London Symphony Orchestra Perform William Walton at Carnegie Hall

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 14 March 2025 13:50

Written by Jack Angstreich

Soloist Yunchan Lim with the London Symphony Orchestra. Photo by Chris Lee.

At the wonderful Stern Auditorium, on the evening of Thursday, March 6th, I had the pleasure to attend a superb concert presented by Carnegie Hall—the second of two on consecutive nights—featuring the excellent London Symphony Orchestra under the very distinguished direction of its Chief Conductor, Sir Antonio Pappano.

The event started brilliantly with an amazing performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s incomparable Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18, with the terrific soloist, Yunchan Lim. The very beginning of the initial, Moderato movementhas a premonitory character, but it very quickly becomes the vehicle for a moody, passionate Romanticism, while the piano enters with the exquisite, primary theme; the music intensifies, ultimately concluding forcefully. The ensuing, slow movement, marked Adagio sostenuto, is extraordinarily lyrical, if meditative; it too builds to an early climax before closing softly. The Allegro scherzando finale is dynamic, propulsive and dazzling, but with quiet interludes, ending triumphantly. Exceedingly enthusiastic applause elicited an exceptionally beautiful encore from Lim: Franz Liszt’s "Sonetto del Petrarca No. 104" from Années de pèlerinage, deuxième année: Italie, No. 5.

The second half of the concert was also remarkable: a sterling realization of the undervalued, seldom played Symphony No. 1 of William Walton. According to the useful notes on the program by Jack Sullivan, “Walton wrote it during an unhappy love affair to a young, widowed baroness he could not hope to marry because of his lower-middle-class social status.” He adds that “The work is dedicated to the lover who broke up with him, Baroness Irma von Doernberg.” The composer said, “This awful tempestuous work was really all her fault.” Sullivan comments:

Nonetheless, the symphony took a while to enter the repertory, partly because, as Walton ruefully said, “it is so damn hard to play.”

In 2021, the late critic Terry Teachout eloquently wrote the following about the piece:

The First Symphony, above all, is a work of colossal force, one that has always belonged in the international repertoire, and this symphony as well as its companion pieces of the ’30s deserve to be known as masterpieces whose accessibility is a mark not of their superficiality but their distinction. They may not sound all that English, but they sound like no one else … and their time will come.

The first movement—it has a tempo of Allegro assai—begins suspensefully, rapidly becoming very turbulent—but with subdued episodes—and finishing emphatically. The succeeding Scherzo, marked Presto con malizia, is breathless in momentum for much of its length, but again with less exuberant passages, and it ends abruptly and unconventionally. The slow movement (Andante con malinconia) is inward and emotional, but song-like at times, and it closes gently. The annotator records that:

Walton wrote the ending first, so he knew where the symphony was heading. “I always looked forward to the last movement when I was conducting it,” he said.

The Maestoso finale is stirring, exciting and dramatic—even sometimes extravagant—but, again, with more tentative sections; it concludes affirmatively, if not pronouncedly so. A deserved standing ovation was rewarded with another magnificent encore: the unsurpassably enchanting Valse triste of Jean Sibelius.