| Description: | Sir William Turner Walton, OM (29 March 1902 – 8 March 1983) was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera. His best-known works include Façade, the cantata Belshazzar's Feast, the Viola Concerto and the First Symphony.
Born in Oldham, Lancashire, the son of a musician, Walton was a chorister and then an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford.
Walton was a slow worker, painstakingly perfectionist, and his complete body of work across his long career is not large.
During the Second World War Walton was exempted from military service on the understanding that he would compose music for wartime propaganda films. In addition to driving ambulances, he was attached to the Army Film Unit as music adviser. He wrote scores for six films during the war – some that he thought "rather boring" and some that have become classics such as The First of the Few (1942) and Laurence Olivier's adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry V (1944).
Two photos of Walton, including one with a koala bear, and a photo of Christ Church, Oxford, are attached below.
Recently, I've been given the opportunity to make some "demos" and to do a review of the fine new sample set of the Steinmayer organ at St. Magnus in Marktoberdorf.
While the organ is modest in size, it does possess variety and color, and can play a pretty wide spectrum of the literature.
I hope you will check out the review, which should be coming soon!
These pieces show some of the varied "color schemes" of the instrument. :-) |
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