My first job was in London and somehow I managed to find enough money out of my meagre wages to buy a season ticket for the 1948 Henry Wood Promenade concerts. Most nights as soon as work was over, I joined the queue and generally got a good position in the arena. This way I began to learn the basic orchestral and choral classical repertoire. The main diet was Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart and the romantic concertos of Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov. But there were performances by contemporary composers, often British ones, few of whom are heard in concert halls today. Popular then for his patriotic music, and seen as the natural successor to Edward Elgar, William Walton was one of them.
One evening I heard his first Symphony (there was a second but that came much later) and was overwhelmed by it. I was amazed to see two sets of tympani, thwacked good and hard in much of the work, especially the second and last movements. Then here was this unashamedly emotional music employing a large modern orchestra with a Sibelius -like journey, not through the craggy splendour of Finland, but with the personal background of a broken love-affair.
Only the first three movements were played at the first performance in 1934 because of Walton’s lack of focus following the breakdown. I stood amazed at such music – the excitable rhythm of the opening, the jagged metres of the scherzo (‘presto con malizia’). The sublime, flowing, slow movement with its wonderful flute solo and then the grandeur of the finale – joining in the wild enthusiasm of the promenaders at the end.
Sir Malcom Sargent was the conductor. Adored by the numerous choirs and loathed by many of the orchestras he conducted, he was a popular figure in the British music scene in the middle years of the last century. Immensely elegant, he always wore a white carnation in his buttonhole, was a joy to watch, and was never slow to take his full share of an audience’s applause.
Orchestral players called him ‘Flash Harry’. Walton might have been pleased by this performance of his symphony but not as I remember, the first performance of his only full scale opera – ‘Troilus and Cressida’, which Sargent also conducted. Walton felt it was insufficiently rehearsed. Though regarded by some critics as an old fashioned work, its opulent score was warmly welcomed, and its performance by Opera North in the 1963 revised version is still available on CD.
An uneven composer perhaps, but I am still a Walton fan.
p.s. I have just been present at a performance (27.04.06)- of the same symphony. It was a stunning high-powered, superbly prepared reading from Bramwell Tovey and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Such playing! Such a symphony! I am still bowled over by it – 57 years later.
B.R.
