Walton's Viola Concerto
\WITHOUT being in the least folksy or provincial, Walton’s Viola Concerto is as characteristically English as (say) Fauré’s Requiem is undeniably French. Why this is so, is perhaps difficult to explain without falling into clichés like the one about French clarity and English lyricism. It is one of those things best known to the ear and the imagination. The Concerto is also a young work, with a grave and youthful beauty. Indeed, one is at first surprised to find that music so assured, so securely poised between joy and melancholy, is almost contemporary with Belshazzar’s Feast, and that it antedates by a few years the rumbustious symphony. In the unexpectedly unsatisfactory recording with William Primrose (heard recently from 1YC) the passages of agitation and disquiet, in the middle, are perhaps exaggerated. Yet one can still follow the discourse of that noble instrument, the viola, and experience the serenity of the opening, the flashes of pageantry, and the meditative close. It is surely (as the late Constant Lambert once described it) "that least sensational] yet most satisfving of all things. a finished and well-
balanced work of art."
M. K.
J.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19530410.2.20.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 717, 10 April 1953, Page 10
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193Walton's Viola Concerto New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 717, 10 April 1953, Page 10
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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