Walton Choral works
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: William Walton
Label: EMI
Magazine Review Date: 5/1989
Media Format: Cassette
Media Runtime: 0
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: EL749496-4
Tracks:
| Composition | Artist Credit |
|---|---|
| Belshazzar's Feast |
William Walton, Composer
David Wilson-Johnson, Baritone London Symphony Chorus (amateur) London Symphony Orchestra Richard Hickox, Conductor William Walton, Composer |
| In Honour of the City of London |
William Walton, Composer
London Symphony Chorus (amateur) London Symphony Orchestra Richard Hickox, Conductor William Walton, Composer |
Composer or Director: William Walton
Label: EMI
Magazine Review Date: 5/1989
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 53
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: 749496-2
Tracks:
| Composition | Artist Credit |
|---|---|
| Belshazzar's Feast |
William Walton, Composer
David Wilson-Johnson, Baritone London Symphony Chorus (amateur) London Symphony Orchestra Richard Hickox, Conductor William Walton, Composer |
| In Honour of the City of London |
William Walton, Composer
London Symphony Chorus (amateur) London Symphony Orchestra Richard Hickox, Conductor William Walton, Composer |
Author: Edward Greenfield
Here at last is the ideal coupling for Belshazzar's Feast, the other ambitious choral work which Walton wrote in his most electric period during the 1930s, In Honoar of the City of London. It is astonishing that this major piece, only just over 16 minutes long but for big-scale forces not so different from those for the oratorio, should have had to wait for over 50 years for its first recording. Now, happily, we are delivered of a real winner. Not only does Hickox conduct a fizzing performance of Belshazzar, brilliantly incisive sharply dramatic, and with a recording fuller and more detailed than ever before in this work, his performance of the accompanying cantata is thrilling too, far more effective than the performances I have heard him conduct in the concert-hall.
Walton wrote the piece for the 1937 Leeds Festival, where six years earlierBelshazzar's Feast had made its mould-breaking impact. In such circumstances a paean to London from a Scots poet, William Dunbar, writing around 1500, was a curious choice of text, particularly when less than ten years earlier the same words had been set—with wide success if less ambitiously—by Sir George Dyson. Though there is no soloist, the choral writing is every bit as demanding in its energetic, jazzy syncopations as the oratorio, and choral societies have fought shy of devoting so much effort to a work so short in time. In addition, when presented live, it is a particularly difficult work to balance, with the words almost inevitably disappearing under such complex writing both for instruments and voices. The EMI engineers do wonders in sorting out detail. Even they cannot do all that much about the words—which are printed in the booklet—but the impact of the piece, its colour, richness, variety, drama and red-blooded vigour so typical of Walton at that period, come out here under Hickox as never before. Any Waltonian must rush out at once, and appreciate at last a vintage work, not one—as I have long thought—flawed by miscalculation.
The recording was made, I see, the day after a performance I heard Hickox give at London's Barbican Centre in September 1984, but overnight he seems to have transformed his choristers, drawing from them a cutting-edge not evident in the hall. In the lovely gentle interlude celebrating the Thames in the fourth of Dunbar's six stanzas, the semichorus is too misty, but otherwise the singing is as electrifying in its bite on misplaced accents as the playing of the LSO. The more I hear the piece, the more I want to distinguish it from Belshazzar instead of regarding it as just a later spin-off. A surprising amount of the writing, notably the brief orchestral links between stanzas, represents the new, more expansive Walton, first witnessed in the finale of the First Symphony and also anticipating the moods and colours of the Henry V film music. I have spent much time on this important Walton premiere—there are others in this same choral field in another superb issue this month (see below) but happily it comes with an account of Belshazzar that matches and in some ways even surpasses the two fine versions from Previn. In my comparisons I have concentrated on the earlier of the two with the LSO, which now in EMI's CD transfer I firmly prefer to the latter and less forceful RPO version. It is also interesting to compare the same chorus and orchestra at an interval of over 15 years. Previn's 1972 sound, recorded in Kin sway Hall, is extraordinarily vivid for its period, but the Hickox—recorded like the RPO disc at Watford Town Hall—is far fuller, not just in range but in inner detail. It allows the extra incisiveness of the singing this time to come through thrillingly, a point established at the very start of the men's narration, where the dotted rhythms snap much more sharply with brighter sound and with notably crisper ensemble.
The 1972 version, I remember, was recorded in only two sessions, and marvellous as it is the choral singing is not ideally sharp, though by a curious recompense some of those very imprecisions actually add to the authentic jazziness of Previn's reading, just as imprecisions of ensemble often help to enhance the Viennese lilt in waltz-time. None the less, Hickox gains significantly with crisper attack in almost every sequence. Even if he does not quite match Previn in evoking mystery in ''By the waters of Babylon'', the account of the writing on the wall is even more eerily chilling, helped by the sinister, baleful tone of David Wilson-Johnson as the baritone soloist. His whole contribution is both sensitive and powerful, even if the microphone tends to bring out the vibrato in his voice.
The LSO Previn version is one that I shall certainly not want to be without. Its weight and gutsiness are unmatched by any rival including his own later version. But Hickox gives us a performance, just as thrilling, more incisive, more detailed with a comparably powerful punch and similarly warm understanding of the Walton idiom, and with recording to match. With its unique revelatory coupling, it is a record that no lover of Walton's music should be without. Two tiny quibbles: In Honour of the City of London should have been transferred with separate CD index points to mark the different sections, as in Belshazzar, and ever-thirsting for more, I should have liked to have Walton's magnificent Coronation Te Deum of 1953 fitted on as well.'
Walton wrote the piece for the 1937 Leeds Festival, where six years earlier
The recording was made, I see, the day after a performance I heard Hickox give at London's Barbican Centre in September 1984, but overnight he seems to have transformed his choristers, drawing from them a cutting-edge not evident in the hall. In the lovely gentle interlude celebrating the Thames in the fourth of Dunbar's six stanzas, the semichorus is too misty, but otherwise the singing is as electrifying in its bite on misplaced accents as the playing of the LSO. The more I hear the piece, the more I want to distinguish it from Belshazzar instead of regarding it as just a later spin-off. A surprising amount of the writing, notably the brief orchestral links between stanzas, represents the new, more expansive Walton, first witnessed in the finale of the First Symphony and also anticipating the moods and colours of the Henry V film music. I have spent much time on this important Walton premiere—there are others in this same choral field in another superb issue this month (see below) but happily it comes with an account of Belshazzar that matches and in some ways even surpasses the two fine versions from Previn. In my comparisons I have concentrated on the earlier of the two with the LSO, which now in EMI's CD transfer I firmly prefer to the latter and less forceful RPO version. It is also interesting to compare the same chorus and orchestra at an interval of over 15 years. Previn's 1972 sound, recorded in Kin sway Hall, is extraordinarily vivid for its period, but the Hickox—recorded like the RPO disc at Watford Town Hall—is far fuller, not just in range but in inner detail. It allows the extra incisiveness of the singing this time to come through thrillingly, a point established at the very start of the men's narration, where the dotted rhythms snap much more sharply with brighter sound and with notably crisper ensemble.
The 1972 version, I remember, was recorded in only two sessions, and marvellous as it is the choral singing is not ideally sharp, though by a curious recompense some of those very imprecisions actually add to the authentic jazziness of Previn's reading, just as imprecisions of ensemble often help to enhance the Viennese lilt in waltz-time. None the less, Hickox gains significantly with crisper attack in almost every sequence. Even if he does not quite match Previn in evoking mystery in ''By the waters of Babylon'', the account of the writing on the wall is even more eerily chilling, helped by the sinister, baleful tone of David Wilson-Johnson as the baritone soloist. His whole contribution is both sensitive and powerful, even if the microphone tends to bring out the vibrato in his voice.
The LSO Previn version is one that I shall certainly not want to be without. Its weight and gutsiness are unmatched by any rival including his own later version. But Hickox gives us a performance, just as thrilling, more incisive, more detailed with a comparably powerful punch and similarly warm understanding of the Walton idiom, and with recording to match. With its unique revelatory coupling, it is a record that no lover of Walton's music should be without. Two tiny quibbles: In Honour of the City of London should have been transferred with separate CD index points to mark the different sections, as in Belshazzar, and ever-thirsting for more, I should have liked to have Walton's magnificent Coronation Te Deum of 1953 fitted on as well.'
Walton Choral works
Walton Choral works
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