Bax’s music seems
to be enjoying something of a renaissance at the moment and
the Naxos series devoted to his piano music – of which this
is the fourth volume – is especially welcome. Even more so,
given the advocacy of Ashley Wass, who has made something of
a name for himself in British piano music, including Elgar and
Bridge. He and fellow pianist Martin Roscoe certainly seem to
have an affinity with Bax, whose impressionistic-mythological
idiom is very much in evidence in the music he wrote or arranged
for the celebrated piano duo, Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson.
Although Bax is
probably best known for his orchestral tone-poems he was first
and foremost a talented pianist and that shines through in these
two-piano pieces. His Festival Overture arrangement is
wonderfully mobile and generally gregarious. He acknowledges
its roots in ‘Continental carnival’ but as so often with Bax
it’s all about moods. According to Lewis Foreman’s excellent
liner-notes Bax even suggested the overture was in some sense
‘Bohemian’, to which the critic Edward J. Dent snootily replied:
‘His Bohemian overture was like Hampstead people in a Soho restaurant.’
A little unkind,
perhaps, but it’s certainly true that Bax absorbed various musical
influences, including the impressionists - in 1909 he accompanied
some Debussy songs in the composer’s presence - and the Celtic
Twilight as epitomised by Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival.
The Poisoned Fountain is a good example of the former,
with its constant watery refrains – shades of Debussy’s sunken
cathedral – while Moy Mell testifies to his endless fascination
with all things Irish.
According to Foreman
Moy Mell is the ‘happy plain’ of Celtic mythology and
Bax’s strange, sometime soft-grained, harmonies are wonderfully
evocative. But even in this misty half-light Bax’s textures
occasionally evince a crystalline, almost Ravelian, clarity.
Wass and Roscoe seem so at ease in this repertoire, sensitive
to each other and alive to all the music’s nuances and rhythmic
subtleties. Add to that a generally pleasing acoustic and this
disc is certain to appeal to both seasoned Baxians and newcomers
alike.
Despite its more
formal title the three-movement Sonata has a detailed
programme, thanks to the insistence of Rae Robertson. The ‘languor’
of the first movement is evoked in the low murmurs at the outset,
but that alternates with music of startling clarity and vigour,
not to mention passages of Russian intensity. Debussy is in
there somewhere, possibly even Rachmaninov, but it seems Bax
has absorbed these influences and fashioned them into something
that’s very much his own.
After this ‘coming
of spring’ and evocation of ‘the sea in its many varieties of
mood’ (Bax’s description) the slow movement enters the world
of Celtic legend. There is a wonderful swirl and shimmer (starting
at 1:40) with a rippling motif over a restless bass, the final
chords subsumed by the enveloping mist. Very atmospheric music,
imbued with an array of colours.
The concluding Vivace
e feroce modulates out of mistiness into something much
more hard-edged. Wass and Roscoe play with great concentration
and intensity here, while at the start of The Devil That
Tempted St. Anthony they manage to invest the quieter moments
with an air of gentle piety. The devil certainly has some good
tunes, though, the clamorous, even dissonant, figures in stark
contrast to the earlier, more reverent, mood. As an exercise
in diablerie it works well enough, but it strikes me
as one of the weaker pieces in this collection.
Bax is on more familiar
ground with Red Autumn, sketched in piano form before
the First World War. It is the composer at his most effortlessly
pictorial, full of muted colours and falling harmonies. Debussian
it may seem in places but there is a distinctive ‘voice’ to
be heard here, as indeed there is in Hardanger, his homage
to Grieg. Intended as an encore piece for Bartlett and Robertson
it’s a remarkably compact, iridescent little number, brimming
with energetic, folk-like rhythms. Needless to say Wass and
Roscoe dispatch it with considerable brio, a marvellous
conclusion to a most rewarding disc.
If you know orchestral
Bax you will have the measure of these scores. They are just
as colourful and seductive and come across with so much life
and sparkle that even the anti-Bax brigade must succumb to their
manifold charms. Of course the success of this recording is
due, in no small measure, to the advocacy and commitment of
these two fine pianists. An utterly irresistible collection
and a worthy addition to the Naxos/Bax project.
Dan Morgan
Ashley Wass,
Martin Roscoe (pianos) 
