EMI follow up their revelatory Elgar Edition with this handsome Walton Edition, bringing together the composer's own EMI recordings not presently available on CD. With two major exceptions—The Wise Virgins ballet suite of 1940, never available since the days of 78s, and the Henry V sequence with Laurence Olivier—these all date from after the time when EMI began to use tape masters instead of direct-cut discs, with some of the most important dating from the mono interregnum before stereo arrived.
The big revelation for me has been how electrifying Walton's own recording of the First Symphony is. It was recorded in mono in October 1951, one of EMI's early LP issues, and never appeared again in the age of LP. I remember how disappointed I was on hearing that initial issue, how the performance lacked bite and body compared with the original Decca Harty version on 78s. Now with an excellent transfer it emerges as among the most exciting versions ever, better played as well as far better recorded than the Harty, and consistently displaying the wanton characteristic—faithfully observed later by such conductors as Previn—of treating the persistent syncopated rhythms with a jazzy freedom. Not only are the tensions in the first movement as keen as those in the Harty version (or the first Previn, on RCA), the passion behind the performance is intense, most of all in the slow movement, which gains from superb woodwind playing from the Philharmonia soloists. With extra precision the scherzo may not seem quite so demonic as in the hazardous Harty (now superbly transferred on the Dutton Sound label), and the trumpet solo in the epilogue to the finale lacks the expressiveness to make it sound elegiac, but those are minor reservations over what must stand as a new benchmark performance.
Just how good the transfer of the First Symphony is comes out when you compare it with the earlier EMI transfer, thin and scrawny, of the Scapino Overture, recorded at the same 1951 sessions. That was issued on the ''Walton conducts Walton'' CD (4/92), now deleted, in the Great Recordings of the Century series, which also contained among other items Walton's earlier 78 recordings of Belshazzar's Feast and the Facade Suites. Comparing Walton's stereo version of Belshazzar's Feast with the earlier one is fascinating, with speeds consistently more spacious in 1959 compared with 1943, but with tensions just as keen and ensemble consistently crisper. With extra clarity some of the mystery of the earlier performance is missing, but again the new transfer gives more bite to the whole performance than I had remembered in the LP versions. Again this is a reading to set standards for everyone. The one snag is the soloist, Donald Bell, clean of attack but uncharacterful, with the voice curiously distanced by the recording, almost as though his microphone were not working.
Belshazzar and the Symphony make up the first disc, very generous measure, and all four discs are very well filled indeed, each with well over 70 minutes of music, and two of nearly 80. The second disc, entirely stereo, couples Menuhin's recordings of the Violin and Viola Concertos—the last that Walton made for EMI—with his version of the Partita made in 1959. Almost simultaneously, George Szell, for whom it was written, recorded the piece in Cleveland, and I have always felt that Walton's paled next to that high-powered demonstration of virtuosity (reissued on CD by Sony in coupling with Szell's recordings of the Second Symphony and Hindemith Variations). But the new transfer, fuller than before, reveals what extra fun Walton himself finds, bouncing the rhythms on this ''champagne score'', as Michael Kennedy describes it in his notes on the music. Though Menuhin's account of the Viola Concerto is a little effortful, not always flowing as it should, his viola sound is gloriously rich and true, and when it comes to the Violin Concerto, recorded in July 1969, this is a vintage Menuhin performance, marked by his very distinctive tone and poignantly tender phrasing. He also relishes the challenge of the virtuoso writing designed for Heifetz, pointing rhythms in the central scherzo delightfully, with a nice agogic hesitation on the final pizzicato pay-off. Though the violin and viola are rather forwardly balanced, the sound is full and rounded.
The third disc, mono except for Walton's scintillating account of the Johannesburg Festival Overture and the Hamlet Funeral march, brings together the shorter pieces. This 1955 account of the Facade Suites lacks the tautness of Walton's consistently brisker pre-war recordings (issued on the earlier deleted disc), not helped by less immediate recording. That is the only disappointment, for the Coronation marches and Portsmouth Point, recorded in 1953 to celebrate the Queen's coronation, have a beefy strength, with Walton as conductor bringing out not just the swagger but the full-throated emotion behind the marches. The 1953 sessions also produced a new version of the Bach arrangement, Sheep may safely graze, warmer and more refined than the one in the original 1940 recording of The Wise Virgins. That was made with the Sadler's Wells Orchestra in July 1940 within days of the fall of France, but the political situation failed to affect the bright vigour of the performances, even if the ensemble is not of the crispest. Having known the original 78s, I am delighted at last to have the salty flavour of Walton's own readings restored at last.
The final disc contains the film music—the Spitfire Prelude and Fugue (against his usual trend, brisker than his earlier 1943 Halle version), the Richard III Prelude and Suite and the Henry V Suite, all made in 1964 as a package, the last devised for Walton by Walter Legge, his regular producer over the years. Most important, and for me most enjoyable of all on the disc, is the belated restoration of the complete Henry V sequence with Laurence Olivier, recorded in 1946 on four 78 records, but reissued on LP by RCA with nine minutes of cuts from the opening and closing scenes, as Lyndon Jenkins reminds us in his well-researched notes on ''Walton and the Gramophone''. The transfer is again first-rate, with the atmospheric quality of the writing vividly caught, with fanfares near and far, even if the mono sound lacks a little in body. The sound of arrows at the climax of the Agincourt charge has never been matched on subsequent recordings.
I now hope that EMI will reissue the disc of Walton's earlier 78 recordings with sound suitably refurbished up to the standard of the Walton Edition. What consistently comes out is that in his seemingly reticent way Walton was just as inspired a conductor of his own music as Elgar was of his. He consistently negotiated cross-rhythms, syncopations and uneven bar-lengths with a confidence that looked beyond literal precision to the style, vigour and warmth that make Walton one of the most richly sympathetic of twentieth-century composers.'