CD Reviews

VAF: William Walton The Complete Façades
Jo Ann Falletta, conductor; Virginia Arts Festival Chamber Players
Review by John Campbell

Naxos Records recently released a CD of the complete Façades performed by the Virginia Arts Festival Chamber Players, conducted by Jo Ann Falletta in mid-June, 2021. It includes the first-ever recording of additional songs (four) that Walton wrote but did not use in Façades – An Entertainment and Façades 2: A Further Entertaiment (34 songs all together). The three narrators were soprano Hila Plitmann, known for her boundary-pushing interpretations of contemporary music; Fred Child, NPR host of Performance Today; and bass-baritone Kevin Deas, who has been heard in diverse repertoire with top orchestras and conductors.

It has been one-hundred years since English composer William Walton (1902-1983) wrote this music paired with abstract poems by Edith Sitwell that features verses in patterns of sound, including experiments in rhythm, tempo and texture. At age eighteen, Walton left Oxford without a degree and accepted an invitation from Sacheverell Sitwell to move in with this literary family that included Osbert and Edith. Edith hatched the idea that he should set her recent literary experiments to music. He did and this is the result.

The CD is a performance of the original piece for an ensemble that includes flute, Debra Wendells Cross; doubling piccolo, Rachel Ordaz; clarinet, Todd Levy; doubling bass-clarinet, Robert Alemany; saxophone, Timothy McAllister; trumpet, David Vonderheide; percussion, Robert Cross; cello, Julian Schwartz; Jo Anne Falletta conductor.

Hearing Façades with texts in hand is an advantage. Sitwell's poems offer tumbling images that sound sensible but do not follow through—there are no ideas that the listener can hold on to because another incomplete one will replace it. These wide-ranging vignettes titillate the mind briefly but are rapidly (or slowly) replaced by the shifting mood of another half-formed idea. The percussive delivery reflected in the instrumental music can be raucous and fast or gentle and slow, all in a continuous flow. It is entertaining and sometimes enthralling.

The project was first described as a “melodrama,” and was tried-out in the Sitwell home early in 1922—an overture, an interlude, and a setting of sixteen poems. The first public performance had Edith Sitwell reciting her poems from behind a curtain painted with a face mask with a megaphone-shaped mouth. Her sing-song voice floated out as both she and the instrumentalists remained unseen. The concert aroused "an outburst of critical rage and hysteria in the audience" as Sir Osbert Sitwell later recalled. Noel Coward left the auditorium in the middle of the performance. To avoid molestation or attack Edith was warned to remain hidden after the concert.

A revised version met with a happier fate. Revisions after each successive performance continued for twenty years prior to its publication in 1951. By then it had been used twice as a ballet score, as two suites for orchestra and in a reduction for piano.

My old London CD is from the 1980s and has a dated British patina compared to this bright, clear, new recording. Highly recommended!