Gramophone November 2025
Editor's choice

Jonathan Aasgaard (cello), Sinfonia of London, John Wilson

Walton: Scapino: A Comedy Overture
Walton: Cello Concerto
Walton: Symphony No. 1 in B flat minor

The First Symphony was largely inspired by the composer’s tempestuous love affair with the widowed Baroness Imma von Doernberg, whom Walton met in 1929 and with whom he was living on the Continent in the early 1930s. Although the work was long in gestation, with a particular delay in the composition of the finale, the result was universally acclaimed as an outstanding success, with John Ireland commenting “unlike any other English symphony, this is in the real line of symphonic tradition. It is simply colossal, grand, original, and moving to the emotions to the most extreme degree... It has established you as the most vital and original genius in Europe”.

Walton’s star was in the descendent through the 1950’s, with a poor reception to his opera Troilus & Cressida, and equally negative comments for his Cello Concerto, which was widely considered to be embarrassingly old-fashioned in its essentially neo-romantic idiom. Commissioned by Gregor Piatigorsky (at the suggestion of Heifetz), the work was first performed in Boston under Charles Munch in January 1957, with the UK première under Sir Malcolm Sargent following a month later. Walton was unable to attend that concert as he was hospitalised following a car accident on the journey to London from his home in Italy. Now widely perceived as one of Walton’s most important late scores, the work is performed here by Sinfonia of London’s principal cellist Jonathan Aasgaard. Recorded in Surround Sound, and available as a Hybrid SACD.