Symphony No. 2 (Walton)

Peter Heyworth praised Walton's aesthetic convictions but criticised the composer for failing to develop and for stereotyping his own style.

Early in his career critical consensus was that William Walton appeared to be on the cusp of a breakthrough as a modernist composer, shown by a series of compositions whose stylistic trajectory culminated with the first three movements of his First Symphony.

[9][10] Walton had other commissions to complete, including the Partita for Orchestra, music for a television series based on Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and Anon in Love (a song cycle for Peter Pears and Julian Bream).

[14] In a 1961 interview with the musicologist Eric Salzman for The New York Times, Walton said that the atmosphere of his home on the Italian island of Ischia did not encourage hard work.

In reference to the challenges he faced in the creation of the earlier work, Walton joked that this time he would complete the finale first and have it performed alone.

[27] Walton's biographer Neil Tierney has likened the symphony to a large-scale divertimento,[28] an opinion echoed by the music critic Michael Kennedy, in whose view it would have been more appropriate to have labelled the work a "sinfonietta".

[22] The opening movement in sonata form, marked "Allegro molto", begins in 34; it is mainly derived from the leap of a major seventh.

The critic Frank Howes describes the next section as "noisy with glissandi, percussion, brass, and short snaps and stutters on the strings".

[27][31] The critic Bayan Northcott writes that cumulatively "the trapping of [the first movement's] gestural fun and games in a singularly constricted and dissonant harmonic field produces as unsettling an effect as anything in Walton".

[33] This gives way to a passage of ascending and descending figures on woodwinds, celesta, harps, and strings framing a solo horn.

It opens in 34 with a massive statement in unison by the entire orchestra of the theme, which is composed of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale.

[36] Walton rebutted that perception to Salzman:[15] Although it resembles the tone rows used by the composers of the Second Viennese School (and by Walton himself in the second movement of his Violin Sonata, 1949)[37] the theme is securely rooted in G minor and is employed as a cantus firmus, similar to Benjamin Britten's use of this device in his opera The Turn of the Screw.

[35] It is followed by a succession of ten brief variations that lead into a fugato section and the movement's coda: After the score was published, the conductor and critic David Lloyd-Jones wrote in 1961 that the fugato section was "a barren piece of writing [that] presents an almost insurmountable problem of articulation for the strings at the composer's tempo", and called the coda "a pot-pourri of Waltonian cliché".

[41] The concert programme also included Berg's Violin Concerto, a work based on a twelve-tone series that – like the passacaglia in Walton's symphony – begins with triadic intervals.

[9] Walton made minor changes to the score after the first performance, in time for the work's London début, at the Royal Festival Hall on 23 November 1960.

Marius Flothuis, the Concertgebouw's artistic director, suggested inviting the composer to attend the rehearsals and local premiere.

[52] A. K. Holland, the music critic of the Liverpool Daily Post, said that Walton had no reason to be dissatisfied by the audience's reception to the symphony's premiere.

He continued by saying that the work "sometimes [seemed to be] a Waltonian synthesis" of compositional tropes that had previously been used in the First Symphony, Scapino, and the concertos for Viola and Violin.

Cardus admitted that he did not understand the symphony's first movement, but nonetheless faulted it for relying on technical virtuosity rather than "inner imagination" to achieve its resolution.

[54] Felix Aprahamian warmly welcomed the work and congratulated the composer for entirely avoiding "the inhumanly conceived desiccations of an ingenious but tone-deaf avant-garde".

He decried the composer for descending into stereotyping of his own style in the finale's fugato and for "[resorting] to bombast in a somewhat too apparent attempt to bring [the Second Symphony] to an end with a big bang".

[51] Despite his evaluation of the symphony, Heyworth also praised aspects of it, including what he felt were passages of striking beauty in the "Lento assai" that he compared to the work of Elgar and Richard Strauss:[51] The only test of an idiom's validity is whether a composer can make it his own, and, eclectic though Walton's musical language may be, there leaps from almost every bar an intense sense of character, compounded of that odd assortment of jauntiness, irony, and an underlying melancholy.

A creative artist often reflects the society that gives him birth, and who are we to object if [Walton], like most of us, prefers to look backward, provided that he does it his own way?

[...] Still, whatever its defects of form, [the Second Symphony] warms the heart, and at least Walton cannot be accused of suffering from the national disease of castrated good taste: there is no lavender water in his lyricism.

Even so, his concluded that it was "an engaging work [that exhibited] Walton's brilliant orchestral mastery, his humor, his compassion, and, thank God, his ability still to do something interesting within the diatonic system".

[43] Harold C. Schonberg, the chief music critic of The New York Times, was even more approving of Walton, whom he called "the dean of English composers".

[1] To prepare for the first studio recording, Szell programmed the Second Symphony during the Cleveland Orchestra's tour of the eastern United States in early 1961.

[66] Walton told the young composer Oliver Knussen in 1981 that the symphony had received: The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music comments that although the Second Symphony prompted Szell to direct the Cleveland Orchestra "in one of its most spectacular performances on record", Previn and the LSO "give another brilliant performance which in some ways gets closer to the heart of the music with its overtones of the composer’s romantic opera, Troilus and Cressida".

[68] The Gramophone reviewer of Gardner's 2015 recording called it "a superbly perceptive account ... a conspicuously insightful reading of this underrated score – arguably the most gripping to have come my way since Szell, Previn, and Mackerras.