Don'T Tell Jascha Poem by gershon hepner

For Gregor, Walton wrote a smasher,
declaring it to be his best.
“But please, ” he said, “do not tell Jascha! ”
and there the matter ought to rest,
except that being thus so curt is,
I think as a concerto poller,
unfair to Lionel, the Tertis
for whom he wrote one for viola,
although, to add to the caprice,
quite mystified, it’s not myth.
Tertis couldn’t play the piece,
whose premiere was with Hindemith.

William Walton wrote three concertos, the first for the viola (1929) , the second for the violin (1939) and the third for the cello (1957) . Of them Christopher Palmer has written, 'Walton knew little or nothing of strings as a performer. Yet his three string concertos are amongst the finest written this century.'

It was Sir Thomas Beecham who suggested, in 1928, that Walton should write a viola concerto for Lionel Tertis. According to Susana Walton, writing in her book, William Walton: Behind the Façade, Walton was somewhat perplexed and wondered why Sir Thomas thought he should be able to write such a work. At the time Walton confessed that he knew little about the viola except that it made a rather awful sound! 'The only piece of viola music he admired and knew was Berlioz's Harold in Italy, which he thought quite beautiful, although it was not highly thought of in those days.' Nevertheless, Walton rose to the challenge and proceeded with the task, finishing his Viola Concerto at Amalfi. Alas, when he sent it to Tertis, the viola virtuoso sent it back by the next post declaring it too modern. Understandably, Walton was deeply hurt. He thought of transposing it so that it would become a violin concerto but Edward Clark at the BBC sent it to Hindemith in Germany. To Walton's delight, Hindemith accepted to play the Concerto.
In 1936 Jasha Heifetz took Walton out to lunch in London and commissioned him to write a Violin Concerto for 300 pounds, a great honour from the greatest virtuoso of the day. Walton had actually been thinking of writing a piece for clarinet and violin that Benny Goodman and Joseph Szigetti had asked him to do when Spike Hughes, an old friend, introduced him to Heifetz. Lady Walton recalls, 'William was delighted and accepted [Heifetz's commission]. It had been William Primrose, the viola player whom William had met at one of Alice's [Alice Wimborne] parties, who had suggested to Heifetz to contact William. The viola concerto was by now thought successful, and Heifetz was keen on having a work written especially for him.' '…As usual writing it gave him a lot of trouble [he had refused a lucrative offer to write music for a film of Shaw's Pygmalian to concentrate on the concerto—Honegger picked the commission up]. He said he did not know how to make the violin part elaborate enough, and therefore worthy of Heifetz. In a panic, he thought he had better give it instead to Fritz Kreisler to play. Eventually he was satisfied that he had exhausted the possibilities of what one could do on a violin. Yet he always thought of it as a rather intimate piece, a bit like the Elgar concerto; as a matter of fact it is in the same key…Substantial revisions to the orchestration were made in 1943. The concerto has a more substantial element of technical virtuosity than the earlier Viola Concerto. Michael Kennedy comments: 'Like the Viola Concerto, the Violin Concerto is a declaration of love, but this time without frustration. The 'dreaming' (sognando) opening theme sets the mood of a great work in which the pyrotechnical demands on the soloist are reconciled with music of ultimate poetical expressiveness. As in the earlier concerto, the first movement theme returns in the finale and the whole work has an Italianate warmth and languor, with the rowdier side of Italy surfacing in the tarantella scherzo.' The lady with whom Walton was in love was, of course, Alice Wimborne. Walton said, 'Women have always been important to me…and I've been very lucky. Alice Wimborne—very beautiful, intelligent, kind, very rich, a grand hostess, very musical…she had all the virtues. A marvellous woman' Christopher Palmer writes, 'Walton was blissfully in love as he worked on the concerto through the late 1930s and it is tempting to relate the solo violin's expression of radiant happiness to its unrivalled capacity for free-ranging lyricism for what someone once called instrumental bel canto. We like singing when we are happy.'
The same is true of the performance of the Cello Concerto. This work was written in 1956 for Gregor Piatigorsky and he gave the first performance in Boston in January 1957 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Charles Munch. Just a few weeks later these same artists made the first recording which remains a benchmark account. The present performance was given just two years later, presumably at the Edinburgh Festival. Walton told Piatigorsky that he thought it wsa his best concerto, and added: “But please don’t tell Jascha! ”


8/23/09