I’ve gone and mislaid the programme in Tesco’s. So as not to fold it I let it lie flat in the trolley, then forgot to take it after filling up my own bag-on-wheels with comestibles. I went to a wonderful matinee today, at the Tower Theatre: Fetes Galantes by somebody called Swale, and then Walton’s Façade with that notorious bouquet of exhilarating poems by Edith Sitwell set to the chamber orchestra’s intensely hip little numbers. Written when Walton was terribly young. And the verses were spoken in perfect time to that of the orchestra, and this involved sometimes incredibly fast diction by a woman who had distinguished herself most attractively, singing in magnificent voice as Columbine in Fetes Galantes. Walton’s variegated musical turns are neatly jazzy at times, and wasn’t this all written during the time jazz was first coming to the fore in terms of world interest and influence? The piece still comes over as devastatingly experimental. Speech used as a percussive instrument as part of a select orchestra of fifes, flutes, cello, clarinet, violins. And it works, though you may only take in a few scattered phrases, a sense that you are listening to rhythm in the rhyming, not meaning. Just hugely coloured words. Behemoth, peccadillo, zenith. And a lot about the sun. Words like extravagant blooms that loom up at you and go as the poem merges with other instruments in the ensemble.
And now, thank goodness, someone has sent me the programme, Note that there was in fact only one reciter of Edith Sitwell’s poems – and that was Rosalind Dobson.
And finally here is Rosalind Dobson’s website.
