Letter from Adrian Boult to William Walton, 11th November 1932

urn:iso:std:iso:639:ed-3:eng

158

text excerpt

Many thanks for your letter. I certainly think that we gave a better show of 'Belshazzar' than last time, in particular I think we solved the problem of 'The Kings of the Earth', expensive though that solution is, for as you know the Wireless Chorus is entirely professional. I expect you were able to hear the rather slower tempo and determine whether you found it too slow. Personally I thought it worked out just right though we reduced the Double Basses to two and had a good deal of trouble with the bass line altogether, Bass Clarinet and Bassoons and so on had to be very much damped down. This with rather an exaggeration of the portamento between the high crochet and quaver of the accompanying figure I think gave the passage its right value and meaning, and the unaccompanied passage finished dead in tune.

One other point; there still seem to be a great many discrepancies between the score and parts in regard to dynamic sounds, in particular a good many of the fps and quiet marks generally in the Feast Scene are missing from the parts. This is very important. It gave us a lot of trouble to scale this time to something that would still leave power in reserve for the final F major.

However, we all enjoyed ourselves very much.

A.C.B.

excerpt from 'Letter from Adrian Boult to William Walton, 11th November 1932' pp. 158 (227 words)

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