William Walton's two symphonies make a rare and illuminating pairing on this recording. The First Symphony, composed in the early 1930s following the triumphs of the Viola Concerto and Belshazzar's Feast, was notoriously slow in coming — yet arrives with strikingly positive, defiant energy, as though celebrating its own difficult birth. The Second Symphony, written in 1957, finds Walton in a changed musical world but no less vital: bubbly and assured, it builds on the confident spirit of his Partita for orchestra. Owain Arwel Hughes draws committed, high-energy performances that capture both the tortured ambition of the First and the sparkling brilliance of the Second.