Cello Concerto

Opening and closing with the dreamily star-spangled magic of a summer night in Italy, Walton’s Cello Concerto is a late-Romantic love letter to the island of Ischia, which had become his home (and retreat from the world) by the time he composed this music in 1956. Warm breezes wafting through the trees, the buzz of the cicadas, moonlight glinting on the sea—it’s all there, in what was the composer’s first large-scale orchestral work in nearly two decades, although the writing does relate stylistically to his opera Troilus and Cressida from just two years before. It came about as a commission from the celebrated cellist Piatigorsky, who wanted a tougher, more assertive ending than he initially got. Happy to oblige (not least because the fee was generous and in dollars, which, as Walton said, was an encouragement to creativity), the composer then wrote two alternative conclusions. But it’s the original you tend to hear in the many performances that keep this concerto at the heart of modern repertoire. The three movements—slow, fast, slow—start with a yearning cello theme that rises over cushioned, major/minor oscillations in the orchestra: the spangled sounds from which the rest of the concerto grows. The second movement scherzo (“Allegro appassionato”) is a classically Waltonian piece of bravura writing, while the third (a theme with improvisations) returns to the mood of the first, with a ravishing coda that out-spangles anything heard previously, bathing the big tune in even more luxuriance.