Walton's career as a conductor seems to me to fall into two phases. It was Sir Eugene Goossens, experienced in conducting contemporary scores, who taught the young Walton a technique which enabled him to master the rhythmic complexities of his own music, and this was enough for him to obtain performances which had passion and vitality. Then in his fifties Walton seems to have lost the ability to project rhythms and to define accents in quite the same way. His tempos became slower, following, though not immediately, the change in his composing style and the transition to comfortable middle age after an emotionally turbulent earlier life. So although Walton recorded later versions of all the works listed above none of them, I feel, is nearly so good as the performances reissued here.
The British Council-sponsored recording of Belshazzar's Feast is the major item, an extraordinary undertaking for wartime. Like Leslie Heward's 1943 recording of Moeran's Symphony (HMV EM290462-3, 8/85), it has the excitement and tension of a very special occasion, with the performers playing and singing their hearts out for the composer. Dennis Noble was the soloist at the work's first performance: he sings magnificently and with perfect diction. In their day the original 78s created a sensation and they still sound well; the transfer engineers have obtained more clarity and detail from commercial pressings than I would have thought possible, though some inherent distortion is also brought to the fore and a little of the original body is lost.
The Scapino Overture was unaccountably left out of the ''Walton Conducts Walton'' collection of later recordings (HMV SLS5246, 3/82), and the original 78rpm is hard to find, so it is good to welcome back this joyous and superlatively played account of the then newly revised score. There is joy too in the Facade pieces, with the LPO's playing a little ragged here and there when the going becomes particularly fast and furious, and the recording sometimes not the best that could be achieved in the 1930s. But what vitality there is in the music-making throughout the record. All the orchestral items have been beautifully transferred: they reproduce the originals very faithfully but the sound is cleaner and clearer. On this 79-minute-long record we hear clearly too the voice of the younger Walton through performances which have the kind of directness only a composer-performer can achieve.'