Walton's first work for full orchestra, "Portsmouth Point" (1925), inspired by a Rowlandson print of the same name, depicts a rumbustious dockside scene (in Kennedy's phrase, "the sailors of H.M.S. Pinafore have had a night on the tiles") in a fast moving score full of syncopation and cross-rhythm that for years proved hazardous for conductors and orchestras alike. Throughout his career, Walton wrote works in this pattern, such as the lively Comedy Overture "Scapino", a virtuoso piece commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, described by "The Musical Times" as "an ingenious blending of fragments in exhilarating profusion." Walton's post-war works in this genre are the "Johannesburg Festival Overture" (1956), the "diverting but hard-edged "Capriccio burlesco"" (1968), and the longer "Partita" (1957), written for the Cleveland Orchestra, described by "Grove" as "an impressively concentrated score with a high-spirited finale steely counterpoint and orchestral virtuosity". Walton's shorter pieces also include two tributes to musical colleagues, "Variations on a Theme by Hindemith" (1963) and the "Improvisations on an Impromptu of Benjamin Britten" (1969), in both of which the source material is gradually transformed as Walton's own voice becomes more prominent. The critic Hugh Ottaway commented that in both pieces "the interaction of two musical personalities is... fascinating".