Arnold Bax

* Overture, Elegy, and Rondo
* Sinfonietta (Symphonic Phantasy)

Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra/Barry Wordsworth.
Naxos 8.555109 (B) {DDD}  TT: 45:44

Summary for the Busy Executive: Bax deserves better.

Bax today has become the treasure of a few devoted souls, but at one
time, most (and not just in his own country) considered him in the front
rank of Modern symphonists.  Vaughan Williams was a fan and not only
dedicated his Fourth Symphony to Bax, but also went so far as to stick
into the original version of his piano concerto a quote from Bax's Third
Symphony.  For a while, music just poured out of Bax (he wrote over
eighty orchestral works alone), but in the late Thirties, he ran into a
writer's block that he never really pulled out of.  Some small pieces
and two very fine film scores were creatively all that was left in him.

For me, Bax's work splits in two: moony and dreamy; sharply-focused.
The moonstruck music tends to bore me.  It doesn't necessarily taint
the works Bax calls rhapsodies and "ballads" or the tone poems.  One can
even find it in things he calls sonatas.  Essentially, he inherits the
idiom and the manner from the post-Wagnerian chromaticism of the late
nineteenth century, not my favorite period.  Generally speaking, that
part of Bax's output tends to sound like (in the phrase Vaughan Williams
applied to Delius) "the village curate improvising." On the whole, the
rise of Modernism, especially in the Twenties, gave a salutary boost to
Bax's music.  It tended to concentrate him, to force him to dig deeper
into himself for better ideas, to keep a tighter grip on the course of
argument.  Moreover, it didn't change his basic Romanticism or the
nineteenth-century rhetorical thrust of much of his music.

Both works here come after the First World War -- the Overture, Elegy,
and Rondo from 1927, and the Sinfonietta from 1932 -- in short, mature,
fully-formed Bax.  Even among Bax fans, this is obscure stuff.  Bax never
bothered to publish the Sinfonietta (or, as he originally called it, the
Symphonic Phantasy) or even to get it performed.  I have no idea why.
It's top-drawer Bax: three movements, played without pause, all flowering
from the same motto-theme and encompassing a wide range of mood.  The
development is complex, but one mainly hears "emotions painted in music."
The Overture, Elegy, and Rondo Bax could easily have designated a symphony
or sinfonietta.  The outlines are more apparent than those of the later
work, and, as Lewis Foreman's liner notes point out, the opening movement
gets a lot of its vigor from the then-fashionable neoclassicism of
homegrown composers like Lambert and Holst, rather than Stravinsky or
Hindemith.  Even with the sombre Elegy, the work as a whole leaves the
impression of Bax in an extroverted humor.

I suppose Bax fans should give thanks for whatever they get.  Wordsworth's
is the only recording of these two pieces out there.  It is just barely
acceptable.  The fault lies with the Slovak Philharmonic who play
out-of-tune, even within orchestra sections, in the Overture, etc., and
with ugly tone, to boot.  Furthermore, their rhythm taps erratically.
Their intonation (but not their rhythm) improves in the more complex
Sinfonietta.  Wordsworth is a talented conductor and often gets the
players to make music with what they have, but this is one Naxos disc
that correlates price with quality.  The recorded sound is fine.

Steve Schwartz