The Viola Concerto by William Walton was written in 1929 and first performed at the Queen's Hall, London on 3 October of that year by Paul Hindemith as soloist and the composer conducting.
[1] His exuberant and harmonically edgy concert overture Portsmouth Point (1926) maintained his reputation as an enfant terrible.
[2] Towards the end of 1928 the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham suggested that Walton should write a concerto for the violist Lionel Tertis, for whom composers including Vaughan Williams and Bax had written major works.
He said he considered the concerto potentially his finest work to date, although whether this assessment would hold true would depend on how the third movement turned out.
[8] The first performance was at the Proms at the Queen's Hall, London, on 3 October 1929; Hindemith was the soloist and the Henry Wood Symphony Orchestra[n 1] was conducted by the composer.
[14] When it was selected for performance at the International Society for Contemporary Music festival in Liège in September 1930, Tertis was the soloist, with Walton conducting.
[15] Walton was given to revising his works after their first performances,[16] and in 1961 he thinned the orchestration of the Viola Concerto, reducing the woodwind from triple to double, omitting one trumpet and the tuba, and adding a harp.
The violist Frederick Riddle, with whom Walton performed the work many times, made some adjustments to the solo line.
He understood that Walton approved his changes and intended to incorporate them in the score of the revision, but when it was published, in 1962, the original line remained intact.
[22] In his study of Walton, Michael Kennedy comments that in its design the Viola Concerto resembles Elgar's Cello Concerto in beginning with a slow ("or at any rate ruminative") movement followed by a quick scherzo, and concentrating most weight into the finale, "which ends in a mood of pathos by recalling the principal theme of the first movement".
[25] After a three-bar introduction in which muted strings and low clarinet establish the tonality of A minor the viola enters with a melancholy 98 theme, in the middle register of the instrument.
[32] In The Manchester Guardian, Eric Blom wrote, "This young composer is a born genius" and said that it was tempting to call the concerto the best thing in recent music of any nationality.
[35] A dissenting voice was that of Sir Edward Elgar, who heard the concerto at the Three Choirs Festival in 1932 – the only time the two composers met.