Sir Arnold Bax Society

The Blessed Damozel – Songs of Arnold Bax
Review by Ennio Caironi

Editor’s Note:  This review is written by our Bax Society Italian Representative who recently adapted many of Bax’s songs for solo piano arrangements for Fand Music Press.  

The Blessed Damozel (1906); 
A Milking Sian (1907); 
The White Peace (1907); 
Shieling Song (1908); 
To Eire (1910); 
Roundel (1914); 
Parting (1916); 
Far in a Western Brookland (1918); 
Folk-Tale for Cello & Piano (1918); 
Jack and Jone (1918); 
When I Was One-and-Twenty (1918); 
The…

Review by Richard R. Adams

Almost 20 years have passed since the 50^th anniversary commemoration of the death of Sir Arnold Bax and the concurrent release of Vernon Handley’s complete set of Bax symphonies on Chandos. That set received enormous amounts of media attention and became the ‘go-to’ set for the Bax symphonies. Overlooked in the excitement was the release of the final instalment of David Lloyd-Jones’s Bax symphony cycle on Naxos (No. 7 and Tintagel). The Naxos set had been released in single…

Review by Richard R. Adams 

Harriet Cohen’s influence on Sir Arnold Bax’s music was arguably greatest on his piano music for which she was his muse and frequent dedicatee as well as constant performer. It is therefore surprising that she recorded so little of it commercially aside from the Viola Sonata with William Primrose and a handful of piano miniatures. There also exists a live recording of Winter Legends from a BBC broadcast but sadly none of her performances of the piano sonatas were captured either…

Review by Christopher Webber 

Hot on the heels of Nimbus’s Frank Merrick: A Recorded Legacy, a bumper box of 9 CDs centered on the pianist’s pioneering recordings of Bax’s sonatas and a handful of shorter works – including Paean which was dedicated to him – comes this equally valuable supplement for piano and violin. Merrick’s partner throughout 4 CDs of underexposed 20th c. repertoire is the Danish violinist Henry Holst, a pupil of Carl Nielsen who led the pre-war Berlin Philharmonic under Furtwängler and…

Review by Graham Parlett

Hot on the heels of Mark Bebbington’s ‘Private Passions’ comes another splendid CD that also contains works that have never been recorded before. Natalia Williams-Wandoch has been playing the pieces included here at recitals over the past few years, and it was good news when we learned that she had decided to record them for the Usk label in January 2018. With a single exception—the slow movement of the Sonata in B flat—these are all world premières, and for that reason alone will be…

Self-quotation may be a sign of age, idleness or both; but I can’t avoid referring back to my 2007 review of this performance of Bax’s Symphony No.2, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sir Eugene Goossens in 1956 (Dutton CDBP 9779):

If I’m less enthusiastic about the off-air Symphony No.2, that’s no reflection on Goossens’ vigorous attack and dramatic intensity, as impressive as any conductor recorded in this most urgent, dark and sinister of Bax’s symphonies. It was an astute move by the BBC…

Martin Yates continues his resurrection efforts on behalf of British composers by giving us a disc of recorded premieres including a Fantasia for Orchestra by George Butterworth, a tone poem for cello and orchestra by Cyril Scott and the very early Variations for Orchestra by Arnold Bax. The later work was only heard once in Bax’s lifetime – conducted by the composer himself in 1905 and then un-played until 2014 when it was performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Yates at Em Marshall’s English…

Review by Graham Parlett who writes about the origins of the work and Richard R. Adams who writes about the performance and recording.

The Symphony in F was Bax’s earliest attempt at writing a piece in this form, preceding the completion of his first official symphony by fifteen years, and is his longest composition apart from the unorchestrated ballet Tamara. The work is referred to in Farewell, my Youth (pp. 37–8 of the first edition), in the chapter describing Bax’s second visit to Dresden in Saxony…

A naughty leprechaun prompts me to say that some recent Bax CD issues have emerged, not to the sound of the trumpet, but rather to the faint groan of the scraped barrel. Let me say at once that this Chandos release has stopped any rot. This barrel is bursting at the staves with extremely worthwhile music, superbly played and recorded.

Before discussing the feast on offer, it may be worthwhile to list the precise ingredients. The Viola Phantasy and Overture, Elegy and Rondo have appeared on disc before…

If Bax the symphonist causes scarcely a blip on the international radar, the same can’t be said of Bax the chamber and instrumental composer. Excellent discs of his smaller-scale output have recently appeared on Canadian, American, Italian and French labels, so it is especially good to welcome leading German independent Oehms Classics into the fold. It’s always important for a composer to interest performers outside his own country; but when a musician as eminent as leading German pianist Michael Endres…