When Sir Neville Marriner happened upon William Walton in a London hotel, he immediately attempted to convince the composer to write a work for performance by the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields under Marriner's baton. Though Walton declined this initial proposal, Marriner was able to persuade Walton to orchestrate his String Quartet in A minor. The resulting piece, the Sonata for String Orchestra, was premiered by the Academy under Marriner in March 1972.

Walton's colleague Malcolm Arnold was enlisted to aid in the transcription, completing the last movement under Walton's supervision. The composer himself carried out the majority of the work, however. As a whole, the orchestration retains the general form and character of the original, and in fact, the final three movements hardly deviate from the quartet version at all. In transcribing the opening movement, however, Walton made several considerable alterations: steering a modulation to a different key, omitting some passages, streamlining others, even occasionally adding altogether new material.

The clear sonata form of the opening movement remains intact, however, with its contrasting themes: a soft, lyrical line supported by various plaintive countermelodies; and a jarring sforzando figure leading to a rhythmically agitated 5/4 passage. The development jostles these elements before initiating a lively fugato, leading eventually to a compressed recapitulation. The scherzando flavor of the Presto second movement loses a bit of its bite and agility in the context of full strings, but makes up for it in the wider range of exaggerated orchestrational gestures that the recasting affords. The lush third movement is rendered predictably richer and a bit more viscous by the softened sound of the combined strings. Like the first movement, it assumes a sonata form, though the transformations performed in the development and recapitulation on the expository material are more extreme and the connections less apparent. The rondo finale takes on a rather boisterous attitude (one familiar to the quicker passages in many of Walton's works), the repeating rondo theme or segments thereof alternating with various episodic ideas.

Perhaps most striking about this transcription is that it does not merely translate the notes from one medium to another. A master orchestrator, Walton (and in the finale, Arnold) enhances each idea to dramatic effect through idiomatic instrumentation. Likewise, he frequently utilizes the original quartet texture in order to create a kind of intimacy and immediacy that is difficult to achieve outside of the chamber music realm. Expert Walton interpreter Christopher Palmer even suggests an alternate title: "Concerto for String Quartet and String Orchestra."

© All Music Guide

###

Aside from an early and unfortunate venture into the string quartet realm which the composer quickly withdrew from public performance, the Quartet in A minor stands as William Walton's only effort in the medium. Walton began work on the piece in 1945. The return to the string quartet genre did not come easily to Walton. As he wrote to a friend in 1945, "I'm in a suicidal struggle with four strings and am making no headway whatever. Brick walls, slit trenches...I'm afraid I've done film music for too long." Despite his initial difficulty, however the work gradually took shape—he wrote to the same friend a short time later that he had "captured a trench" and "overcome some barbed wire entanglements"—and Walton finished it in time for its premiere in 1947 by the Blech Quartet.

The work assumes largely traditional forms, to the point that thereafter many of Walton's critics, impatient with the composer's accessibility, familiarity, and unassuming expressive nuance, began to complain that his music was unadventurous, that it broke no new ground, that it merely comprised "the mixture as before." True, the musical language employed by Walton in this work offers little by way of technical or conceptual innovation, and occasionally entire passages go by that could pass for the work of a late Beethovenian contemporary or a would-be Brahms. Still, for most audiences historiography holds only so much sway when it comes down to an actual encounter with the music in concert or on recording, and what Walton's quartet may lack in innovation or surprises it makes up for in skill of construction and sincerity of expression.

The first of the quartet's four movements is cast in a fairly traditional sonata form, the thematic constituency of the exposition being first, a soft and lyrical line presented by the viola and adopted with subtle variations by the violins; and second, a jarring sforzando figure introduced by the first violin in terse staccato notes, which gradually cedes to an equally agitated passage set in quintuple meter. The expository material is reworked in the development section until finally settling into a lively fugato texture, followed by a transition into a condensed recapitulation. The second movement, marked Presto, takes on a scherzando character. Its form is an irregular combination of two closely related sections in a playful triple meter, the second section distinguished by its employment of a drone bass. The third movement, cast, like the first, in a sonata form, begins slow and stark, with an elegiac melody in the viola that wanders gracefully through various harmonic areas. As the viola moves into a new thematic area, the rest of the ensemble provides quaint pizzicato accompaniment. The development and recapitulation are less transparent than those of the first movement, as Walton takes greater liberties in revisiting and revising the initial material. The rondo finale adopts one of Walton's characteristically punchy rhythmic attitudes, the refrain material counterposed with various episodic figurations.

© 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.