Recorded performances of Bax's songs, strangely enough, are scattered here
and there throughout the catalogues - rnostly single items in recital (the
single exception being an elusive cassette - Ensemble TR 1002 - with David
Owen Norris and a variety of singers - an important tape since it concentrates
on the early songs, then coherently characteristic). Because of this 'The
White Peace' keeps cropping up with the result that inevitably this song
(perhaps along with 'I heard a piper piping'), lovely though it may be, has
become the principal representative of Bax's one hundred or more songs. In
fact neither it, nor 'I heard a piper' are by any means the most characteristic.
The present disc, brought out some ten years ago with the support of the
late John Bishop and now reissued, includes twenty-one songs - seven of which
date from 1905/9 and fourteen from the period 1918/26. Yet between 1909 and
1918 Bax wrote some twenty four songs - many unpublished and now lost - settings
chiefly of Rückert, Dehmel, Meyer and Hartleben - as well as the only
Shakespeare. Nevertheless the songs that are on this disc are quite beautifully
sung by Patricia Wright and her colleagues - and are accompanied (if one
may use the term 'accompanist for such intricate writing) with just the right
amount of unshowy panache by Rosemary Barnes. It is difficult to say just
exactly what are the predominating characteristics of Bax's song writing
indeed his very eclecticism has a chameleon-like quality - his reactions
to the varied poetic image quite different in each song - the quasi-mediaevalism
of 'Eternity' (58 bars of which 32 are for piano alone) - the essentially
choral 'Magnificat' - the richly contrived texture of the early (1905) 'Song
in the Twilight' by his cousin Freda - and the elusive James Stephens' ·Out
and Away, one of the last songs he wrote, whose ethereal chord progressions
verge on atonality. - perhaps the only connecting thread being a thin vein
of Celticism, itself expressed in diverse ways. It also becomes obvious here
that Bax, though a supreme melodist (think of 'Fand' 'Tintagel' and the slow
movement of the Second Symphony!) his melodic lines are essentially unvocal
- conceived in instrumental terms and then tending to virtuosity - and after
1918 he chose frequently lines to already extant melodies which his rich
palette of quasi-orchestral colour could illuminate, as in the lambent
chiaroscuro of the settings of traditional French songs, and in the more
harmonically restrained, Moeran-ish settings of Campion and Ravenscroft.
The remaining songs in the selection - apart from the liturgical, and the
over-elaborate 'The Flute' (Bjørnsen 1907) have their origins in the
Celtic poetry of Fiona MacLeod, Campbell and Colum.
Two songs however remind us that Bax, despite his exoticism, was a thoroughly
English composer. His setting of Housman's "Far in a Western Brookland' sounds
every bit as Housman-ish as the songs of such as Wilfred Orr, Somervell,
Butterworth and Ireland. Hardy's 'The Market Girl' is a joyous, superbly
subtle cameo, unsurpassed by anything in the canon of English song. I personally
have always felt that the real Bax - he of the symphonic works - is enshrined
in the powerful early songs of which, on this disc, 'Song in the Twilight'
is the sole, but intensely beautiful representative, which I played over
and over again. A fine disc, that must surely be followed by another exploring
other facets of this many-faceted personality
Colin Scott-Sutherland.
Patricia Wright - soprano
