New Naxos Recording by Maestro JoAnn Falletta Walton: The Complete Façades

New Naxos Recording by JoAnn Falletta

Walton: The Complete Façades

Featuring Hila Plitmann, Fred Child and Kevin Deas, Narrators

and the Virginia Arts Festival Chamber Players

Recording Includes Four World Premiere Tracks and

 Marks the Centennial of the First Performance of Walton’s Façade

Acclaimed conductor JoAnn Falletta’s newest recording, Walton: The Complete Façades, will be available September 22, 2022 on Naxos 8.584378. The recording features narrators soprano Hila Plitmann, bass-baritone Kevin Deas and American Public Media Public Radio host Fred Child, with the Virginia Arts Festival Chamber Players. This first-ever recording of the complete Façades introduces material never heard before and marks the 100th anniversary of William Walton’s youthful masterpiece. 

The Façades are a unique collaboration between the young Walton who was 18 and had just left Oxford in 1920, and the avant garde English poet, Edith Sitwell, who was the sister of Walton’s good friend at Oxford. The 20 poems, plus an opening Fanfare, set to music by Walton were considered innovative and revolutionary new works and proved to be Walton’s first great success.  

Falletta, who comments that “nothing like it had ever been created before,” calls Edith's use of language “extraordinarily rich and varied, ranging from the comic to the mundane to the haunting, poignant and sheerly beautiful,” and the music as “stunningly colorful vignettes that reflected the meaning and the rhythm of the poetry.” She adds “Walton and Sitwell treated the words as rhythmic sounds, enjoying their meaning but also reveling in the techniques of assonance, alliteration and internal rhyme.” The original Facades were premiered in the Sitwell drawing room in 1922. Fifty-seven years later, Walton, in celebration of his 75th birthday, revisited Façade and added 8 new movements to the collection. The expanded Façade 2 was premiered in 1979 at the Royal Albert Hall, at a time when Walton had become one of the most lauded composers of the 20th century. The new recording, which marks the 100th anniversary of the 1922 premiere, concludes with four world premieres including the first recording of Small Talk (1922), and three numbers, Daphne, The White Owl and The Last Galop, that were composed in 1977 but never previously performed.

Sitwell envisioned the poems as being read by a single narrator and recited them herself in the original performances, using a megaphone from behind a curtain. After reading the poems Falletta noted that they used a variety of characters, and felt it would enhance the performance by having them read in different voices. Falletta describes the three narrators, two-time GRAMMY Award-winning soprano, songwriter, and actress Hila Plitmann, acclaimed bass-baritone Kevin Deas, and Fred Child, host of APM’s Performance Today, the most popular classical music radio show in America, as a “dream team,” with each using Sitwell’s exact words with their own interpretations. 

Multiple Grammy-winning conductor JoAnn Falletta serves as Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, and Music Director Laureate of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, Principal Guest Conductor of the Brevard Music Center and Artistic Adviser to the Hawaii Symphony. As Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, Falletta became the first woman to lead a major American ensemble. With a discography of over 120 titles, Falletta is a leading recording artist for Naxos. She has won two individual Grammy Awards, including the 2021 GRAMMY® Award for Best Choral Performance as conductor of the world premiere Naxos recording, Richard Danielpour’s The Passion of Yeshua. In 2019, she won a Grammy Award as conductor of the London Symphony in the Best Classical Compendium category for Spiritualist by Kenneth Fuchs. Her Naxos recording of John Corigliano’s Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan received two Grammys in 2008. Her 2020 Naxos recording of orchestral music of Florent Schmitt with the Buffalo Philharmonic received the Diapason d’Or Award.

More information on Maestro Falletta may be found at www.joannfalletta.com.