The final completed work to emerge from the desk of composer William Walton before his death in 1983 was the Prologo e Fantasia—a short piece for orchestra commissioned by Mstislav Rostropovich and the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, D.C., and premiered by the same conductor and ensemble in 1982 in the Royal Festival Hall in London. Though brief and rather perfunctory, the work nonetheless suggests a somewhat new stylistic avenue that the composer seems to have been considering, one that was unfortunately left unexplored further. The piece exhibits a wide range of expressive flexibility, particularly in its use of perceptually free and almost speech-like rhythmic gestures, its variety of phrase length and shape, and its ever and drastically changing sense of dramatic pace.

The opening Prologo, rendered in an evocative Lento maestoso, takes the form of a kind of antiphonal (or "call and response") recitative in the strings, based on a short chromatic ascent followed by what sounds like a modified fragment of the central \of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. The durations and contours seem to develop slowly and organically (a quality that we heard to a lesser extent a decade before in the stark lines and textures of Walton's Improvisations on an Impromptu of Benjamin Britten from 1970).

The Fantasia assumes a lively character that seems more familiar to Walton's work, with the kind of animation so conspicuously absent (to deliberate effect) in the Prologo. As the conflicts of the Fantasia section play out and finally culminate, Walton carries us via thematic interconnections into the final section, which bears the curious mark "Fuga finta," or "Pretend fugue." Semi-imitative textures draw together for the grand chordal conclusion with which the Prologo e Fantasia ends (and the compositional output of William Walton as well).

© All Music Guide

Portions of Content Provided by All Music Guide.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.