Editing William Walton (section)

===Orchestral music===

====Overtures and short orchestral pieces====
[[File:Scapino-balli-di-sfessani.jpg|thumb|upright|right|alt=caricature of seventeen century man in full length right profile|[[Jacques Callot]]'s etching inspired Walton's ''Scapino'' overture]]
[[File:Paul Hindemith 1923.jpg|thumb|right|upright|[[Paul Hindemith]], who premiered Walton's Viola Concerto]]
Walton's first work for full orchestra, ''Portsmouth Point'' (1925), inspired by a [[Thomas Rowlandson|Rowlandson]] print of the same name, depicts a rumbustious dockside scene (in Kennedy's phrase, "the sailors of [[H.M.S. Pinafore]] have had a night on the tiles") in a fast moving score full of [[syncopation]] and [[Cross-beat|cross-rhythm]] that for years proved hazardous for conductors and orchestras alike.<ref>Hussey, p. 407; and Franks, Alan (1974), liner notes to EMI CD CDM 7 64723 2</ref> Throughout his career, Walton wrote works in this pattern, such as the lively Comedy Overture ''Scapino'', a virtuoso piece commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, described by ''The Musical Times'' as "an ingenious blending of fragments in exhilarating profusion."<ref name=evans>Evans, Edwin. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/922336 "William Walton"], ''The Musical Times'', December 1944, p. 368 {{subscription}}</ref> Walton's post-war works in this genre are the ''Johannesburg Festival Overture'' (1956), the "diverting but hard-edged ''Capriccio burlesco''" (1968),<ref name=grove/> and the longer ''[[Partita for Orchestra|Partita]]'' (1957), written for the [[Cleveland Orchestra]], described by ''Grove'' as "an impressively concentrated score with a high-spirited finale [with] steely counterpoint and orchestral virtuosity".<ref name=grove/> Walton's shorter pieces also include two tributes to musical colleagues, ''[[Variations on a Theme by Hindemith]]'' (1963) and the ''Improvisations on an Impromptu of Benjamin Britten'' (1969), in both of which the source material is gradually transformed as Walton's own voice becomes more prominent.<ref name=grove/> The critic Hugh Ottaway commented that in both pieces "the interaction of two musical personalities is{{space}}... fascinating".<ref>Ottaway, Hugh. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/956101 "Belshazzar's Feast; Improvisations on an Impromptu of Benjamin"], ''The Musical Times'', November 1972, p. 1095 {{subscription}}</ref>

====Concertos and symphonies====
Walton's first successful large-scale concert work, the Viola Concerto (1929) is in marked contrast to the raucous ''Portsmouth Point''; despite the common influence of jazz and of the music of Hindemith and Ravel, in its structure and romantic longing it owes much to the Elgar [[Cello Concerto (Elgar)|Cello Concerto]].<ref name=ocm/> In this work, wrote [[Edward Sackville-West, 5th Baron Sackville|Edward Sackville-West]] and [[Desmond Shawe-Taylor (music critic)|Desmond Shawe-Taylor]] in ''[[The Record Guide]]'', "the lyric poet in Walton, who had so far been hidden under a mask of irony, fully emerged."<ref>Sackville-West and Shawe-Taylor, p. 848</ref> Walton followed this pattern in his two subsequent concertos, for Violin (1937) and for Cello (1956). Each opens reflectively, is in three movements, and contrasts agitated and jagged passages with warmer romantic sections.<ref name=grove/> The Cello Concerto is more introspective than the two earlier concertos, with a ticking rhythm throughout the work suggesting the inexorable passage of time.<ref name=grove/>

The two symphonies are strongly contrasted with one another. The First is on a large scale, reminiscent at times of Sibelius.<ref>Cardus, Neville. "William Walton's First Symphony". ''The Manchester Guardian'', 7 November 1935, p. 10</ref> Grove says of the work that its "orgiastic power, coruscating malice, sensuous desolation and extroverted swagger" make the symphony a tribute to Walton's tenacity and inventive facility.<ref name=grove/> Critics have always differed on whether the finale lives up to the rest of the work.<ref name=evans/><ref>Cox, p. 193</ref> In comparison with the First, the Second Symphony struck many reviewers as lightweight, and, as with many of Walton's works of the 1950s, it was regarded as old-fashioned. It is a very different kind of work from the First Symphony. David Cox describes it as "more a ''[[divertimento]]'' than a symphony ... highly personal, unmistakably Walton throughout",<ref>Cox, p. 195</ref> and Kennedy calls it "somewhat enigmatic in mood, and a superb example of Walton's more mature, concise, and mellow post-1945 style."<ref name=dnb/>

====Music for ballets, plays and films====
{{also|William Walton: film music}}
Although generally a slow and perfectionist composer, Walton was capable of working quickly when necessary. Some of his stage and screen music was written to tight deadlines. He regarded his ballet and incidental music as of less importance than his concert works and was generally dismissive of what he produced.<ref>Kennedy, p. 127</ref>

Of his ballets for Sadler's Wells, ''The Wise Virgins'' (1940) is an arrangement of eight extracts from choral and instrumental music by Bach.{{refn|Later in 1940 Walton further arranged the music into a six-movement suite.<ref>[[David Lloyd-Jones (conductor)|Lloyd-Jones, David]] (2002), liner notes to Naxos CD 8.555868.</ref>|group= n}} ''The Quest'' (1943), written in great haste, is, according to Grove, oddly reminiscent of Vaughan Williams.<ref name=grove/> Neither of these works established itself in the regular repertoire, unlike the ballet score Walton arranged from the music of ''Façade'', the music for which was expanded for full orchestra, still retaining the jazz influences and the iconoclastic wit of the original.<ref name=ocm/> Music from ''The Quest'' and the whole of the Viola Concerto were used for another Sadler's Wells ballet, ''O.W.'', in 1972.<ref>Percival, John. "Finding the paradox of Oscar Wilde", ''The Times'', 23 February 1972, p. 11</ref>

Walton wrote little incidental music for the theatre, his music for ''Macbeth'' (1942) being one of his most notable contributions to the genre.<ref>Kennedy, pp. 113–114</ref>

Between 1934 and 1969 he wrote the music for 13 films. He arranged the ''Spitfire Prelude and Fugue'' from his own score for ''[[The First of the Few]]'' (1942). He allowed suites to be arranged from his Shakespeare film scores of the 1940s and 1950s; in these films, he mixed Elizabethan pastiche with wholly characteristic Waltonian music. Kennedy singles out for praise the [[Battle of Agincourt|Agincourt]] battle sequence in ''Henry V'', where the music makes the charge of the French knights "fearsomely real."<ref name=dnb/> Despite Walton's view that film music is ineffective when performed out of context, suites from several more of his filmscores have been assembled since his death.<ref name=grove/>