The new Chandos album devoted to William Walton—John Wilson conducting the Sinfonia of London, with Jonathan Aasgaard as soloist in the Cello Concerto—brings together, within a single orchestral frame, Scapino, the Concerto, and the First Symphony in B-flat minor. The result is a compact portrait of a mature Walton, focused on a kind of writing that binds together—under an almost uninterrupted tension—late-Romantic symphonic thinking, rhythmic nervousness, and a lucidly theatrical taste for color. From the very first bars, this reading asserts itself as a Walton who is more architect than fury; yet precisely for that reason, it is able to bring out with clarity the inner weave of the pieces.

Walton today: a nervous, self-aware symphonism

Symphony No. 1, built in the early 1930s in four movements, pushes the model of the grand Romantic symphonic form to its limit, bending it, however, toward a more jagged harmonic language and a dramaturgy founded on ostinatos, dissonances, and accumulations of energy that point to a disenchanted twentieth century. The Cello Concerto, written in the 1950s in three unconventional movements (Moderato, a fast central scherzo, and a finale in the form of a theme with improvisations), instead shows Walton’s more lyrical and nocturnal side, where the soloist’s cantabile is grafted onto a finely controlled structure and an orchestration that is transparent yet allusive. Within this frame, the choice to set the two titles side by side, with Scapino as a brilliant prologue, builds an arc that runs from the theatrical vitality of occasional pieces to the emotional density of the great concerto and symphonic cycles.

Symphony No. 1: controlled tension

In the first movement—a vast Allegro assai in sonata form that on its own has the concentration of a self-contained symphony—Wilson seems to privilege continuity of flow over rupture, allowing the fabric of ostinatos, timpani rolls, and harmonic progressions to grow like a single great wave rather than in episodic explosions. The “Sibelian” element of the long basses-and-timpani line, often cited as a key to reading the piece, here becomes the backbone of a construction in which layers accrue by superimposition rather than by head-on theatrical contrast, with a sense of urgency that never lapses into brutality.

In the finale, which brings the tonality back to a sunny, “majestic” B-flat major, Wilson’s aesthetic shows both its strengths and its limits: the martial opening, which anticipates certain atmospheres of Walton’s celebratory pieces, is rendered with sonic splendor and lucid blend, and the central fugal section is highly legible even at points of maximum density. Less evident, within this limpid and well-organized perspective, is the sensation of risk, of emotional imbalance, that often makes the symphony a “threatening edifice”: where others seek the fault line, this recording seeks coherence, and the listener feels more the intelligence of the architecture than the sense of the precipice.

The Cello Concerto: vigilant lyricism

The Concerto opens with a Moderato in C major, which Walton builds on a broad chromatic melody for the soloist, stretched above a regular, almost “ticking” orchestral warp: Aasgaard chooses a centered sound, warm but not languid, with a controlled vibrato that keeps the line always moving forward, avoiding any Romantic self-indulgence. The impression is that of a lucid inner monologue, continuously sustained by the orchestra rather than cradled by it: the clarity of the recording brings out well the texture of pizzicatos and small wind interventions, which become a discreet counter-song to the cello’s principal voice.

In the second movement, a rapid scherzo built on almost “sputtering” figurations and rhythmic jolts, the dialogue between soloist and orchestra is tense and graceful at once: Aasgaard’s technical agility is evident, but what strikes most is his ability to turn virtuosic passages into narrative gesture, avoiding mere effect. The finale, Theme and Improvisations, with its play of variations on the initial material and its gradual return to a meditative climate, benefits from a direction that holds together the many sections without losing the long line; and the quiet ending, with the cello descending to the low C, is shaped as a luminous leave-taking rather than a sentimental fade-out.

Performers, sound, discographic gesture

The Sinfonia of London sounds here like a “studio” orchestra in the best sense of the term: precision of attack, cohesion of registers, homogeneity of the strings, and a brass section that manages to be powerful without ever becoming granite-hard or stiff. Wilson, who has made of this ensemble an extremely supple instrument, sets up a Walton that lives on transparency and on the focusing of details: every inner line is readable, every transition of color seems thought through—sometimes even at the cost of making the emotional outbursts less wild.