I was playing first horn on this and it gives me goose bumps to this day!!

Absolutely, profoundly amazing... to the point of exultant exhaustion. I felt like a cigarette after listening to this performance for the first time, and I don't smoke. Thank you so very much for sharing this.

There is no equal of Previn in this magnificent symphony. One of the best produced by a British composer. Combining power, strong rhythms and immense beauty I never fail to be drawn into this .

Man, this piece is on fire !!! Scorching hot Walton goes for broke and so do the LSO!

This is so fiercely articulated it should carry a health warning! Thrilling stuff.

The tension built in the first movement is heart wrenching. What an accomplishment for a young William Walton. One of my favorite symphonies.

Still a mind blowing performance 52 years later.

I had the privilege of first hearing this in the Royal Festival Hall, sometime in the 1960s, with Previn conducting the LSO. Walton had made one of his rare visits from Ischia and took a bow at the end. I was totally bewitched by the performance and thrilled to share a concert hall with a man who I still regard (unfashionably perhaps) as one of the great 20th Century composers. An LP of this version had recently been released, at the same time as a recording by Sargent and the New Philharmonia, but Previn's youth and exuberance shone through over the rather stodgy Sargent. Few things can ever match the sheer joy of that evening, spent with a girlfriend who has now been my wife for over 50 years, although we came near to it a few years ago, sitting in Walton's garden in La Mortella listening to this on headphones, in the warmth of the Italian sun!

Stunning performance of a blockbuster of a symphony. The intensity throughout is wonderful. I particularly love that Previn doesn't allow any tempi to drag.

All the positive comments on this performance are entirely justified. I have twice listened to this account of Walton's greatest work and compared it with Previn's take on it two years later in the RFH (also available on KZfaq). No question: this is by far the finer reading, delivered with sure-footed pacing and tingling electricity throughout. Once in a while everything comes together on the night. This was one of those fantastic and utterly memorable occasions.

What a splendid and utterly compelling performance.

Brilliant with all the subtle and strong emotions Walton wrote into it. What a feast.

I like the gradual shaking off Elgar. It's magnificent and all those little quirky bits.

Wow. This is even more exciting than the LSO/Previn studio recording, which is really saying something. The first movement especially is tremendous; and I don't think I've ever heard the finale hang together so well. What a concert this must have been!

One cannot exactly grasp what clever Willy Walton was perceiving or perhaps smoking when composing this unspeakably shocking work in 1935, but he assembled on the pages of the score an “express train to terrifying unease” and impending political doom. Once the opening bars of the first movement commence, over the low menace of the timpani roll, you get that chilling conviction that this is a world where things are radically and revoltingly and terribly out of joint. Where paranoia and inescapable discomfort from within ones bowls and bones are de rigeur even to survive relatively unharmed, for just one more day. Where violence and cruelty are exalted into vaunting immoral triumph. The tightness of form, scalpel-sharp orchestration and agitato themes are precisely right for that dirty “disreputable decade” of the 1930s (W H Auden’s phrase). When the English in particular seemed to be irresponsibly playing at being a fading Imperial world power, and actually struggling with economic depression and the politics of Indian Independence, whilst having only half an eye on the viper's nest of real insanity being composed in Nazi fascist Germany. Every member of this RAH audience must have felt these tearing psychological and emotional and political machinations and contradictions. After all, many will have lived through 1932 to 1945....and known many who did not survive. The music encapsulates the dread of going to sleep in Whitechapel or Bow or Poplar in Sept 1940 and thinking, “Are my friends and family going to be ripped into exploded flesh? Am I going to wake in a moment of agony and then perish in a fireball from the bombing of my street? Will my people and my neighbourhood, all that I have known and loved, ‘sink into an abyss a new dark ages’ of destruction? How can I even dare look at my precious children with love and hold them to my breast, knowing that they may perish and I might survive?” When the final reprise of the first movement starts over those "deadly and dread" timpani strokes, and snarling brass chords, my goddess, it is as if you have been summoned from some brief respite, some inadequate hiding place, into the dazzle of the lights of a Fascist interrogation chamber, to confront absolute malignancy in polished uniforms, and be tortured and torn to shreds of flaming incineration. Summoned and spat upon and then cast down, by dancing fiends at the levers of hellish instruments of screaming destruction and irredeemable extinction! Dangerous and brilliant and shattering music 🎶. Hardly cathartic, yet truly electrifying and morally sobering in the most adult fashion. Not for children, unless you wish to teach them very early on the meaning of terror and despair, which perhaps is unwise from caring parents or guardians. Love 💕 Andrea

Previn owns this Symphony.

The best performance of this great work.

Cool reaction from the audience.

I was born in 1972! What a joy to play this symphony or even to be present at the concert while Sir Walton was still alive. Was he in the concert hall that day? I went to La Mortella in 2009 and had the opportunity to meet his wife who died a litlle later in 2011. Thanks for post!! Congrats from Brazil!

The first movement mood seems taut with troubled tension. Somewhere in the BBC television archive there's a fascinating Omnibus film from 1977 of Previn rehearsing this with the LSO for a performance to mark Walton's 75th birthday. Around 5 years ago the Berlin Philharmonic performed Walton 1 guest conducted by Smyon Bychkov: Simon Rattle ( then the BPO's principal conductor) so loved the work he managed to inveigle himself into the orchestra during rehearsal to play the timpani part!

I first heard this through Boult's 1958 recording at Walthamstow Town Hall. The first movement has to combine inexorable momentum with thunderous force (from a medium-sized band) and I am not sure that Previn quite equals old Adrian- the pedal points are so spaced out that it must be very tricky to keep that sense of hurtling into the void going. The 'con malizia' is fine (Previn's jazz background helping with the jagged rhythms?) and the slow movement too. As ever, the fugal finale is not convincing: a physical more than spiritual resolution, repetitiously bombastic. Walton's 'gap year' before finishing it was counter-productive. He was starting to turn into Elgar v2.0. For an account of No. 1 against which all others should be measured, try the first recording by Hamilton Harty and the LSO. Incredibly for a young British composer in the 1930s, this was on sale weeks after the premiere. The opening is tentative, but the sense of the players getting into gear well before the end of the first movement is exhilarating, and the slow third is as good as any later version. Harty had joined in pushing Walton into finishing the work, and although his tenure at the LSO was brief and unhappy, it yielded this grand performance. It must have helped Walton become the most acclaimed debuting British symphonist since Elgar 28 years earlier.

Is there a greater British symphony? I think not. And this performance has huge electricity.

RIP, Maestro.

nice!!!

It's a monumental work that only gets better with age - one of the great works of the twentieth century. I'd forgotten how much Hindemith appears in the fugue section and for a little stretch thereafter, perhaps a testament to the long friendship the two had.

In my opinion the studio recording is even more sensational and emotionally charged. Even with the progressively scrappy trumpet playing as the music progresses through the movements. The only recording to own!

I think something the likes of Classic FM and perhaps school doesn't properly explain is that it really matters who's playing an orchestral piece. Even to a fairly untutored ear like mine, you can hear the crackle of electricity from the start

Zouds man!!

Check out Previn's later performance with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on Telarc. The dynamic range on that is stupendous which for the 1st movement adds greatly to its impact. Short note and review of this at: www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2004/Oct04/Walton1_previn.htm I have owned the vinyl and CD and recommend each but think the Vinyl is no longer available.

oh...nice hair.....cut too....LOL love the 70's

This recording is booming. It's clipping. You need to reupload and make sure the tracks don't go over 0!!!

The sound is very bad here, thin and badly balanced. The studio recording of 1966 gives a far better sonic picture of Walton’s great orchestration. I’m not a great fan of Simon Rattle but his recent live recording with the L.S.O. is possibly overall the best of all performances,

First movement a bit of a mess. Rest very good and enormous sound in the finale. The LSO has improved immensely since the 1970s, but it needed to. Great individual soloists but this needed more rehearsal as evidenced by the occasional miscounting. This was back in the days of an all male orchestra and all kinds of practical jokes etc etc