William Walton
William Walton wrote across film, opera and the concert hall. His catalogue includes Belshazzar's Feast, the Viola Concerto, coronation marches such as Orb and Sceptre, and the light, demanding Five Bagatelles for guitar.
Façade began as an avant-garde setting of Edith Sitwell's verses for reciter and small ensemble and later thrived as ballet music. Belshazzar's Feast is a large-scale cantata of Old Testament drama, brass and chorus. The Viola Concerto and First Symphony brought him to the centre of British orchestral life; Crown Imperial and Orb and Sceptre gave public ceremony an Elgarian stride. He scored films for Laurence Olivier's Shakespeare adaptations and other wartime productions, then returned to chamber and vocal writing. On guitar, the Five Bagatelles sound like trifles until their virtuosity and stormy turns declare otherwise. Seasonal carols such as What Cheer! and All This Time keep his choral voice in regular use.
Compositions by William Walton appear on
Midsummer's Night
Jonathan Paget’s solo guitar recital traces an enchanted night-world of magic, mischief and romance, from Walton’s sparkling Five Bagatelles through Barrios’s Paraguayan dreamscapes to Sculthorpe’s Aboriginal dreaming.
Melbourne Sounds Grand
Thomas Heywood’s first commercial recording presents the Melbourne Town Hall Grand Concert Organ in a grand-concert programme of virtuoso showpieces and transcriptions, chosen to display its orchestral colour, dynamics and power.
We Wish You a Merry Christmas
The Choir of Ormond College, directed by Douglas Lawrence, presents a varied selection of twenty-eight Christmas carols. Familiar favourites sit beside Bach and Pachelbel organ pieces and twentieth-century settings.
When David heard that Absalom was slain
The Choir of Ormond College specialised in liturgical music of the 16th and 20th centuries. This recording also includes psalm settings, among them Allegri’s Miserere, a setting of the penitential Psalm 51 once reserved for the Sistine Chapel in Holy Week.