NOSPR / Akiki / Hagner / An Alphabet of Emotions - NOSPR

William Walton’s Violin Concerto begins in an oneiric atmosphere – sognando (‘dreaming’), as the composer himself instructs in the score. A soaring lyrical melody rises from the violin and, although it is repeatedly carried along by quickening momentum and buffeted by dynamic waves of orchestral storms, it remains the heart of the work throughout. The melody persists even in the virtuoso second movement, modelled on the southern Italian tarantella – perhaps as a tribute to the tarantula that bit Walton while he was composing the work. Some listeners detect still more Mediterranean references in the Concerto. After all, it was written in a villa overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, where the composer had been taken by his partner, Alice Wimborne. No wonder that he repaid her with what biographer Michael Kennedy described as a musical ‘declaration of love’. 

A similar expression of love is often discerned in Schumann’s Symphony No 4 in D minor. The connection is not immediately obvious from the solemn introduction or the menacing opening of the scherzo. Instead, it lies in a recurring motif that runs through the entire work, known to musicologists as the ‘Clara theme’. Schumann is said to have used it to encode the name of his wife, whom he had married only a few months before composing the symphony. This is, of course, a hypothesis, although listening to the Romance in the second movement may help dispel some doubts.

It is perhaps unnecessary to dwell on the fondness for women expressed in Juice of Barley, the drinking song borrowed by Anna Clyne. More to the point, its melody proves admirably suited to the buoyant atmosphere of the eighteenth-century promenade concerts in London’s pleasure gardens, which Masquerade so vividly recreates.

Piotr Mika („Ruch Muzyczny”)

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