Edith Sitwell’s invitation to William Walton to collaborate on an innovative, revolutionary new work came at a critical moment in the young composer’s career, and Façade proved to be his first great success. The peerless combination of a peculiarly English dry wit, genuine pathos and superlative technical skill remains an extraordinary achievement. Sitwell’s verses conjure a satirical and poignant world of bourgeois late-Victorian England, while Walton’s settings unfailingly enhance and enrich the texts in a work in which words and music are unquestionably of equal importance. This release includes the first recording of Small Talk (1922) and three numbers first performed in 1977 but subsequently rejected by the composer.

This recording includes not only the refined and polished Façade – An Entertainment as it was left by its creators, but also includes the verses and settings that were re-worked for Façade 2 – A Further Entertainment in the 1970s and other numbers originally conceived for the work and later substituted for other verses, making this recording as complete an edition of the whole piece as anyone could desire.

The team of narrators for this recording is a particularly strong one. Hila Plitmann is a two-time Grammy Award-winning soprano and actress, while Kevin Deas has gained international renown as one of America’s leading bass-baritones. Fred Child is the host of APM’s Performance Today, the most-listened-to classical music radio show in the USA.

The Virginia Arts Festival Chamber Players conducted by JoAnn Falletta have recorded Schoenberg’s arrangements of Mahler songs (8573536) in a release that was an Opera News Critic’s Choice. Their recording of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale (8573537) was given a 10/10 score by ClassicsToday.com, and considered by Gramophone to be ‘a fine performance all round’.

Grammy Award-winning conductor JoAnn Falletta serves as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and music director laureate of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra. She is also a leading recording artist for Naxos, winning her most recent Grammy Award in 2019 as conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra for Kenneth Fuchs’s Spiritualist (8559824). Her Naxos recording of John Corigliano’s Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan (8559331) received two Grammy Awards in 2008. Falletta is a member of the esteemed American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has served as a member of the National Council on the Arts, recipient of many prestigious conducting awards and was named Performance Today’s Classical Woman of the Year 2019.