Part 2
The Rio Grande and Facade have more in common than the fact that there is, so to speak, a Sitwell in both of them. Both Constant Lambert's setting of Sacheverell Sitwell 's poem and William Wahon 's entertainment based on Edith Sitwell 's verses were written in the 1920s, and both possess the youthfully exuberant vitality. the sureness of technique, and the search for novelty and sensation which characterised that now almost fabulous era. In other respects, however, the two works could scarcely be more dissimilar. Lambert's, despite its use of jazz and Latin-American idioms, its brilliant orchestration for brass, strings, and percussion, and its glittering piano part, is essentially an evocative and romantic fantasy. Walton's is musical caricature, deft and peaetrating, streamlined in its economy of means. To paraphrase Dryden, it contains ' much wit mingled with a little malice.' Who else could have distorted a few notes of the William Tell overture and placed them so cunningly at the close of the Yodelling
Julian Herbage