10 Mar EDITH SITWELL & WILLIAM WALTON – FAÇADE ~ Record Store day release 2020
EDITH SITWELL/ WILLIAM WALTON – FAÇADE MOOCHIN21
10” gatefold with 26 page lyric book
70TH Anniversary of this unique recording taken from Scarborough born Edith Sitwell series of poems and on the 100th anniversary of the original transcripts…
Façade is a series of poems by Sitwell, best known as part of Façade – An Entertainment in which the poems are recited over an instrumental accompaniment by William Walton. The poems and the music exist in several versions….
Walton revised the music continually between its first performance and the first publication of the full score in 1951. That definitive version of the Sitwell-Walton Façade consists of:
- Fanfare (Instrumental)
- Hornpipe
- En Famille
- Mariner Man
- Long Steel Grass (Trio for Two Cats and a Trombone)
- Through Gilded Trellises [from The Sleeping Beauty]
- Tango-Pasodoble (I do like to be beside the Seaside)
- Lullaby for Jumbo
- Black Mrs Behemoth
- Tarantella
- A Man from a far Country [from The Sleeping Beauty
- By the Lake
- Country Dance
- Polka
- Four in the Morning
- Something lies beyond the Scene
- Waltz
- Swiss Jodelling Song
- Scotch Rhapsody
- Popular Song
- Fox Trot (Old Sir Faulk) When Sir Beelzebub.
This version is a re-issue with the original rare Jim Flora artwork, this beautiful package includes 26 page lyric booklet…
Sitwell began to publish some of the Façade poems in 1919, in the literary magazine Wheels. In 1922 many of them were given an orchestral accompaniment by Walton, Sitwell’s protégé. The “entertainment” was first performed in public in 1923, and achieved both fame and notoriety for its unconventional form. Walton arranged two suites of his music for full orchestra. When Frederick Ashton made a ballet of Façade in 1931, Sitwell did not wish her poems to be part of it, and the orchestral arrangements were used.
After Sitwell’s death, Walton published supplementary versions of Façade for speaker and small ensemble using numbers dropped between the premiere and the publication of the full score in 1950.
Sitwell was like the Wahol of her day, publishing a mountain of essays and poems covering every aspect of the arts…
The Scarborough-born poet-eccentric extraordinaire who had once publicly declared that her immense wisdom had been born of a long, unrequited love affair with the Russian painter, Pavel Ychelitchew – unrequited on the account of his homosexuality…
Sitwell fan Morrissey, heavily featured Edith as his tour mascot on his Kill Uncle tour and used her image as his stage backdrop and on his T-shirts…
and like Morrissey, Sitwell also had a knack of putting her foot in it, pontificating at one of her world famous Bayswater Tea parties, I have been bought up on Rhythm as other children were bought up on Glaxo! And another, when a coachload of noisy children were arriving, “it almost makes one wish for another King Herod!”
This is a limited edition release for Record Store Day 2020 one limited to 500 copies, available from independent record shops signed up to Record Store Day….
full list of participating attached here…
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