The Façade entertainment – poems by Edith Sitwell to music by the then-unknown William Walton – was an amorphous creation, a collection of over 40 poems and settings built up over the years between 1922 and 1928.
Pamela Hunter in her disc on the Koch Discovery label did a marvellous job collecting all the surviving settings, adding recitations of the poems for which the music had been lost. The difference is that, instead of being recited on the disc, the texts of those extra poems are printed in the booklet, with revealing comments. Also, David Lloyd-Jones has devised an order for the 34 items (including the opening fanfare) which is arguably the best yet, avoiding the anticlimactic effect of Façade 2 being separated. Eleanor Bron and Richard Stilgoe make an excellent pair of reciters, and the recording in a natural acoustic balances them well – not too close. They inflect the words more than Edith Sitwell and early interpreters did, but still keep a stylised manner, meticulously obeying the rhythms specified in the score. Not everyone will like the way Stilgoe adopts accents – Mummerset for 'Mariner Man' and 'Country Dance', Scots for 'Scotch Rhapsody', and something like southern- state American for the jazz rhythms of 'Old Sir Faulk' – but he's the most fluent Façade reciter on disc so far, with phenomenally clear articulation. Eleanor Bron is also meticulous over rhythm, in slower poems adopting a trancelike manner, which is effective and in-style.
Under David Lloyd-Jones the brilliant sextet of players from the Nash Ensemble couldn't be more idiomatic.