protector, Lady Wimborne, leading to his impulsive marriage to young Susana Gill during his visit to Argentina. In this performance at least the prevailing lyricism suggests a very direct inspiration from that new and blissful love affair. Variation form was later to become a staple of Waltonian argument, very much on the lines here in the second movement of a wayward main theme leading to sharply defined and sharply contrasted sections. The alternative version of the Sonata from Lorraine McAslan and John Blakely on ASV has the Elgar Violin Sonata for coupling, but with full, warm sound and its Walton coupling the new Chandos could not be more welcome.'