Side one of the LP above contains the two Façade instrumental suites for orchestra, as devised by the composer in 1926 and 1938. (Lambert intermixes the numbers of the two suites.) The second side has the first of two Wand of Youth suites that Elgar devised from his earliest compositions.
 |
| Walton by Michael Ayrton |
 |
| Lambert by Christopher Wood |
Lambert returned to the recording studios with Façade in 1950, this time as conductor of the orchestral suites found on the LP above. These give a good impression of Walton's musical achievement, with characteristically fine performances from the vintage Philharmonia.
 |
| Sargent by Gerald Festus Kelly |
although it was composed within 15 years of Façade. The Edwardians had a tendency to romanticize youth; several of Elgar's works display this characteristic. (See my post from several years ago discussing The Starlight Express, for an example.) Even so, it would be hard to dispute the charm, warmth and appeal of Elgar's heartfelt music.
Elgar himself conducted both suites for a 1928 recording. I believe the first suite's next appearance on record was in 1949, in a version directed by Eduard van Beinum. The Sargent effort with the Liverpool Philharmonic came only a few months later. Liverpool did not have a top-flight orchestra at the time, but they are in better fettle here than they were a few years earlier in the Horoscope recordings I recently featured.
 |
| Edith Sitwell with her brother (Osbert, I believe) in 1922 |
20 comments:
Link (Apple lossless):
https://www.mediafire.com/file/aijrtplvihooy64/Walton%20-%20Fa%E7ade%20Suite%20%28Lambert%29%2C%20Elgar%20-%20Wand%20of%20Youth%20%28Sargent%29.zip
Declaiming through a megaphone sticking out of a mouth? I'm never sure what's going on around here...
Yeah, it was avant mouth-guard.
Thanks so much this reference LP as well as the extraordinary 1929 recording. Historical documents indeed. Façade sounds sounds so different with and without narrator....
centuri - Yes, I think Sitwell's dog-trot cadence takes over the piece when the speaker is used.
This is marvelous. Thank you, Buster! I know Lambert's recordings of Façade as reciter, but hadn't heard him conduct the Suites before. (It has recently been confirmed that he actually did the orchestration for some of the numbers from Suite 2; Oxford U Press paid him, but he didn't ask for official credit.)
Reportedly, he was Walton's favorite reciter for the "an Entertainment" version. Study of the score reveals that Dame Edith never mastered the specific rhythms that Walton wrote, particularly the syncopations; sometimes she wasn't even in the right measure. Of later recorded Reciters, I particularly admire Peter Pears, Fenella Fielding, Prunella Scales, Timothy West, Eleanor Bron, and Jeremy Irons. And (immodesty alert!!) I think I did quite well on the three occasions I've had the chance to serve as reciter, most recently last spring.
JAC - Thanks so much for the information. I had read that Lambert orchestrated some of the pieces, but I had no idea what he did specifically. I certainly admire your resolve in performing these pieces. It takes a remarkable amount of skill to pull them off! No wonder that Sitwell herself couldn't do it properly.
(To be fair -- grudgingly -- to Dame Edith's performance, Walton kept revising/adding/subtracting with Façade for years, as you note. The spoken version wasn't published until 1951! So he MAY have repositioned the voice part in different measures at one or two points. I bet he still wanted the rhythmic patterns he wrote, though.)
According to the most recent score of the Suites (research undertaken for the critical scores in the Walton Edition), Constant Lambert conducted the premiere of Frederick Ashton's ballet Façade in 1931. Suite 1 was available at that time, but Ashton wanted more movements, so the composer agreed that Lambert could orchestrate what was needed -- the Fanfare, Scotch Rhapsody, and Popular Song, to which the Country Dance was later added. When Suite 2 was eventually published, those four items were used, along with new orchestrations by Walton of Noche Española and Foxtrot.
Thank you for the kind remarks about performing it. I find it fun to do, though at dress rehearsal stage I always ask myself why I got myself into this again.
JAC -
Again, thanks for the added information. That helps to knit together the various strains of Façade, and provides some clarity about Lambert's contributions.
Side note - When issued, Lambert's 1950 recordings were in effect competing in the marketplace with Sitwell's 1949 version, also released in the US on Columbia.
Right, although they represented two different formats of the work (orchestral suite and spoken "entertainment"). Then in 1957 Sitwell took part for the first time in a complete recording of the definitive 1951 version, sharing the numbers with Peter Pears, for the Decca label.
One other tidbit in the introduction to the new Suite scores: there has sometimes been puzzlement why the best-liked number in the piece, the soft-shoe "Popular Song," wasn't included in Suite 1 (assembled in 1926). The answer is simple: that song wasn't composed until 1928, part of the ongoing evolution of the piece's contents.
The published suites include a recommended order of movements if the two suites are combined in performance. I had assumed that to be a contribution from Lambert, from his experience with them in performance. But on this recording he uses a completely different mixture of the two. Again there turns out to be a simple explanation: The recording (like Walton's earlier recording of the suites) was first issued on 78 RPM records, and the order was shuffled to get 2 or 3 numbers on a side when possible, so the shorter movements got grouped together. The LP issues didn't give any thought to rectifying the order, but I believe the most recent CD reissues have done so.
JAC - Again, most interesting and valuable. It's odd that Columbia - the inventor of the LP - didn't use the proper order in its long-playing version, but I suppose the issue originated with EMI, who produced the recording and had not adopted the LP format as yet.
I suspect it's as simple as, nobody put a note in the file saying that the other order was preferable, so when the time came, nobody on hand knew about it. Similar things have happened with other cases of reissue on new media over the years, where an unwanted byproduct of the old format was retained in the new, and the answer is simply "nobody knew/thought about it."
thanks, Buster
Thank you very much for these nice performances!
Buster, many thanks for another rarity....
Here is a comment by Lambert on Façade, copied from the Land of Lost Content blog:
Constant Lambert first appeared as a reciter in Façade in the New Chenil Galleries, Chelsea, London on 29 June 1926 and had an involvement with the work over the succeeding years. In the February 1928 edition of The Dominant magazine he wrote an article entitled ‘Some Recent Works by William Walton.’
The music of the entertainment Façade includes, in its different versions, [1] work ranging over several years, although the only published numbers are of recent date. For the benefit of those who have not heard Façade it may be explained that the entertainment consists of a series of poems by Miss Edith Sitwell, spoken through a megaphone to the accompaniment of six instruments, namely, flute, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, 'cello and percussion. Both orchestra and reciter are concealed by a screen decorated with a large mask, through the mouth of which the megaphone protrudes.
The poems are recited, for the most part, ‘senza espressione’, but with the utmost precision and variety of rhythm.
The collaboration is most successful and one can think of no other composer who could so well supply the musical equivalent of what has been admirably described as 'the hallucinated vision, the glassily clear technique, the curiously profound wit' of Edith Sitwell's poems. In the early version of Façade the music did little save add a background of strange arabesques and unexpected timbres to the poems; in the later versions, the music is much more clearly formed and there is a greater wealth of thematic material.
The orchestral suite [2], though a very enjoyable work, represents only one side of Façade for the composer has chosen the more brilliant and satirical numbers for adaptation and one may search in vain for the pastoral charm of ‘Daphne’ or the sinister atmosphere of ‘Four in the Morning'. The composer has kept closely- and in my opinion, too closely - to the form and rhythm of the poems. He has not always realized that certain passages have but little meaning when divorced from their peculiar method of presentation; thus, in the fourth number we are given nothing save a rather perfunctory crescendo passage to take the place of the brilliant cadenza for voice which (in the entertainment) leads from the tango to the paso-doble.
The only piece in which he has departed from the original form of the poem is the ‘Tarantella-Sevillana’, perhaps the most successful number in the suite, where the original material has been considerably expanded into a brilliant burlesque of the ‘Mediterranean’ style. [...]
The Dominant February 1928 (with minor edits)
Notes
[1] The study of the versions and recensions of Facade is complex. Suffice to say that most of the pieces of the original series were composed between 1922 and 1929. The first private performance was given at the Sitwell home at 2 Carlyle Square, London on Sunday 24 January 1922. Edith Sitwell was the reciter and William Walton conducted the ensemble of musicians. The first public performance was given at the Aeolian Hall, London, on 12 June 1923. Lambert would have been aware of the original Walton music and also some revisions.
[2] Lambert, at the time of writing this article, would also have known the 1926 Orchestral Suite which included Polka, Valse, Swiss Jodelling Song, Tango-Pasodoble and the Tarantella-Sevillana. This was first heard at the Lyceum theatre on Friday 3 December 1926.
Posted by John France
Original link: http://landofllostcontent.blogspot.com/2011/09/william-walton-constant-lambert-writing.html
That information is wonderful to have here to add some authoritative opinion to the discussion. Thank you, Addison, for supplying it.
The history of the various versions, or even just the fluctuations of the "recitation" version, became of course even more complex than when Lambert wrote this. Considering the piece's popularity, it's remarkable that it (as distinct from the orchestral suites) wasn't published until 1951!
This article would seem to be the source for comments (which I have seen in a number of places) that Lambert felt that Walton sometimes didn't intervene or augment enough when arranging sextet-accompaniment-to-speaking into the orchestral medium. And he is of course quite right that the one place Walton did do this, the "Tarantella-Sevillana,"made it into a gratifyingly extended orchestral showpiece, the inevitable finale to any presentation of the Suites.
Addison (and JAC) - Thanks so much for this most informative material.
Somm reissued the 1950 Lambert-Philharmonia Facade Suite on CD but the sequence of the pieces within the suite on that CD is different from the order listed on the LP. I wonder why, as I would expect that they would follow the sequence on the UK Columbia 78s in numeric order. But if so, then why would US Columbia change it? very curious. Plus it took up 5 sides not 4, The filler was an Ibert piece called Ballabile from a ballet of the same name all orchestrated Ibert piano pieces, first performed a few months before the September 1950 recording. Also, the Sargent wand of youth suite also had a single side 78 "filler" of Sargent/Liverpool doing Grainger's "London derriere". Do you have either of those fillers?
Rootie - Not sure about the Facade sequence, although the elements of that particular work are so varied and confusing that it's anyone's guess as to what is correct (if indeed there is such a state). I recently mentioned Ballabile as being Lambert's last recording, although I had it down as being by Chabrier. I don't have it, alas, nor the Grainger, to my knowledge.
Post a Comment