Walton: String Quartet / Piano Quartet

Description

William Walton(1902-1983)String Quartet in Aminor Piano Quartet in D minorWilliam Walton occupies his own position in English music of thetwentieth century, chronologically between the generation of Gustav Holst andVaughan Williams and that of Benjamin Britten. Born in Oldham in 1902, the sonof a local singing teacher and choirmaster, he became a chorister at ChristChurch, Oxford, and followed this with admission to the university at the earlyage of sixteen, with support from the college. His Oxford career broughtsuccess in music but failure in the necessary academic tests to allow him adegree. At the same time his friendship with Sacheverell Sitwell led to hisadoption by the three Sitwell children, Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell, as anhonorary brother. The practical help of the Sitwells and the musical andcultural influences of their circle allowed him to devote his attention tocomposition in the years after he left Oxford, followed by increasingindependence, as he won a wider reputation for himself and a satisfactoryincome from music for the cinema and from a generous bequest by Mrs SamuelCourtauld. In the years after 1945 he was to some extent eclipsed by Britten,whose facility he lacked and whose contemporary achievement now seemed to gobeyond Walton's successes of the 1930s. His marriage in 1948 to Susana GilPasso, whom he had met in Buenos Aires at a conference of the Performing RightsSociety, was followed by a move to the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples,continuing an association with Italy that had started in the early days of hisfriendship with the Sitwells and had continued in subsequent years. He diedthere in March 1983.In the years between the wars Walton won a succ?¿s de scandale withFa?ºade, a collaboration with Edith Sitwell that amused the cognoscentiand shocked wider audiences, before winning an assured if minor position intwentieth century repertoire in its final form, whether as a ballet or in theconcert-hall. His dramatic oratorio Belshazzar's Feast, with a textderived by Osbert Sitwell from the Bible, first performed at the Leeds Festivalin 1931, was a significant addition to choral repertoire, while the ViolaConcerto of 1929 marks a height of lyrical achievement and holds a centralplace in the viola concerto repertoire. The first of his two symphonies waseventually completed in 1935 and his Violin Concerto four years later.The popular film music of the war years was followed after the war by theoperas Troilus and Cressida and the one-act Chekhov extravaganza, TheBear, as well as the Hindemith Variations, Improvisations on anImpromptu by Benjamin Britten and the Cello Concerto and SecondSymphony.Walton's first String Quartet, written at Oxford principally in1919 but later revised, had proved disappointing and was not well received atthe 1923 meeting of the International Society for Contemporary Music inSalzburg. By 1939 he was considering another quartet, but it was only after thewar and distracting work on film scores t