By the mid-1930s William Walton was an established composer, known for works including Façade, the overture Portsmouth Point, the Viola Concerto, the cantata Belshazzar's Feast and the recently completed First Symphony.
[1] Turning to less demanding and more remunerative work, Walton wrote his first film score (for Paul Czinner's Escape Me Never) and collaborated with Osbert Sitwell and Frederick Ashton on a short ballet for Charles B. Cochran's 1936 revue, Follow the Sun.
[1] Czinner asked Walton to write the music for a second film, As You Like It, starring Elizabeth Bergner and Laurence Olivier, which premiered at the Carlton Theatre, Haymarket, London on 3 September 1936.
In 1986 Carl Davis extracted a seven-movement suite from the As You Like It score, and in 1989 Christopher Palmer arranged some of the music into a continuous five-section "Poem for Orchestra", with solo singer in the "Under the Greenwood Tree" section.
[5] Palmer's arrangement of the music is in five continuous sections: This version was first recorded by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields directed by Sir Neville Marriner in 1989, released the following year.