Arnold
BAX (1883-1953)
London Pageant (1937)
Concertante for Three Wind Instruments and Orchestra (1949)
Suite from Tamara (1911)
Cathaleen-ni-Hoolihan (1905)
BBC Philharmonic/Martyn
Brabbins
rec. 17 May & 23 June, 2000, New Broadcasting House, Manchester
CHANDOS CHAN 9879
[74.33]
Crotchet
Amazon UK
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US
Cradle to grave Bax, or perhaps grieving to gravitas, from the first piece
to the penultimate one: the public Bax of London Pageant, the 1937
Coronation piece famously overshadowed by Walton's Crown Imperial
of the same year.
Cathaleen-ni-Hoolihan (1905), Bax's treatment of the slow movement
of the second of his student string quartets in E, of 1903, is far more
interesting than one might have supposed. Almost Bax's first orchestrated
piece, its layered profusion and undertow of woodwinds rippling through the
strings, gesture toward an individual sound through a wash of Strauss and
Bantock, with just a hint of Debussy. Betraying its quartet origins, it begins
on what sounds like another neo-Irish folk tune. Bax disliked direct quotation,
but this unguarded early one resembles one of Stanford's Irish Rhapsodies.
Because it isn't an opening movement, it hasn't that angular melodic profile
on clarinets that characterises say, the opening of Into the Twilight
(1908) or the single one of In the Faery Hills (1909) of a few
years later. But the woodwinds and horn interjections, above all its climax,
clearly anticipate the martial Roscatha from 1910. There's a quite
surprising level of incident for a slow movement, ensuring its 12.10 minutes
unfold and don't curdle.
The discovery is from 1911; something Baxians have been waiting for, a score
almost as revelatory as Spring Fire of two years later. Tamara
was Bax's excited response to Diaghilev's Ballets Russes of that year, and
the dancing of Tamara Karsavina, for whom he was to write ballets later.
Bax wrote a piano score of over two hours, but didn't orchestrate it, waiting
for an introduction to Diaghilev before he committed himself to such a task.
Then, the 1912 Ballets russes season announced Thamar, and Bax simply
put the score away. Karsavina, who only knew about the score years later,
was to dance one of the numbers, the marvellous Apotheosis which Bax re-used
in 1920 as the 'Dance of Motherhood' in The Truth About the Russian
Dancers. He also published it as a piano piece, Water Music, in
1929. As Parlett says, his final inspiration would have had to be quoted
earlier when presenting the ballet. It almost comes in the preceding number,
'Naiads', which can only provoke speculation at what Bax might have done
had he orchestrated the whole. Perhaps Graham Parlett could do it for Naxos!
Parlett has orchestrated a necessary suite from this music, but at 23 minutes
it seems too short for what he himself terms 'glorious music'. He particularly
regretted impressive pastiches of grand polonaises (opening of Act II). Chandos
should have been more generous, making a whole CD of it and finding something
else from Bax's student years; or, tantalisingly, completing the Piano
Concertino of 1939, which needs work in the finale only. Lewis Foreman
suggests that the vibrant and attractive Tamara might have given Bax
the wrong success, too derivative of the Mighty Handful and Glazunov when
his style changed from 1912-14 with the impact of Stravinsky and Debussy.
I'm not sure such a score would have done an English composer harm; other
scores soon followed. It was left to Constant Lambert to prove that British
composers could write ballets. Parlett's orchestration draws on some scoring
indications (including glockenspiel), Bax's scoring of his two ballets, From
Dusk till Dawn (1917) and The Truth About the Russian Dancers;
and the Russians just mentioned. The wonderfully crunchy brass (with echoes
of Finlandia!) and orchestral opulence prefigure, too, Spring
Fire and the first two symphonies.
London Pageant perhaps shouldn't be judged as a failed march. In truth,
only Elgar and Walton managed one memorable example apiece, and even Walton's
Orb and Sceptre of 1953 (again quite overshadowing Bax's re-cycled
Malta GC effort) doesn't measure up to them. So this leaves Bax elsewhere,
composing a piece whose outer reaches bustle with contrapuntal echoes of
his Sinfonietta (1932) and particularly the Overture, Elegy and
Rondo, another Sinfonietta, of 1927. This is effective, and perhaps indicates
the source of his late neo-neo-classical style. But numerous episodes, not
at all germane to marches or pageants, drift in from faery land - literally,
since a student march from the starry year of 1905 (the year Bax reached
his desired 22) furnishes one of the few martial notes in what Foreman rightly
suggests is 'more a tone poem than a pure concert march.' Its nearest cousin
is the Festival Overture of October 1909.
Foreman, so expansive on Tamara, is slightly perfunctory about the
extended late score, the Concertante for Three Wind Instruments and
Orchestra (1949), which he discusses at length in his biography. Here,
he feels the first three movements with their respective solos for cor anglais,
clarinet and horn, could be more positively programmed together without the
full orchestral last movement, or separately. The last movement, 'whilst
still enjoyable, is laboured by the standards of his best orchestral music.'
Foreman revised his view of the Left Hand Piano Concertante, and perhaps
he might here, too. Clearly Bax intended to draw his strands together, and
in truth it sounds differently to the preceding three movements. These open
with a pianissimo Elegy movement, a winding cor anglais theme that only slowly
gathers an obvious momentum, recalling the Third Symphony. It in fact is
inscribed 'Lament for Tragic Loves, 1803', for Irish patriot Robert Emmet
and Sarah Curran, quoting 'She is far from land' from Moore's Irish Melodies.
It's really enchanting and recalls his symphonic slow movements, more
delicately. The following Scherzo is a bubbling clarinet solo recalling the
Clarinet Sonata's finale, and distinctly memorable. The horn Lento is delicately
handled with harp accompaniment evoking his Irish period. This is hardly
surprising, since the first movement so overtly invokes it. Why should Bax,
in 1948-9, revert to Irish themes, something he'd not really broached for
nearly thirty years (the choral St Patrick's Breastplate, 1923, being
one of the last isolated instances)? Perhaps de Valera's imminent severing
of Commonwealth ties, or Bax's feeling that he would like to retire and bind
himself to Ireland, something he was about to do at his death in 1953.
The solos are all beautifully taken, and the BBC Philharmonic under Martyn
Brabbins (have Chandos and Vernon Handley totally fallen out?) play sumptuously
and with genuine Baxian feeling. Because of the music's range and quality,
this is a fine disc to summarise fugitive Bax; even if the opening with
London Pageant won't suit delicate tastes.
Simon Jenner
