PROGRAM NOTES CONCERTO FOR VIOLA AND ORCHESTRA – WILLIAM WALTON (1929) Sir William Walton (1902-1983) is a noted composer of the twentieth century. Raised as a choirboy in the Anglican church, he studied at Oxford for six years, ultimately without a degree, before embarking on his career in composition. He was heavily influenced by Italian lyricism, encountered on a trip taken with the Sitwell siblings Sacheverell, Osbert, and Edith, who were friends, patrons, writers, and poets. In fact, Walton’s first success as a composer came from the siblings, with his Façade suite written as incidental music to a series of poems by Edith Sitwell. Walton, however, fashioned much of his career around film scoring, composing for patriotic films through World War II. After the war, Walton did not achieve much new success, mostly due to the musical aesthetics changed around him while his own style remained unchanged. The Concerto for Viola was originally written in 1929, then further revised: the solo part in 1938 and the orchestral accompaniment in 1961. The concerto was originally dedicated to Lionel Tertis, but the violist declined the work; violist and composer Paul Hindemith instead premiered the work in 1929. The concerto marked a major development in Walton’s style, taking in influences from his contemporaries, especially from Prokofiev. He did so to the point of near-direct copying of his friends’ works: he admitted to copying bars from Hindemith’s Kammermusik No. 5, and many parallels can be made between Walton’s concerto and Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1. The concerto is of an unusual form, starting and ending with slow movements and featuring a fast and technical second movement. This is an inversion of the typical fast-slow-fast formula utilized since the Baroque period. The first movement of the concerto is a narrative, recitative-like piece. It opens with a mournful melody, eventually dancing and soaring. The soloist, it seems, cannot break free from the moody and the melancholy, for when spirits rise in the piece, they cannot help but fall again. Walton’s use of expressive dissonance in the orchestra serves to underscore this depression in the solo, which seems to deflate at the end of the movement. The second movement features quick and driving rhythms in the accompaniment, laying the foundation for a light and brilliant solo part. Here is where Walton notes the borrowing from Hindemith, with borrowings of Stravinsky being heard as well. Note the abundance of harmonics, which have a clear, almost “glassy” sound, made by lightly touching the finger to the string. The last movement of the concerto immediately opens with the first theme, stated in the bassoon before being copied by the soloist, who then expands on it. This theme sets the material for the rest of the movement as Walton continuously returns to it, almost never stating it the same way twice. In the coda, Walton brings back the opening theme of the first movement to tie together the entire concerto. He does so by overlaying the third movement's theme (this time as an ostinato in the low voices) with the first movement’s theme in the solo.
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