I have played this symphony many times in a London Orchestra, now long since retired. I was struck by the expressions on the musicians faces of this wonderful orchestra, sheer enjoyment of the music and the obvious respect of the craftsmanship of Walton in writing this symphony. German orchestras play English composers as equals to any homegrown orchestra. A joy to listen to. Bravo!

Hell of a good performance! Haven't heard the piece live since I lived in London in the early 1970s and rarely thought British performances, however 'idiomatic' or well-meant, lived up to its potential. This restored my faith in the work.....

Wow, was für ein beeindruckendes Werk. Ich finde Walton sollte öfter gespielt werden. Massiv underrated; gerade in Deutschland :D

Absolutely fabulous performance! Bychkov and the orchestra clearly loved playing it. Especially loved the cheeky grin of the principal clarinet getting right into it! Bravo a million times!

This is an amazing performance; superbly conducted but wonderfully played by an orchestra with a feeling both for the idiom but also for the ambiguity of this very British masterpiece.

As someone who adores this blockbuster of a symphony, the first thing that strikes me is how much Bychkov "gets" this symphony. A really fantastic performance, especially movements 2,3,4 (it seemed to me the orchestra had warmed up after a not quite so convincing first movement). A small detail but those final "Sibelian" stabbing chords are fantastic. Also wonderful to hear a bravo at the end of this performance - well deserved.

love it so much!! it is so so great--epic sometimes, laid-back at others. it's great

An excellent upload. The sound is forward and has good impact. The important percussion is caught well but the vital tam tam player seemed a little reluctant to hit the damn thing (I am/was a percussionist, so I have a vested interest). Seriously, this is a valuable addition to KZfaq and Many thanks for it.

A special pleasure to listen to this masterpiece. 🎼 I wish you all the best!

A distinguished performance！ 我已經聽好幾次，平衡好的第一樂章，極佳的法國號，強弱到位的弦樂，充滿期待又美麗的結局。

Beautiful

When I first heard this as a teenager, the section at 27:42 left me with my jaw on the floor, and 40-odd years later, it's still one of the most beautiful few bars of music I've ever heard.

Yep, these Germans have done it again! No matter how provincial the orchestra or ensemble; the playing is just world class. Fab leadership from Bychkov. I need this on CD / Download / LP to replace Brabbins, Gardiner, Daniels (all good bty).

Fantastic music and great interpretation.

This is THE BEST recording I know. Not even Previn+LSO, this. Bravo Maestro Bychkov, bravo WDR!

Electrifying performance of a blood-stirring masterpiece.

I am fan of Bagatelles with Julian Bream. I didnt know other musics from Walton. What a surprise for me ! Now i am fan of Walton music...

Holy Cow. That is astonishing. And they nailed it.

I appreciate the camera showing the tympanists gloriously banging away, but I missed close ups of the other percussion - the cymbals and the tam tam and the snare drum in action.

a great work Walton should be better known

Siempre Maravilloso💎

Great performance

Great performance just love it however I wish the videographers would study the score and when there’s a string solo, they seem to ignore the entire section(s)

Semyon Bychkov is one of the truly great conductors of our time. Why? Because he is always score perfect and obviously must rehearse different sections of the orchestra separately in order to give confidence at the section level. This approach suits Walton 1 especially well because the composer was a severe self-critic and a slow composer, needing to get everything "just so". Also, the symphony has some very complex passages (which would not change) requiring an expertly directed orchestra, adjusting only for hall acoustics. Bychkov evidently has the same sensibilities and in some works (notably Mahler) changes the seating layout to get the best sonics. Here we see the timps placed unusually far left between the two 'kits' with the big drum in the middle of the top stage tier and snares to the right. Note also how Bychkov places the woodwinds dead centre, as they "carry" the burden of joining the many 'split orchestra' writing in the work, notably what Walton demands of the strings. In the last movement (which was not in the world in the premiere because the composer was not satisfied with it for many months) such that they end a fugue sections only to be met by opposing subjects in the score which are devilish to play, then the brass and woodwind bring the sonic focus to the centre and the coda flows from there with the sound stage spreading out. Wonderful. Bychkov understands all of the composer's ideas and feelings and conveys this to his colleagues. It was my privilege to attend a concert of the Leningrad Phil in the mid-'60s in Nottingham's quite compact Albert Hall. The conductor was Arvids Jansons and the Walton 1st took up the first half and Shostakovich's 5th the second. The musicians were practically spilling off the stage and moved a few chairs before beginning after testing elbow room with great humour. Silence for the conductor's appearance and the second welcome applause ceased we were into this symphony. If anything, Bychkov has the edge and this is probably the best I have heard.

It must be quite a challenge for an orchestra to play 'with malice'? (2nd movements)

14:42 2nd movement |

Very brilliant, very apt and frighteningly disturbing performance, of a symphony created aidst and expressive of the gathering storm and insanity of Nazism and militarism and genocide, in a soon to commence "total-world-conflict", and the already apparent psychotic entrancement of whole nations. Played most fittingly by the marvellous WDR Symphony Orchestra, in the Cologne Philharmonic Hall of all places! Under a Russian baton. Amazing celebration of the power of music to harmonise peoples across cultures! A technique to reveal to our hearts that tour greatest power is to offer the hand of love and the lips and caresses of mutual adoration, to celebrate our universal sacred status as moral and beautiful beings. This music, however, embodies the opposite perspective. A very agitato world horribly well-drawn by Walton where, let it be stated plainly, great cities were pounded to disgusting rubble by men in bombers in the skies; where 100,000's of people intentionally murdered in firestorms perpetrated by men; where in two atomic flashes 250,000 innocent people are incinerated by men; where millions were gassed and burned in ovens by men (apart from the odd clearly deranged female guard), and billions written off as Untermenschen by men. Where millions of Russians were systematically starved to death in sieges conducted by so-called civilised male officers and conscripts in the Wehrmacht. An age, in fact, where the very existence of morality and political virtue, and the trajectory of humanity, albeit haltingly, towards greater enlightenment rather than hellish degeneration ..... seemed exceedingly doubtful. A world where there was no Goethe, or Thomas Mann, or Rilke, or Beethoven, or Mozart, or Bach. Only kitsch musik and deranged rhetoric nightly from the mouth of Dr Goebbels on the Volksradio. An age which Mr Churchill understood came within but one paper-thin time period, whereby the highest flights of European scientific and technical and industrial power would have been deployed in rockets of nuclear decimation across the globe. Where oh-so-civilised SS Colonel Werner von Braun (whitewashed "hero of NASA") and his "deeply educated" male German scientific collaborators (via their 10,000s of enslaved and whipped workers) were determined to produce intercontinental ballistic missiles. Where, in fact, the RAF and USAAF had to play "find and destroy", night by night, against the V2 production and launch facilities. No amount of high explosives, no unpressed rickety bomber, no utterly exhausted aircrews, no distastefully large civilian casualties - none of these was more important than this ceaselessly probing and aerial "hand of death", in breathless mortal search of vastly more monstrous dreams - deranged "sick fancies" of completely insane diabolical extermination. Even the veterans and politicians (all men) of the terrible carnage of the Western Front in the Great War would have pronounced this to be some infernal and perverse nightmare, the work of Dante and Hieronymus Bosch at their darkest and most malcontented misanthropy. All this, in retrospect, can be heard in this storm-clouded and (in one sense) hugely brilliant work - "a hymn to malevolence". But for the grace and beneficence of the intervening goddesses ..... who with moments to spare restrained the blood soaked hands and twisted minds of bestial men. Music from an English genius (who loved the Italian Mediterranean world) and expressing that almost imperishable English pragmatism and empirical common-sense, happily too grounded to be susceptible to ideological fanaticism (ignore the Civil War and the distasteful excesses of Imperial arrogance). A people with a very robust 19th Century Liberal confidence in civilisation and the rule of law and the kindness of English hearts. The England of JS Mill and Lord John Russell, and William Beveridge, and Victoria and Albert, and John Lewis, and Hyde Park.... and the BBC. The English in India, in fact, to put it rather satirically. Music is that most dynamic and ever evolving and incorporative of arts, sucking into the score the faiths and anxieties of players and audiences and even tuppenny critics! The very idea that music is a purely formal notation of mathematical detachment and cleanliness .... is juvenile rubbish. Love andrea

upload is in mono sound :(

wow.Schon wieder und wieder WDR und KÖLNER PHILHARMONIE. Was ist los mit Euch? Wie ist das möglich das Klang von KÖLNER PHILHARMONIE ist einmalig in EU und kann man nach ein paar Sekunden glücklich sein? Grüsse von mir Marek Maria Lipski aus Cottbus Alles Gute.Von mir und viel Spaß mit meine Kompositionen kzfaq.info/get/bejne/jMqSZ8J0qt_deXU.html