Walton

Ida Haendel’s sinewy and athletic reading of the often under-rated Britten combines toughness with a cumulative dramatic impetus which is hard to resist. Berglund and the Bournemouth players respond with a terse and argumentative vigour, suitably balanced between resignation and defiant rhetoric, especially in the closing Passacaglia. The Walton Concerto, also dating from 1938-9, is played with an apposite blend of inscrutable panache, as in the irrepressibly brilliant central movement, and elsewhere, a sensuous, if occasionally over-indulgent languor. Rare lapses in the finale can be safely overlooked, in a performance of eloquence and undisputed stature.

For a single-package introduction to the music of William Walton, it would be hard to do better than this two-disc set from EMI. Not only is the selection impeccable (including the First Symphony, Belshazzar's Feast, the violin and viola concertos, plus the Partita, for orchestra), but the performances, with the composer conducting, are, for all intents and purposes, definitive.

Two killers from Cedar Walton – back to back on a single CD!

Bo Walton was born in the little village of Marden in Herefordshire, UK. At the age of 5/6 he began listening to his parents albums of Elvis, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Billy Fury and Jerry Lee. He formed his first performing band when he was 14, playing mainly pop-rock covers but every now and then dropping in an Elvis or Cochran track and it was quite obvious how much that style of music had influenced him!…

The viola is no longer the Cinderella of string instruments, thanks to such composers as Hindemith, Schnittke, Britten and Berio, but it was Walton who, in 1927, composed the first significant work for the viola since Berlioz’s Harold in Italy of 1834. Max Bruch also wrote for it; like Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante for violin/viola duo, he composed a concerto for viola and clarinet in 1911, with an alternative version substituting violin for clarinet. A short Romance had appeared in 1885, while Kol nidrei for cello also had a version for viola. All these works appear on this excellent disc and highlight the instrument’s strengths and weaknesses in the capable hands of Bashmet, currently one of its greatest exponents.

The music on Among Friends was actually performed at San Francisco's Keystone Korner during a recorded engagement by the Bobby Hutcherson sextet. Pianist Cedar Walton opened each set with a few numbers and he was playing so well that in 1990 Evidence decided to release his material as a separate CD. Walton performs three songs ("Ruby My Dear," "My Old Flame" and "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face") solo, interprets four other pieces (three standards plus his own "Midnight Waltz"), in a trio with bassist Buster Williams and drummer Billy Higgins, and Hutcherson himself makes the group a quartet on "My Foolish Heart." Excellent hard bop-based music from the talented pianist.

A very light but very lovely disc of mid-twentieth century violin concertos, this 1996 recording by Joshua Bell with David Zinman directing the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra coupling the concertos of Samuel Barber and William Walton along with Baal Shem, the concerto-in-all-but-in-name by Ernest Bloch, may be for younger listeners a first choice among digital recordings.