Sir Arnold BAX (1883-1953)
Violin Sonata in G minor (in one movement) (1901) [8.17]
Violin Sonata No. 1 in E (1921) [33.49]
Ballad for violin and piano (1916) [7.23]
Legend for violin and piano (1915) [10.19]
Robert Gibbs (violin)
Mary Mei-Loc Wu (piano)
rec. Potton Hall, Suffolk, England (G minor Sonata), November 2000; St Giles,
Kentish Town, London, September 1999
ASV PRESTO CD CDDCA1127 [60.38]
During its lifetime the late-lamented ASV label released,
as I recall, six valuable CDs either devoted to the music of Bax or including
music by him and other British composers. Three featured Bax’s chamber
music. This album’s companion CD (ASV CD DCA 1098) had the Violin Sonatas
No. 2 in D and No. 3 with the Sonata in F which received its world premiere
recording. A third album was given over to Bax’s complete works for
cello and piano (ASV CD DCA 896). A volume of piano trios included the Bax
trio in B flat and two others by Stanford and Holst (ASV
CD DCA 925). Another disc (ASV CD DCA 891) had Emma Johnson playing Bax’s
Clarinet Sonata in B flat with other works including pieces by Bliss, Ireland
and Vaughan Williams. Finally ASV released an album of Sacred Music by Bax
and Whitlock (ASV CD DCA 941). Critics’ reception of these CDs was very
favourable.
Bax often described himself as ‘an unashamed romantic’ and this
description fits so many of his works that were often inspired by wild isolated
landscapes and seascapes in all conditions serene and turbulent – and
his numerous women especially the concert pianist Harriet Cohen. The Sonata
in G is an amazingly accomplished piece for a young man of eighteen, written
for his sweetheart of the day, Gladys Lees when he was into his fourth term
at the Royal Academy of Music. The music is both intimately romantic and wild
and abandoned and one notices even then the mature Bax style in embryo and
his tell-tale musical fingerprints peeping through the fabric. Later, in 1916
Harriet Cohen was to be the pianist at the first performance of Bax’s
Legend. This piece was possibly the only work by Bax that revealed
his reaction to the fate of friends killed in the Great War. As Lewis Foreman
observes “it could well be called ‘elegy’.” Beginning
in serenity and tranquillity, its atmosphere darkens considerably to a landscape
of horror. The third shorter item, the Ballad written in the year
after Legend, again deals with the turbulence of those days, but
this time the music is set during the days of the Easter Rising in Dublin
in which so many of Bax’s Irish friends were involved.
The main work in this programme was influenced by another young woman who
so touched the young impressionable Bax’s heart that he pursued her
to her homeland in the Ukraine. Alas it was not to be and he was mortified
when she chose another. That experience together with the works of Russian
composers and that land’s folk music influenced his music. One composer
whose music impressed him was Rachmaninov and that composer’s obsession
with the Dies Irae and tolling bells find fleeting references in
the score of this Violin Sonata in No. 1 in E. The intensity of his passion
and yearning for the girl is very apparent. In the scherzo second movement
the music might suggest wild elemental forces. One feels a shiver through
the music that might suggest a wild desperate chase through blizzard conditions.
Folk gypsy-like material is heard at other times. The Finale returns to romantic
turbulence and Bax had at one time headed its manuscript with a quotation
from Yeats: “A pity beyond all telling is/Hid in the Heart of love.”
Robert Gibbs and Mary Mei-Loc Wu are very well attuned to the Bax idiom and
deliver spirited, passionate and most atmospheric readings.
A must for all Bax admirers.
Ian Lace
Previous review (original release): Rob
Barnett
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