Walton: Facade [Import]

William [composer] Walton (Composer), Constant Lambert (Composer), David Lloyd-Jones (Conductor), Nash Ensemble (Performer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: Nash Ensemble
• Conductor: David Lloyd-Jones
• Composer: William [composer] Walton, Constant Lambert
• Audio CD (September 11, 2001)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Label: Hyperion UK
• ASIN: B00005A7LU
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #222,667 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Facade - a unique experience!, April 2, 2007

By 

John N. Taylor (Palm Desert, CA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Walton: Facade (Audio CD)

Walton (and Sitwell's) Facade is a delightful entertainment and nowhere better than here with all the extra poems that Walton set.
If you have never heard the piece before - it takes a little effort - but that is well worth the time.
The settings are witty and apposite. Stilgoe and Bron are the perfect pair to recite - I suspect few of the listeners in the US will have heard of them - except Stilgoe has written lyrics for Lloyd Webber.
I encourage you to try this CD - I am sure you will enjoy it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Entertaining Performance, July 16, 2009

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D. A Wend (Arlington Heights, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Walton: Facade (Audio CD)

I first heard Façade many years ago in a televised performance performed by the Boston Pops conducted by Arthur Fiedler and spoken by Tony Randall. I still have the LP recording of the work but, alas, it has not been issued on CD. For me, this recording by the Nash Ensemble goes a long way to taking the place of that recording.

I had been unaware that there were different versions of Façade and I never knew that three poems had not been excluded from the final version. In any case, all of the poems that William Walton scored are presented here. The booklet is highly informative providing facts about the poems and which version of Façade they belong to. The speakers are Eleanor Bron and Richard Stilgoe, both of whom were unfamiliar to me. Both speakers do an excellent job of reciting the poems, some of which clip along at a very fast tempo: they bring a lot of character to their reading. The poems themselves make use of quite a few arcane words and, as I recall, Edit Stillwell chose many of her word combinations for their rhyming qualities rather than their specific meaning. So I still wonder about:

"As the steely grasses' thrill,
Or the sound of the onycha
When the phoca has the pica
In the palace of the Queen Chinee!"

The short suite from Constant Lambert's incidental music to Salome fits well with the Walton. The excepts come from various parts of the play and the music was used to link scenes. The scoring is for just four players: clarinet, trumpet, cello and percussion. It is interesting what Lambert does with this small force. The music does not recall Strauss but sounds more jazz inspired.

The Nash Ensemble perform beautifully conveying all of the nice characteristic touches Walton included in his score. The recording, as one would expect from Hyperion, is first-rate. If you don't know Façadem the complete work is great fun. William Walton arranged some of the music as a ballet suite but without the words something is missing.

4.0 out of 5 stars A fine version, but hardly a perfect one, May 1, 2011

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G.D. (Norway) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Walton: Facade (Audio CD)

I'll skip the complicated story concerning the background of "Façade". Suffice to say, Edith Sitwell conceived of Façade as a study on "the effect on rhythm, and on speed, of the use of rhymes, assonances and dissonances, placed outwardly and inwardly (at different places in the line and in most elaborate patterns". In 1922 Walton was called to the task of putting music to the numbers; it was a success though over the subsequent years numbers were added and/or dropped; 21 numbers were published (and are the well-known ones), but a total of 43 poems were at some time or other put to music. 8 numbers were published as Façade 2; the release at hand contain some additional ones lost in the long process as well, 33 in all (the booklet contains discussions of the lost or incomplete ones as well). One objection is that Hyperion has mixed up the extant works and created their own sequence, rather than giving us first Façade, then Façade 2, then the additional numbers.

But OK. How does it fare? In Façade the reciters are crucial; their articulation is in fact much of the music (the whole point is the sound of the words, and certainly not their content), and they need crucially to avoid over-characterization or putting too much personality into it. I think Eleanor Bron and Richard Stilgoe fare good, in general. Some of the numbers are virtually impossible to do right, but the impression here is favorable - except for Stilgoe's sometimes annoying mannerisms. Brons is generally very fine, although some of the numbers lack a little precision. The instrumental contributions from the Nash Ensemble under David Lloy-Jones are splendid, however; crisp and sharply articulated (this is certainly Walton's most obviously Stravinskian work, especially in the later numbers). Hyperion does for once have a problem with the recorded balance, however - the reciters are often overshadowed in places where it is crucial that they are not. So what we've got is a fine account of a rather remarkable piece, but not a perfect one. Fans will of course need to have it for the rejected numbers (and possibly for the excellent booklet), but on the evidence of this recording it is rather obvious that the rejected numbers were rejected for a reason.

We get a bonus in a suite from Constant Lambert's music (for clarinet, trumpet, cello and percussion) to a staging of Wilde's Salome; it is an acerbic, sarcastic score that was probably effective for the stage presentation but is surely of biographical rather than musical interest.