We owe it to the late Christopher Palmer, devotee both of Walton and of film music, that we have this extended sample of the Henry V score in a very effective concert form, with the music enhanced by passages from Shakespeare. The regular orchestral suite which Walton approved leaves out far too many of the most striking passages, not least the exhilarating choruses at the beginning and the end. In Naxos’s Walton series it makes good sense to have such a colourful and warmly communicative work in a performance far more committed than one would expect of an Irish orchestra playing patriotic British music. Ensemble is crisp and clean with some excellent woodwind playing, as in the lovely oboe solo for Burgundy’s peace-making speech, using the Auvergne theme made popular by Canteloube.
At super-budget price it is a welcome issue, but that said, it cannot match Sir Neville Marriner’s full-price Chandos version which both musically and dramatically has a far bigger, sharper impact. Though the sound of the RTE Concert Orchestra, evidently modestly sized, is warm and atmospheric, it is set too far back, and the chorus sound as though they are half off-stage. More seriously, the speaking voices of both Michael Sheen (as the king) and Anton Lesser (in other roles including narrator) are by contrast forwardly balanced. If one sets the volume control to suit the speaking voices, the distancing of orchestral sound is emphasized the more.
Sheen and Lesser are both much-admired actors who have worked successfully with the Royal Shakespeare Company, yet neither quite matches Christopher Plummer, who alone contributes all the speech tracks to the Chandos issue, varying his voice superbly. On Naxos Lesser is the more successful of the two, though after Plummer the manner sounds rather too high-flown and stagy, effective as it no doubt is in the theatre. Sheen starts very well with an intimate, hushed account of the speech of rejection of Falstaff, “I know thee not, old man”, spoken over the music for Falstaff’s death. Instead of presenting it as it comes originally in Henry IV Part Two (which Plummer does), he delivers it as a flashback memory. But then in the Harfleur speech, “Once more unto the breach”, he comes near to ranting, and his curious distortion of vowels becomes obtrusive, as in his short “e” sounds, so that the second line incongruously becomes “Or else close the wall up with our English dad”. “O” and “a” sounds also get distorted and, even more than Lesser, Sheen fails to adapt his grand stage manner to the needs of a domestic recording, where Plummer is masterly in finding a perfect compromise, not least in the king’s prayer before Agincourt, “Upon the king”, which is omitted on Naxos.
The Chandos issue also offers a useful appendix in the original versions of themes (two Elizabethan, one from Canteloube) which Walton quotes in this score. By contrast the excellent Naxos booklet with note by Keith Anderson includes the complete Shakespeare text, which Chandos do not.'