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The original instrumentation also included bass drum, castanets, glockenspiel and gong.
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The revised version is scored for violin solo 2 flutes (second doubling piccolo) 2 oboes (second doubling cor anglais) 2 clarinets 2 bassoons 4 horns 2 trumpets in B-flat 3 trombones timpani 2 percussion (side drum cymbals tambourine xylophone) harp and strings. The concerto takes about thirty minutes in performance. This revised version was first performed on 17 January 1944, in Wolverhampton, by Holst and the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent. Walton later revised the orchestration, in particular reducing the number of percussion instruments. In November 1941, at a Royal Philharmonic Society concert at the Royal Albert Hall, Walton conducted the first British performance, with the soloist Henry Holst, former leader of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, who had settled in England. The contract between composer and soloist gave Heifetz the exclusive rights to the concerto for two years, but as he could not travel to Britain he waived them to allow the work to be given there. Walton could not travel to the US, and the world premiere of the concerto was given by Heifetz and the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Artur Rodziński on 7 December 1939. The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 forced Heifetz and Walton to abandon their plans. It was agreed that he should premiere the work in Boston, with Walton conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and then, after several more performances in the US, Heifetz would give the British premiere in London in March 1940. The British Council hoped to present the premiere of the concerto during the 1939 New York World's Fair, along with new works by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arthur Bliss and Arnold Bax given during the event, but Heifetz was otherwise committed on the proposed date of the concert.
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In mid-1939 he visited Heifetz in New York to work on the piece together, incorporating the violinist's suggestions for making the solo part as effective as possible. During the course of composition he was bitten by a tarantula and marked the incident by incorporating a tarantella into the work in a passage he called "quite gaga, I may say, and of doubtful propriety". After meeting Heifetz in London, Walton accepted a commission for a concerto, but he did not begin work on the piece until early 1938, when he went with his partner, Alice Wimborne, to Ravello, where he worked on the concerto for several months. In 1936 William Walton had established a position among the leading British composers of the day, but he was a slow and far from prolific worker and in that year he felt obliged to choose between accepting a commission from Jascha Heifetz or one from Joseph Szigeti and Benny Goodman, who wanted a work for violin and clarinet. The assembled players show a clear commitment to the music, contributing much to the enjoyment of listening to this recording.Background and first performances The adventurous Toccata and the Two Pieces are persuasively performed by the Naxos team. The album is the result of a Guildhall School research project entitled ‘Walton: his voice through the violin’, inspired by violinist Matthew Jones’s lifelong love of Walton’s music. The presence of the often overlooked Toccata is unusual, and shows a dimension of Walton’s music that is rarely given mention. Many of the works in this programme are not unfamiliar on recordings, but this is the first single-disc release to include all of the composer’s chamber works involving both violin and piano. Matthew Jones and Annabel Thwaite’s recording of works by Benjamin Britten (Naxos 8.573136) was summed up as ‘superb’ by BBC Music Magazine. They offer a fascinating glimpse of Walton’s stylistic journey, from the youthful exuberance of the early Piano Quartet and the Toccata to the unconventional but masterful Violin Sonata, and the Two Pieces with their connection to his music for films. These four works represent all of Sir William Walton’s chamber music involving both violin and piano, as well as being a microcosm of his compositional output between 19.