Arnold Bax

* Overture to a Picaresque Comedy
* Nympholept
* Symphony No. 4

Royal Scottish National Orchestra/David Lloyd-Jones
Naxos 8.555343 {DDD}  TT: 64:38

Summary for the Busy Executive: Convincing.

Fate has not treated Arnold Bax well.  From the Twenties to the Forties,
critics considered him one of the leading modern lights and a major
symphonist.  Vaughan Williams dedicated his powerful fourth symphony to
Bax.  But many things conspired against Bax, including a creative block
toward the end of his life as well as the reaction against his kind of
Romantic modernism after the second world war.

Unusual for his time, Bax wrote in almost every genre, including major
cycles of both tone poems and symphonies.  I confess to not caring for
the early tone poems, like Nympholept ("caught by nymphs," 1912), because
I dislike the moony, swoony harmonic idiom, typical of the last gasp of
Victorian Romanticism.  On the other hand, I have to admit it a superb
example of its kind, written with a steely sense of thematic progression,
unlike, say, the tone poems of Bantock.  The mastery of thematic
transformation and the hold over the larger architecture of the piece
reveal, beneath the hothouse languor, a symphonist.

Harriet Cohen, one of Bax's mistresses, described Overture to a Picaresque
Comedy (1930) as a "pastiche." Henry Wood had asked Bax for something
similar to Strauss's Til Eulenspiegel.  I think Cohen sold the piece
short and Wood got more than he had asked for.  If the world were just,
this should be a hugely popular piece.  I treasure an old LP conducted
by Igor Buketoff, but Lloyd-Jones yields very little.  It sparkles, with
a vivacious running figure similar to the opening one in Mozart's Marriage
of Figaro overture.  It keeps up the fun for nine minutes, a task rather
difficult to bring off.  Bax has covered a vast distance from Nympholept
to this, and all for the better.  If it's not quite Eulenspiegel, very
little else is.

This is my first encounter with the fourth symphony (at this point, I've
heard all the others except the third).  I can't talk knowledgably about
the main previous recordings by Handley and Bryden Thomson.  I can say
that in general Thomson's conducting fails to click with me, usually
because of weak rhythm, one reason why I didn't rush out and buy his
recording.  Bax experts, for some reason, consider the fourth the weakest
of the symphonic cycle.  Based on Lloyd-Jones's performance, I don't
understand why.  Bax claimed inspiration from the sea.  Again, I don't
get it myself, probably because it sounds like neither La Mer nor The
Flying Dutchman, but it certainly bowls me over as a piece of symphonic
construction -- a complex work by a composer who has so mastered symphonic
form and movement that he can afford to forget about textbook faithfulness.
The first movement bristles with themes.  Keith Anderson, in excellent
though brief liner notes, talks about first and second subject groups,
but I don't believe this is what's going on.  I can, however, see why
Vaughan Williams dedicated his fourth to Bax.  The themes in both seem
generated from an Ur-theme, never directly stated.  Thus, the themes in
Anderson's "second subject group" relate to those in the first.  The
proportions of exposition, development, and recap are idiosyncratic,
with the lion's share of the movement by far going to the development.
Indeed, the opening re-appears roughly one minute from the finish in a
sixteen-minute piece.  Furthermore, the movement is as much about
characteristic rhythms as it is about melodic themes.

The second movement unites, unusually, Delian chromatic harmonies
(particularly a bass line in thirds descending by semitones) to pentatonic
themes.  However, Bax's architecture holds up much more sturdily than
that of Delius.  It's in roughly A-B-A form, but its interest lies in
the thematic byplay.  Ordinarily, I hate music with this kind of harmony
(which I associate with whining), but Bax wins me over here.  The finale
opens with vigor.  The overall structure seems somewhat idiosyncratic
to me, but it does indeed hang together.  Bax comes up with a contrapuntal
tour-de-force.  Hardly any theme gets time alone.  It always jostles
against at least one other important idea.  Again, rhythms as well as
melodic shapes make up the argument.  Bax creates his rhetorical emphases
-- what's important at any one time -- almost entirely through orchestration.

None of Bax's works, with the possible exceptions of Tintagel and
The Garden of Fand, is done all that often, especially the symphonies,
so it's hard to judge Lloyd-Jones on a reasonable scale.  I will say I
enjoyed his readings very much for their own sake, and I certainly prefer
his more insistent rhythmic approach to what I think of as Thomson's
flaccidity.  I think this one of the outstanding Naxos entries, and
at Naxos prices it encourages me to sample the entire symphonic set.

Steve Schwartz