A Giant Refreshed
WHATEVER the merits and weak- nesses of Walton's opera Troilus and Cressida, its success seems to have done him good. After a gap of nearly' twenty years, he has found the creative impetus,to embark on a new series of big symphonic works. The first of these, the Cello Concerto, has now appeared, and few could have expected anything so fine. It is entrancing, a work of a man refreshed in spirit, a happy work of a man who having by an effort of will forced himself out of a state of despondent inactivity has sud- denly found his inspiration renewed by the sheer joy of having done so. Not that its tone is jubilant. It is almost wholly subdued, but along with the rhetorical vehemence of the old works, something of their plangent intensity has also gone. This seems to be the result of a conscious effort on Walton's part to make a more varied use of the gift that has already distinguished him as one of the outstanding lyrical melodists among composers today. The character of the whole work is defined at the outset in the first ten-bar melody on the solo cello, which begins and ends with familiar Waltonian gambits but in the middle introduces some quite unexpected and uncharacteristic rhythms and interval-sequences. It is a most subtly and beautifully constructed melody, gradually embracing all twelve notes, gently marking each new acquisition, and ending on the note tonally most remote from the first one, yet firmly anchored to .a frequently re- curring G. With a dozen other subtleties of organisation and phrase-relationship, it belongs to the melodic world of Ii mio tesoro or the open- ing tune of Beethoven's F major Razumovsky quartet, where inspiration and deliberation Add up to magic. The mixture of familiar and new in the con- certo as a whole is in much the same proportion as in this opening melody, though the pattern is turned inside out. In the complete work, which is similar in form to the thirty-year-old Viola Concerto, it is the middle movement, a typical Waltonian scherzo, that is familiar, while the two slower movements that enclose it bring the surprises. Both arc fascinating, the first very brief and economical, very consistent in mood, yet tantalisingly rich in things that the ear wants to hear again, the other very varied and episodic, with two big cadenzas for the soloist, before a long coda in which the main thematic threads of the movement are drawn together and mar- vellously interwoven with those of the first movement. Like the opening melody, these two movements have a beauty of design and relation- ship that arouses an almost aching desire to identify and account analytically for the endless subtleties of detail in which it lies. Walton here, like Shostakovich in his recent works, has sud- denly re-emerged, when he had almost been given up for lost, as one of the handful of great com- posers working today. The existence of Troilus, which despite its success did not re-establish him in this way, only makes the new development the more remarkable—and the more welcome. Few perhaps will feel any need to have second thoughts about Troilus itself, but one at least will be hurrying at the first opportunity to have another look at the Violin Sonata, to see whether after seven years some words do not have to
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