Live online: English Chamber Orchestra: Teatime Music - Façade

The English Chamber Orchestra presents ‘Teatime Music’ a series of four afternoon tea concerts, streamed straight to your living room. Pour yourself a cuppa, crack open the posh biscuits, and enjoy a smorgasbord of programmes, performed by the world's most recorded chamber orchestra.

Brimming with jazz-soaked charm and colour, William Walton’s Façade gained immediate notoriety for its unconventionality; at its public premiere in 1922, poet Edith Sitwell recited her delightfully quirky verse with a megaphone protruding through an ornate screen, with Walton conducting the work’s six-piece ensemble hidden from view. In the audience that night sat Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf and Noël Coward.

This 'entertainment' comprises twenty-one miniatures in a multitude of musical styles and forms, its deft and playful pastiche leading one reviewer to say of Walton "As a musical joker, he is a jewel of the first water".