Tag: Arnold Bax

If you’ll allow a labored pun, Bax is a composer I can really get behind.

Sir Arnold Bax blazed his own trail in English music, for the most part forgoing both the pomp and circumstance of Sir Edward Elgar and the rustic folk song of Ralph Vaughan Williams. (Bax once quipped, “You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing.”) Like Elgar, he found much to admire in the German Romantics, especially Wagner and Strauss, but he also made a careful study of Debussy.

Sadly, he lacked the French master’s refinement when it came to some of his own queasy chromatic harmonies. Even after decades, I can’t say I’m entirely fond of the symphonies, which come off more like extended rhapsodies, clunkily strung together. As if Frederick Delius met Percy Grainger on a bad day. It is in his tone poems, his love of all things Celtic, and his colorful orchestrations that he is at his most gratifying.

Bax wrote most of his piano music for Harriet Cohen, the magnetic virtuoso who captivated seemingly every English composer of her time. She and Bax engaged in a tempestuous affair that spanned some 40 years. His most famous work, the symphonic poem “Tintagel” (1917, orchestrated in 1919), was ostensibly inspired by the ruins of an Arthurian castle overlooking the turbulent Cornish seascape. But it’s widely understood that there’s a subtext to the piece: the erotic intensity of illicit lovers, who passed an especially ardent six weeks on vacation there.

Also ravishing, for entirely different reasons, is the season-appropriate tone poem “November Woods” (1917)

Bax’s “Elegiac Trio” (1916), for flute, viola and harp, appeared the year after Debussy’s trio for the same instrumental combination (which Bax may or may not have known). Its alluring melancholy emerged from a world at war. Bax was especially affected by escalating tensions between England and Ireland, which had just boiled over into violence with the Easter Rising.

“Three Pieces for Small Orchestra” (1913; revised 1928), including “Evening Piece,” “Irish Landscape,” and “Dance in the Sunlight”

A Bax rarity: The “Russian Suite” (1919), originally for piano. A delightful pastiche. This could be a great pops favorite, if anyone would actually program it. Quite unexpected, I’m sure, for anybody accustomed to Bax the dreamy impressionist. Its three movements are posted separately, so allow them to play through! You can thank me later.

Bax was knighted in 1937. In 1942, he was appointed Master of the King’s Music (retitled, with the death of George VI in 1952, Master of the Queen’s Music). The appointment surprised many, since Bax was by no means an establishment figure.

Happy birthday, Sir Arnold Bax!

PHOTO: Bax and Cohen in Cornwall. Evidently there was time for reading, too.