Ed Zubrow <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>I'd be interested in list members' assessments of the *differences* between
>Walton and his British contemporaries.  I find that the more I listen to
>them, the higher Walton climbs in my esteem.

Differences may be a bit more apparent than real:  Walton (generally) was
closer to Malcolm Arnold than anyone else in the British music scene (the
Battle of Britain score - originally written by Walton; mostly replaced
with a new score by the underrated Goodwin but including the main battle
sequence from Walton's version; was orchestrated & conducted by Arnold);
but a broad familiarity with the works of composers as superficially
different as Ralph Vaughan Williams or Humphrey Searle would find more
continuities than discontinuities between their approach & Walton's.

Technically, Walton was a slow work with a fanatic's obsession with detail
- the stories of Arnold & Walton holidaying together where Arnold inks a
couple of pages of full score in the same time it took Walton to pencil a
couple of bars of short score are legion - who created a relatively small
amount of work with surprisingly high level of consistency.  As is almost
de rigeur with English composers, Walton was a superb orchestrator; &
although not a folklorist by inclination, chose his melodic material
well...  the one weakness which may be attributed to him is that his voice
is almost startlingly similar from the mature composer onwards.  Unlike
(particularly) RVW, who seemed willing to try all kinds of different styles
out as his career progressed pretty much just to see where they led him,
the early Walton sounds as sharp & neoClassical as the later composer...
while artistically admirable, this can lead to the charge of high quality
sameness about Walton's music.

You could never imagine Walton saying:  I don't know if i like it; but
that's what i meant, as RVW memorably did, after all.  On the other hand,
the extract from Belshazzar's Feast led by the composer for the Hoffnung
memorial concert is probably the finest recording of this piece ever
taped....

All the best,
Robert Clements <[log in to unmask]>
endeavour2 project <http://www.geocities.com/robtclements/endeavour2.html>