BAX: London Pageant / Concertante / Cathaleen-ni-Hoolihan

Since 1983, Chandos Records Ltd. has continued its survey on the music of Sir Arnold Edward Trevor Bax (1883-1953). This ongoing project, financially supported by the Sir Arnold Bax Trust, continues to be remarkable, enterprising, and bold. No record company even today has ever engage in such profound ways in widening our knowledge and appreciation of a composer whose musical stature generally continues to deemed as be less than substantial and not very recognizable (with Olympia Compact Disc Ltd. a legitimate exception in its Vainberg series). Special thanks are due to the late Bryden Thomson, who, by 1983, essentially sparked an interest and curiousity surrounding this great yet complex composer beginning with the symphonic poems (like Tintagel) and the Fourth Symphony. Nothing shall be taken away from conductors preceeding Thomson (like Leppard, Fredman, Del Mar, Boult, and Barborolli especially in the Lyrita LPs) and conductors during and after Thomson (Lloyd-Jones in the Naxos series, Handley, Brabbins). But, so far, Thomson was consistent and bold in his enterprising journey in uncovering the layers of mystery surrounding Bax. Special thanks are also due to Lewis Foreman. Foreman is Bax' biographer and the most active promoter of his music among writers. He is the most convincing authority in the life and music of this composer. Foreman's insights may generate some disagreements and question. However, his insights are real, deep, and thought-provoking, yet not exaggerated.

The music on this CD are all premiere recordings. The London Pageant (1937) is especially tuneful and majestic, sort of an extension of Paean (piano version of 1920, orchestrated in 1938). For me, however, the main interest is his Concertante for Three Wind Instruments and Orchestra in four movements (1948-1949). The conception is original and ingenious, with the first movement employing a cor anglais (english horn) solo, the clarinet solo a feature in the scherzo (second movement), and the horn in the lento, third movement. Bax' musical personality remains intact, though the sense of urgency and the "brazing romanticism" is not as strong of a presence as his works before 1937. The music is reflective and laid back for the most part, especially the first movement, an elegy, with the mood melancholic as his In Memoriam (for cor-anglais, harp and string quartet). The scherzo second movement and the finale are comical and jovial while the lento, third movement is likewise a soulful lamentation as the first.

The conception behind Tamara was a full-length ballet with an extended prelude and two acts (all-in-all, thirty numbers Bax prepared in the piano version by 1911). Some of the music from Tamara have been re-used: the Dance of the Water Spirits is re-used in "From Dusk Till Dawn" another one of Bax' ballets. Graham Parlett essentially derived a suite from the original piano score and provided the orchestration, which is as authentic as it can get, with the orchestral vision very much Baxian in vividness and in spirit. The music itself is attractive and a foretaste of the later Bax we grew to know and admire. His tone poem "Cathleen-ni-Hoolihan" of 1903-1905, which is youthful and innocent is, likewise a foretaste (The Garden of Fand of 1916 inherent some of the magic apparent in this work).

The performances under Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Philharmonic were in every way vivid, authoritative, and eloquent while the soloists for the Concertante: Gillian Callow-cor anglais, John Bradbury-clarinet, and Jonathan Goodall-horn, played magnificently. I especially admire Gillian Callow's rendering in the elegy, which is piquant and spellbinding. Meanwhile, the Chandos recording is of its usual high standards.

I do hope for a musicologist to engage in the orchestration of Tamara. Nevertheless, this CD is truly a worthwhile acquisition, whether you're a Bax fan or not.

"But the main question," wrote Colin Wilson nearly forty years ago, is "how a composer of such importance can be consigned to something like total oblivion." Sir Arnold Trevor Bax (1883-1953) composed steadily from the first decade of the twentieth century right up to the time of his death. His productivity naturally tapered off toward the end, but the late works (which have been even more unknown than the rest of Bax during the last fifty years) have lately begun to emerge into public awareness. Thanks largely to the dedicated people at Chandos, scores like the Concertante for Piano Left Hand (1950) and the Morning Song (also for piano and orchestra, 1948) now exist in recording and can be evaluated and enjoyed by those who have come to embrace other aspects of Bax's artistic genius. Along comes a new disc featuring the Concertante for Three Wind Instruments and Orchestra (1948), for knowledge of which aficionados have previously had to rely on descriptions in the Bax-biographies of Colin Scott-Sutherland and Lewis Foreman and in histories of modern British music, like those of Peter Pirie and Frank Howes. In "The English Musical Renaissance" (1976), Pirie describes the Concertante as consisting of four "delicate and gnomic movements, of somber orchestration, bronzed and autumnal in colouring." Three instruments (cor anglais, clarinet, and horn) and four movements? Each soloist has a movement of his own and all three join together in the fourth movement Finale. In the main sequence of his works (the seven symphonies), Bax combined spiritual sternness with orchestral luxuriance. The late works use a rather different formula: The sternness is softened, infused with a type of nostalgia, and the thick-textured luxuriance is abandoned for a more chamber-like palette of orchestral color. (The term "pastel," while a cliché, fits.) Bax is undeniably a British composer, but he is not a particularly English one, even though he was a Londoner by birth. There is nothing of the modal idyll (neither sheep-shearing in the fields nor the lark blithely ascending) that one associates with Holst and Vaughan Williams. Occasionally one hears an Irish or a Scots melody, and Scots rhythms remain important until the last. Other influences come from Russian music, which Bax loved (especially Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov), from Wagner, and from Debussy. But Bax is Bax, stubbornly ever and always, and to speak of "influences" is merely to put up signposts for the uninitiated. The Concertante belongs to the dénoument of Bax's Scots phase, local character by now having been deeply assimilated to the composer's late, lovely, and entirely individual language. Bax creates a marvelous delicacy of sounds that evokes a powerful, but oddly impersonal, nostalgia. We hear hints of the neo-classicism that occasionally surfaced in Bax's oeuvre. (See the Sinfonietta [1932] and the "Overture, Elegy, and Rondo" [1927]). The fourth and final movement is a Rondo, busy in the way of "A Romantic Overture" or "Overture to Adventure," although more inwardly turned. The new disc gives us three other items: Graham Parlett's orchestration of music from the ballet "Tamara" (1911), where the composer's fondness for things Slavic is much to the fore; the early tone-poem "Cathleen-ni-Hoolihan" (1903); and the Coronation March "London Pageant" (1937). Despite its youthful origins, the tone-poem forecasts many aspects of the mature Bax whom we know from "Tintagel" (1917) and "The Garden of Fand" (1920). Bax wrote "London Pageant" when he held the post (rather uncomfortably, as it seems) of "Master of the King's Music." It does not compete with the pomp and splendor of Walton's contemporaneous "Crown Imperial" but remains effective in its way. (Ages ago, on an Everest LP, there was a recording of this work.) Martyn Brabbins conducts the BBC Philharmonic, as he did in the previous disc that includes the Piano Left Hand Concertante. Bax once described himself as "a brazen romantic." A romantic he remained, from first to last. It is a form of justice, then, that he has begun to win back what Wilson called his "natural public - discerning and intelligent listeners." [P.S. Few orchestral works by Bax remain to be recorded: The set of "Variations on a Theme by Gabriel Fauré" (contemporary with the Wind Concertante) has never made it either to LP or CD; the Sinfonietta and "Overture, Elegy, and Rondo" deserve new recordings; "Northern Ballad No. 1" appeared long ago on a Lyrita LP, then briefly on a too-expensive CD, but needs a new recording (with its two companion-pieces); and the orchestral-choral work, "The Breastplate of St. Patrick," needs a recording.]