Walton’s English Romantic idiom also had a radical streak, incorporating jazz-era rhythms while exploring a cosmopolitan range of musical influences. He was born in 1902 in the Lancashire mill town of Oldham, where his father was a choirmaster and music teacher. In 1912 Walton won a choral scholarship to Oxford’s Christ Church Cathedral, and he went on to Christ Church College as a 16-year-old undergraduate. There he met the Sitwell family of young writers; impressed by Walton’s precocious talent, they took him to live with them in London and also, in 1922, on a first visit to Italy. The young composer’s Façade (1922-26), setting Edith Sitwell’s poems for reciter and chamber group, brilliantly deployed parodies of different dance forms and musical styles alongside a streak of wistful lyricism. That lyrical aspect, absorbing the influences of Elgar and Sibelius, then dominated in the concertos for viola (1929) and violin (1939), while driving rhythmic momentum propelled the choral Belshazzar’s Feast (1931), the First Symphony (1935), and the coronation march Crown Imperial (1937). During the Second World War, Walton’s scores for patriotic films included the Shakespeare-based Henry V (1944), starring Laurence Olivier. In 1948 Walton moved to the Italian island of Ischia, and an Italian-influenced lyrical warmth colored his full-length opera Troilus and Cressida (1954) and Cello Concerto (1956). Although his work rate slowed in the years before his death in 1983, he produced late jewels in the orchestral Capriccio burlesco (1968) and Façade 2 (1977).