29.3.1902 – 8.3.1983
Sir William Turner Walton OM was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera. His best-known works include Faccedil An Entertainment, the cantata Belshazzar’s Feast and his First Symphony. Born in Lancashire, the son of a musician, Walton was a chorister and then an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford. On leaving the university, he was taken up by the literary Sitwell siblings, who provided him with a home and a cultural education.
His earliest work of note was a collaboration with Edith Sitwell, Façade, which at first brought him notoriety as a modernist, but later became a popular ballet score.
Other early works that made his name were a Viola Concerto and Belshazzar’s Feast. In middle age, Walton left Britain and set up home with his young wife on the Italian island of Ischia. By this time, he had ceased to be regarded as a modernist, and some of his compositions of the 1950s were criticised as old-fashioned. His only full-length opera, Troilus and Cressida, was among the works to be so labelled and has made little impact in opera houses.
In his last years, his works came back into critical fashion; his later compositions, dismissed by critics at the time of their premieres, were revalued and regarded alongside his earlier works. Walton, who was largely self-taught as a composer, was a slow worker, painstakingly perfectionist, and his complete body of work across his long career is not large.
https://www.kennedy-center.org/artists/w/wa-wn/sir-william-walton
From February until May 1964 composer Sir William Walton visited Australia and New Zealand conducting his own works. He visited his sister Nora Donnelly in New Zealand. The entire 1964 tour of Australia—including his travel, accommodations, and performances in Perth—was primarily financed and organized by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), in cooperation with the Adelaide Festival of Arts. The initial financial “anchor” that justified bringing Walton halfway across the world was the 1964 Adelaide Festival. The festival committee pooled its budget with the ABC to co-sponsor Walton as their headline international composer. He was brought out specifically to oversee the Australian premiere of his opera Troilus and Cressida and conduct his symphonic works.
Walton’s 1964 Australian itinerary mostly highlights his scheduled performances of the Hindemith Variations with various state orchestras. However, behind the scenes, the tour suffered from a notorious logistical headache: the physical sheet music and orchestral parts for the Hindemith Variations were either missing, incomplete, or faulty. Because they couldn’t play the planned program, Walton and his promoters had to frantically substitute pieces. He frequently turned to his famous suite Façade because it was a crowd-pleaser and something he could pull together quickly with local players.
The original, definitive version—featuring the instrumental ensemble accompanied by a live narrator reciting the poetry through a megaphone—did not receive a major, documented Australian premiere until Sir William Walton’s first-ever tour of the country in 1964. The tour’s primary, officially scheduled staging of the full Façade entertainment took place at the Adelaide Festival of Arts in March 1964, where Walton personally conducted the Festival Chamber Group. It was because of the wild success of this specific presentation that Walton was able to quickly pull the piece out of his back pocket and recreate it on the fly.
FAÇADE
| May 1964 | William Walton Façade PERTH PREMIERE Performed in front of Walton | Jack Harrison James Beattie (speaker) Verdon Williams (conductor) | Festival of Perth Basil Kirke Studio A.B.C. Adelaide Terrace, Perth, Western Australia |
Walton’s “Façade” for speaker and chamber ensemble with which Walton first made an impact on the English musical scene. It consists of a recitation of Edith Sitwell poems against the background of chamber ensemble music. The speaker will be James Beatty and the ABC chamber ensemble will be conducted by Verdon Williams. The other work in the programme, Bliss Clarinet Quintet, will be performed by the Oriole String Quartet with Jack Harrison. [1]
WORDS, MUSIC BLEND SUBTLY IN “FAÇADE”
By Sally Trethowan
Nearly 2 years ago, actor James Beatty conductor Verdon Williams and a small chamber ensemble gave a scintillating performance of the original version of “Façade”. The same actor and conductor were responsible for a no less diverting and accomplished reading of the work in the Basil Kirk Memorial studio on Saturday night as part of the Festival Of Perth “Music of Britain” series. William Walton deft and witty accompaniment to the spoken verses by Edith Sitwell no longer shock audiences as they did in the 20s. What seemed iconoclastic musical language then, derived as it was mainly from jazz and the music-hall, seems passe now. But though time has weathered the original satiric bite, the work still magnificently fulfils the sub- title “An Entertainment”. A successful performance of “Façade” depends predominantly on fractional timing and coordination between the individual musicians, and between the speaker and instrumentalists. On this count Saturday’s reading could scarcely have been better.
Beattie’s performance of the verbal prestidigitations in the “Tarantella” and part of the “’Tango Paso Doble” was admirable as was his rhythmic delivery of the apparently nonsensical compilation of associative images into a rich mosaic of orchestrated word sounds.
The other work on the program, Arthur Bliss’s Clarinet Quintet, is extremely demanding on all players, though in no sense is it a showpiece. The Oriel String Quartet and clarinettist Jack Harrison, who also performed this work in the composers presence when he visited W.A. about 18 months ago, gave a craftsman like an intelligent reading, inclusive in the brusque helter-skelter scherzo and finale, and reflective, even faintly nostalgic, in the intensely lyrical first and third movements. Bliss’s harmonic acidulation in these movements, however, precludes any thought of the molasses type sentimentality often associated particularly in 19th century music with lyricism. [2]
Walton’s “Façade” for speaker and chamber ensemble with which Walton first made an impact on the English musical scene. It consists of a recitation of Edith Sitwell poems against the background of chamber ensemble music. The speaker will be James Beatty and the ABC chamber ensemble will be conducted by Verdon Williams. The other work in the programme, Bliss Clarinet Quintet, will be performed by the Oriole String Quartet with Jack Harrison. [3]
FESTIVAL FAILS IN ITS HUNT FOR A MUSICAL DRAW CARD
BY KENNETH HINCE IN PERTH
Put on at cocktail time “Façade” was prefaced by the Clarinet Quintet of Arthur Bliss, music of thick Brahmsian texture. This has no necessary reason for existence being simply a work that someone felt like writing down. All the instruments are used with a sense of duty, all the movements are filled with scrupulously professional writing, but it’s total meaning might be boiled down into a bar or two of Elgar or Britten. Only a historian could have really enjoyed its performance; only an archivist could have been satisfied to hear it played instead of reading it over in a library. It was performed on Saturday by Jack Harrison and the Oriol String Quartet – Harrison with unfailingly accurate but monotonous uninflected attack, the Quartet balanced, well matched and reasonably polished. “Façade” came off rather worse. Music of superb elan which has worn much better than most people realise, it had a fairly good reading from James Beatty. The décor in the Basil Kirk studio was quite adequate with a gauze curtain allowing just enough of the reciter and the chamber Orchestra to come through to the audience. But the instrumental work was just not accurate enough for the music. For a mid 60s audience, the point of this music lies half in the way it bites its thumb at Victorian morality, half in the bitterly precise realisation of the score. On Saturday under Verdon Williams, things were too this and that too hither and thither. For people who had not heard “Façade” before this was a tolerable enough experience but to a man who wanted to feel the true historical grip of this music, the performance was too slack and inefficient for a casual reading let alone for a performance of festival tone. [4]
Walton’s “Façade Suite” will be given by the Music Society at the Octagon theatre tomorrow night. The brilliantly witty work with Neville Teede reading the nonsense verse of Edith Sitwell, will be accompanied by the Wigmore Ensemble conducted by Graham wood. Those taking part in the ensemble will be Jill Wright (flute), Jack Harrison (clarinet), Neil Boon (saxophone), Kevin Jonston (trumpet), Jill Cole and Sally Talbit (cellos) and Paul Sarcich (percussion). Members of the group will also play the Pastorales de Noel by Andre Jolivet the French composer and musical director of the Caomedie Francaise, the flute, violin and harp trio of Eugene Goosens and Igor Stravinsky’s “Epitaphium” for flute, clarinet and harp. [5]
Walton signed a photo for Jack Harrison that reads
“with many thanks for your performance in “Façade” 21.5.64 Perth”.
[1] The West Australian Saturday February 26 1966
[2] The West Australian Monday February 28 1966
[3] The West Australian Saturday February 26 1966
[4] The Australian Monday February 28 1966
[5] The Sunday Times April 20 1980