Naxos launch a new
Bax series with this stylishly sensitive
pianist revealingly
interviewed by Colin Clarke. The
disc complements their Lloyd-Jones series
of Bax symphonies.
Wass favours an expansive
approach to Bax's piano music. This
works outstandingly well in Dream
in Exile which receives a masterly
performance, Medtnerian in its elusive
mood it ranges enigmatically between
nostalgia, threat and melancholy. This
could easily have been one of Medtner's
Ballades. Glorious. The knockabout Burlesque
cavorts around Warlock (Cod-Pieces),
Holst (Tyburn Lads), Moeran and
Grainger. Nereid shows
off Wass's plushy touch amid this essay
in shifting tone colours. In a
Vodka Shop is a Russian pastiche
as rowdy as Burlesque but here
looking back to Russian adventures which
also bore fruit in the shape of the
First Piano Sonata. Apart from a few
moments when it sounds like an off-cut
from Balakirev's Islamey this
does not emulate Glazunov or Borodin.
As for the First Sonata Bax wrote
this with memories of an amorously Byronic
adventure he had had in 1910 when he
pursued a Russian beauty from the streets
of London into her Ukrainian homeland.
His passion was unrequited. The sonata
sounds at times more like Balakirev
with Liszt and Debussy also paying court.
There is some particularly fragrant
writing and playing in the first half
in which there are times when this might
have been Sorabji - incidentally a composer
who greatly revered Bax’s music. It
is a credit to Wass that he had me thinking
outlandish thoughts such as what Ervin
Niyereghazi would have made of this
piece. There are some grand dramatic
gestures here and just when you wondered
if the soft focus tone of the piano
was a function of the acoustic you get
the passage from 10.09 and 14.40 onwards
in which a hard-edged hieratic tone
is asserted in the sharpest of focuses.
This is the sort of writing which made
me wonder about Wass as the next interpreter
of Bax's Symphonic Variations -
a worthy successor to Cohen, Hatto,
Fingerhut and Piggott. Great Russian
bells ring out through the finale of
this serious Lisztian extravaganza of
a piece. The end of Rachmaninov's First
Suite for two pianos grasps a similar
effect.
The opening of the
Second Sonata recall the dark
grumble of the start of the Second Symphony.
Instantly the work proclaims a psychological
state more profoundly troubled than
anything in the First Sonata. This is
music that is minatory. Little here
is consolatory. At 5.02 we get a contrasting
heroic and triumphant theme that is
to return but then so is the occluded
threatening music that opened the work.
The playful pearlescent right hand runs
at 17.00 foreshadow the glittering piano
work in Winter Legends a decade
later. At 19.32 Wass celebrates a glorious
display of majestic victory. Listening
again and again to this piece reminds
the listener how Bax writes orchestrally
for the piano, straining at the bounds
of its percussive expressive essence.
Readably authoritative
notes from Lewis Foreman who makes satisfying
new connections and linkages.
The most direct competition
is from Eric Parkin on Chandos CHAN
8496 where the two sonatas are coupled
with shorter works including Lullaby,
Winter Waters and Country
Tune. His First Sonata takes 19:34
and the Second 23:41. That Chandos disc
is at full price and the playing time
is almost 20 minutes shorter. Overall
his 1987 sound is the most natural balance
between half lights and the glare of
clarity. Then there is the deleted but
powerful and extremely impressive intégrale
of the four sonatas from Marie Catherine
Girod on Opès 3D 12 21 84 3D
8008. Girod takes 20:17 in No. 1 and
25:03 in No. 2. As we have seen Parkin
is even quicker in both cases. Girod's
sound is very satisfactory but less
suggestive, more matter of fact, than
Naxos's. Certainly it is clearer than
the muffled boxy mono sound accorded
to Iris Loveridge in her pioneering
recordings of most of the Bax solo piano
music for Lyrita on RCS 10-12 and 26.
Interestingly her Dream in Exile
is despatched in 8:23. Her First
Sonata takes a flighted 18:31 while
her Second runs to 23:58.
Fingers crossed that
Wass will be invited by Naxos to complete
the cycle and also to record Bax's Winter
Legends with David Lloyd-Jones and
the RSNO perhaps with the three Northern
Ballads.
Rob Barnett
see also reviews
by John
France and Graham
Parlett
Ashley Wass (piano) 