Live at the Centre: Walton’s Façade

Music from the Roaring Twenties: jazz meets classical meets weird and wonderful.

Take a deep dive into some fabulously strange corners of 20th Century music. Ibert’s sparkling, playful Divertissement was composed for a play about a straw hat. Its short but sweet movements range from parody to pathos to party -time. Leonard Bernstein declared that Milhaud’s Création du Monde was the best example of jazz -classical fusion: not a ‘flirtation’ with jazz, but a ‘real love affair’. It is serious, funky, and full-blooded. Walton’s Façade, meanwhile, defies categorisation: part chamber piece, par t poetry recital, part provocation. Soprano Jennifer France takes on the fabulously tongue -twisting poetry.