Kyung Wha Chung’s performance of Walton’s violin concerto for his eightieth birthday in 1982 at the Festival Hall in London, in the presence of Walton, who died in the following year. Previn conducts the Philharmonia. 2nd movement. 3rd.
Walton was moved. If you can hear past the bad sound and video, it’s a wonderful performance. Previn has an affinity with this music. Walton composed it (mainly) in 1938 at the Villa Cimbrone in Ravello at the height of his affair with Alice Wimborne. She died in 1948. In the same year he married an Argentinian heiress, Susana Gil Passo.
It is one of the great violin concerti, the equal of Mendelssohn’s and Prokofiev’s. One thinks of Mendelssohn because of the way the theme starts immediately and because of something Italianate. There is an affinity with Elgar, of course. I posted part of the Heifetz recording here.
I was invited to a private celebration of Susana Walton last year and met Walton’s OUP publisher (who confused Varii Capricci with Prologo e Fantasia: I write that only to prove that I know Walton’s music) and the great critic and Mancunian, friend of Vaughan Williams and Walton and biographer of Walton, Elgar, Mahler, Strauss, Britten, Boult and Barbirolli, Michael Kennedy.
Sad today to see williamwalton.net disabled “due to a billing issue”. It was an important resource. Susana would be storming out of La Mortella with something to say about that.
February 8 2012 at 10:59 pm
The cameras were presumably instructed not to cut away to Walton until the end.
February 9 2012 at 12:08 am
She OWNS the Walton, as a YouTube comment under the third movement says.
It has to be said, though, that this work sounds almost diseased next to the Mendelssohn.