Conductor Vernon Handley in an interview with Ian Lace as printed in The British Music Society Newsletter – Dec 1995
“I came across (BAX) when I was a student learning the repertory and a lot of British music. I took out a study score of The Garden of Fand from Enfield Public Library. I was so impressed that I felt that I must learn more about this composer so I bought, begged and borrowed miniature scores and all that I could find. And so I became determined to work for him as much as I could when I became a conductor.
“I think if you analyse any one of the symphonies you will find an extraordinary ability to fashion ideas, themes and tunes rather like Sibelius. Bax was a composer who tended to rely on metamorphosis of ideas rather than using a lot of fresh material. Even if you take the weakest symphony of the set – the Fourth Symphony – it displays an extraordinary unity especially between the first and last movements. You can see how the music has been constructed. Of course, he’s his own worst enemy and I think critics have tended to be beguiled by the sound and harmony rather than looking underneath for the skeleton of the music. But it is there and to me this subtlety, the fact that you have to look is an added enjoyment; it is not all there on the surface.
But range: I don’t think the mood of the Viola Phantasy conflicts really with the mood of Winter Legends and I think the darkness of the First Symphony is a long way from the idyllic tune of the second movement of the Second Symphony and both are some distance from the extrovert Fourth Symphony or from the more apocalyptic Sixth Symphony. I think he has great range.
Bax’s music poses certain problems for the conductor. First of all you’ve got to study the music, you need to know a lot of it to understand the language. It is not a cross between Richard Strauss and Rachmaninoff. It is very personal. It is also hard to appreciate the form of a Bax work because of all the beauitiful melodies and harmony. Bax is a resourceful orchestrator; the colours in his mind are so vivid that sometimes one is tempted to think there is impressionistic music before one but in actual fact there is thematic material there. To present the thematic material, to present the form of the work, poses great problems for the conductor. He has got to make sure that all the tiny joins between one passage and the next are made rather than shown because the more you sectionalize the music in favour of the sensuous sounds, the more damage you do to the form. Indeed I am reminded of a passage in Bax’s autobiography, Farewell my Youth, when he says: I slammed the lid of the piano shut and went out because I could not think of a logical continuation. Now a man concerned about logical continuation is clearly concerned about form, not just pretty pictures.”
Conductor David Lloyd-Jones in an interview with Ian Lace
“No conductor could fail to enjoy his masterly writing for the orchestra. Bax knows how to make an orchestra sound wonderful, but this is not something that is just applied to the surface but rather a by-product of his richly contrapuntal textures. There is something very appealing about the fact that all Bax’s symphonies have only three movements; I think that it is one of his greatest contributions to the form. Some commentators think that Bax was not a natural symphonist. However, he was a natural writer of music for the symphony orchestra and adept at handling big forms which gets very close to being a true symphonist in the wider sense of the word.”
Conductor Myer Fredman in an interview with Robert Barnett
“Bax for me is a quasi-synthesis of the strength and grandeur of Elgar, the “pastoral” introspection of Delius, the orchestral brilliance of Debussy and Ravel yet with a harmonic language which is distinctly his own. As much as I love his music, the music of Vaughan Williams and Walton somehow overshadowed Bax and then Britten came along so that Bax was pushed even further into the background – quite wrongly in my opinion. What with the Second World War and his death not long after, his music has never really taken hold until perhaps now as a direct result of our pioneer recordings at that time.”
Composer John McCabe on Bax
“Bax’s music deserves to have a more permanent place in the repertoire…He was a composer of great integrity, with a distinctive style and with something to say that is worth hearing; his best music usually seems to move an audience, to enter into their consciousness in the way that good music should.”
Violinist and Conductor John McLaughlin Williams in an interview with Richard Adams
“I think that (Bax) is quite tight structurally. Like any music, his requires acquaintance to be understood and that very acquaintance is what the music has been largely denied. Recordings help of course, but they are no substitute for a live show. As far as a reason for his being accused of being excessively rhapsodic, I believe that it is because he rarely repeats a figure verbatim. It requires good concentration to follow a motive through its various guises and the trip can pose difficulties. I can always discern a form in Bax’s music, though he often puts his own spin on it.
So what? Look at the First movement of Mahler’s 5th symphony and its waywardness. What form is that? That waywardness renders it no less great. Sometime we must accept a work of art on its own terms rather than attempting to make it fit a pre-conceived model.”
David Cox in The Pelican Guide to The Symphony
“Bax is at present out of fashion and neglected, but he found symphonic expression through instinctive musical values, with great artistic sensitivity, formal and technical mastery, and a keen intelligence. A challenge of this sort cannot be indefinitely ignored. With other Romantic works regularly filling such a large proportion of our current programmes, it is particularly regrettable that Bax’s Third Symphony, for example, should now be heard so rarely; for here the communication between composer and audience is as clear and vivid as in a symphony of Tchaikovsky.”
Christopher Palmer on Bax as printed in Chandos liner notes to Piano Music Volume 1
“Bax’s lavish talent – which led him to much prolixity and complexity – has certainly hindered thoroughgoing exploration of his work and a just estimate of his stature, which as an ‘unabashed romantic’ (his own much-quoted phrase) of the English Musical Renaissance is considerable. Ecstasy is the keynote of his best work; that mystical withdrawal from the daily round and common task which he sensed in the music in Beethoven, Sibelius and Delius; in Yeats whose poetry came to him as a lightning-flash of illumination; and thence in the Celtic (and later Nordic) mythology in which he was steeped. This quality of ecstasy, rapture, awe, otherworldliness, dreaminess – call it what you will – contrasts with and complements a spirit of turbulence and conflict which seems to reflect now nature in clash-and convulsion, now events in the outer world, now the tempestuous nature of Bax’s emotional life – and is frequently compounded of all these elements indistinguishably.”
Conductor Bryden Thomson on Bax as printed in GRAMOPHONE Magazine
“I felt for a long time that Bax was grossly underrated, and working with the music has made me all the more convinced. It’s tremendous stuff, gloriously orchestrated, and full of beautiful harmonies: basically it’s very tonal, but he decorates it with the richest chromaticisms. The effect can be quite ravishing sometimes.”
Conductor Sir Henry Wood talking about Bax’s In the Faery Hills
“I like Bax in this mood. I feel it is the true Bax – – that dear, dear, kind man of the shy smile, I have known so well for so many years. He is really unpretentious – – but then great men are..”
Musicologist Burnett James in a letter to Lewis Foreman
“The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that, much though Bax admired Sibelius, it is a red herring. I am convinced the line runs far more accurately from Mahler through Bax to Shostakovich. The famous meeting between Sibelius and Mahler seems to me to put Bax squarely in the Mahler not the Sibelius camp. I think this is important, because the eternal references to Sibelius only work to Bax’s disadvantage, since his mind worked in a totally different orbit. Bax, with his confessed Russian affiliations looks forward to Shostakovich not back to Sibelius, although at the time and for some time afterwards the real connection could not be seen.”
Jim Svejda in The Record Shelf Guide to the Classical Repertoire
“As with that other great nature poet, Frederick Delius, Bax is decidedly an acquired taste; yet like many acquired tastes, he can quickly turn into an acquired passion.”
Lewis Foreman as quoted in his biographical study: Bax: A Composer and His Times
“As the remainder of Bax’s orchestral music is gradually given life again, in public performances, on the air, and on disc, the cumulative effect of a renewed performing tradition is becoming established. As with any composer whose sound world is as distinctive as Bax’s, he needs repeated performance for his proper evaluation and appreciation. The parallel with the case of Sibelius is very close. When properly presented by sympathetic players the world he has created quite bowls one over.”
Ralph Vaughan Williams in a tribute written at the time of Bax’s death.
“Though no ascetic, he seemed not to belong to this world but always to be gazing through the magic casements, or wandering in the shy woods and Wychwood bowers waiting for the spark of heaven to fall.”
Jonathan Hutchins in a letter to this web site
“…it’s always irritated me that even when a Proms theme is billed as English music, it’s Britten, Birtwistle, Byrd, you name it, but all the Bax is a token “Fand” or “Tintagel”. What about the 2nd symph, ferocious and glorious…….Oddly enough my next fave is the 7th, although to me it feels subtly but definitely different from any other Bax I’ve heard…the inner expressivity of the music is something else again, and so subjective that it’s understandably difficult for ‘classical’ critics to comprehend – if one doesn’t *feel* the inevitable logic of the twists and turns of say the 2nd, then no amount of analysis of the musical structure will validate it. Which is where mainstream critics miss out, ”
A Personal Note from Richard R. Adams
Perhaps Bax is an acquired taste and I can appreciate the obstacles facing the uninitiated listener who sits down to listen to a Bax symphony for the first time. The music’s concentrated textures and rapid changes in mood and tempo can be jarring the first time through. The music requires an enormous amount of concentration and it is by no means an easy-listening experience. The listener who is uncomfortable with the excesses of late romantic music or who enjoys the hypnotically vacuous mutterings of some of today’s minimalists school will find Bax alien and unfriendly. Bax is a composer for “brazen” and thoughtful romantics who are as intrigued as he was by the elemental powers of nature and the passionate stirrings of the mind.