Henry V (2002)

Walton did not himself arrange his score for the film 'Henry V' for the concert hall. The music was for years known mainly from two suites. In 1988 Christopher Palmer prepared the comprehensive 'Musical scenario after Shakespeare, for speaker, chorus and orchestra'. Walton's score uses a standard-sized orchestra, with the unusual addition of a harpsichord. Since the manuscript and orchestral parts are now mostly lost, Palmer based his reconstruction on surviving fragments and on the two suites. The rest had to be transcribed by ear from the film. Palmer expanded Walton's instrumentation slightly and excluded a few short linking and repetitious passages. And he added the march that Walton wrote in 1959 for a planned TV series based on Churchill's 'A history of the English-Speaking Peoples'. The result was an extremely effective reconstruction and conflation, showing that Walton's music for 'Henry V' was substantial and varied enough to sustain a large-scale structure of its own in the concert hall. (bron: BBC)