William Walton - Facade, Suites for orchestra (1921-22 arr. 1926-38)

William Walton

(29 March 1902 – 8 March 1983) was an English composer.

During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles,

from film scores to opera

 

William Walton in 1937

Facade, Suites for orchestra (1921-22 arr. 1926-38)  

Suite No.1 (1926) 00:00-11:35
Polka - Waltz - Swiss Jodelling Song - Tango-Pasodoble - Tarantella Sevillana.
Suite No.2 (1938) 11:35-22:50
Fanfare - Scotch Rhapsody - Country Dance - Noche Espagnole - Popular Song - Old Sir Faulk.
Performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Louis Frémaux

Edith Sitwell in 1912, by Roger Fry

Façade is a series of poems by Edith Sitwell, best known as part of Façade – An Entertainmen in

which the poems are recited over an instrumental accompaniment by William Walton.

The poems and the music exist in several versions.

Sitwell began to publish some of the Façade poems in 1918, in the literary magazine Wheels.

In 1922 many of them were given an orchestral accompaniment by Walton, Sitwell's protégé.

The "entertainment" was first performed in public in 1923, and achieved both fame and notoriety

for its unconventional form. Walton arranged two suites of his music for full orchestra.

When Frederick Ashton made a ballet of Façade in 1931, Sitwell did not wish her poems to be part of it, and the orchestral arrangements were used.

After Sitwell's death, Walton published supplementary versions of Façade for speaker and small

ensemble using numbers dropped between the premiere and the publication of the full score in

1951.