It was high time that Walton's Facade entertainment was represented in the CD catalogue and musically at least this completely new recording from Chailly and the London Sinfonietta is as near ideal as could be. As soloists in the recitations Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Jeremy Irons capture the fun of the Edith Sitwell poems with the necessary degree of stylized detachment, characterful but not overdone, whatever detailed reservations have to be made. Stravinsky's Renard too receives a dazzling performance, again almost ideally crisp of ensemble, and in that—unlike Facade where the solo speaking voices are very obviously superimposed, forwardly balanced in quite a different acoustic—the soloists are superbly integrated, an outstanding team singing in Russian, Philip Langridge, Neil Jenkins, Derek Hammond-Stroud and Robert Lloyd.
What has surprised me in both works is how deftly Chailly has captured the humour and sparkle of the writing. In Walton at least he is not a conductor whom I would have expected to time the parodies with an idiomatic feeling for the different popular idioms, often jazzy, but quite apart from the precision of ensemble—which might well have worked against a relaxed feeling of fun—he points these witty numbers with a sharpness and delicacy to put previous versions in the shade.
The snag, as I have already implied, is the recording balance, something which the Decca engineers really should have had in mind, when a similar miscalculation afflicted Walton's own recording for Argo in the early 1970s, also with the London Sinfonietta and with Dame Peggy as one of the soloists. As it is, the voices in their dry, close acoustic often mask the brilliant playing behind, when music and words should obviously be equal partners.
The closeness also exposes the fact that Dame Peggy nowadays has to take a great number of breaths, often every second word, and in at least one instance in the middle of a word—Ganymede in ''Jodelling Song''. With characteristic cunning she often manages to turn that shortcoming into a positive characteristic and to that degree an advantage, as in her staccato rendering of ''Valse'' (Daisy and Lily). Otherwise the line of the Sitwell phrases too often becomes chopped up, however beautiful Dame Peggy's voice, and however delicately pointed her manner. She is among the finest of latterday interpreters of Facade, but even with her I keep hearing in my mind what Dame Edith herself did on her two recordings, both for Decca the first in 1929 covering only a selection of the poems.
Jeremy Irons too has a splendid voice for these crisply rhythmic poems, and his characterization never becomes a caricature even in ''Scotch Rhapsody'', where his Highland accent is not too broad, crisper than the generalized Scots accent often adopted. But with him too I wish more attention had been paid to the obvious authoritative source, the two recordings with Dame Edith and when a voice coach is actually credited Nancy Cooley, there is no excuse for even the slightest error.
One small but irritating example is the way that the words ''Venus''' and ''negress''', both with just an apostrophe at the end, are given an apostrophe 's', upsetting the rhythm. And however deftly Irons enunciates the quick-jabbering line in ''Tango-Pasodoble'' (''Thetis wrote a treatise etc.'') it does not quite match the playing, as it would have done, had speakers and players been performing together. The ''tra-la-la'' too at the beginning of ''Polka'' does not quite match the music. Purists may object to some of the early items, ''En famille'', ''Mariner Man'' and ''Through gilded trellises'' being shared between the soloists, but textually the division has been very neatly devised, and to my mind adds point-fully.
None of these reservations, except perhaps the balance, gets in the way of real enjoyment. The young Walton's brilliant inspiration remains one of the rare, really enduring masterpieces of humour in music, and here it is winningly performed and set very attractively not just against Renard but the eight Facade movements, originally discarded which Walton resurrected in the seventies and called Facade 2, sparer pieces but all worth hearing. I now hope that Decca, despite having this completely new version in the catalogue, will also bring out the classic mono version with Dame Edith and Peter Pears as reciters.EG