Bax - Tone Poems Vol.2
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Label: Chandos
Cat No: CHAN10446
Format: CD
Number of Discs: 1
Genre: Orchestral
Release Date: 31st March 2008
Contents
Works
Into the TwilightNorthern Ballad no.1
Northern Ballad no.2
Northern Ballad no.3 'Prelude for a Solemn Occasion'
Nympholept
Red Autumn (arr. for Orchestra)
The Happy Forest
Artists
BBC Philharmonic OrchestraConductor
Vernon HandleyWorks
Into the TwilightNorthern Ballad no.1
Northern Ballad no.2
Northern Ballad no.3 'Prelude for a Solemn Occasion'
Nympholept
Red Autumn (arr. for Orchestra)
The Happy Forest
Artists
BBC Philharmonic OrchestraConductor
Vernon HandleyAbout
Vernon Handley brings together for the first time three orchestral movements to which the collective title ‘Three Northern Ballads’ has been given. They date from the late 1920s and early 1930s, breathe much the same atmosphere, and Handley is keen to promote them as forming a unified, almost symphonic, whole. The first, which Bax composed and gave the name ‘Northern Ballad’ in 1927, was followed by a second Ballad, orchestrated in 1931. The third, formally entitled Prelude for a Solemn Occasion, appears to evoke a Sibelian musical landscape, and occupies the same world as the composer’s Sixth Symphony, which followed almost immediately. When Bax orchestrated the third piece, he was taking his usual winter sojourn at Morar, Inverness-shire, and in a letter to a friend wrote, ‘It suggests an atmosphere of the dark north and perhaps dark happenings among the mists’. The nature painting in the work certainly calls to mind the wilds of Scotland.
Joining this quasi-symphonic work, in addition to Red Autumn, are three further early tone poems. Into the Twilight dates from Bax’s first intensive period of composition, the years immediately preceding World War I, and originated as the prelude to a planned Irish opera, Deirdre. It received only one performance during Bax’s lifetime, in 1909, conducted by Thomas Beecham.
Nympholept, which followed, was the work in which Bax fully achieved the impressionistic technique of his first maturity. It suggests the pagan natural world in which Bax was so deeply interested. The Happy Forest follows a pastoral short story by Herbert Farjeon, and is an Arcadian evocation much like Nympholept. It was first performed in 1923 under Eugene Goossens, its dedicatee.
On Volume 1, International Record Review wrote: ‘This is the greatest single Bax orchestral record I have heard: the orchestral playing is magnificent throughout, of a quality that this music has been crying out for for decades but which it has never received – until now… over and above the excellence of this fine orchestra is the profound understanding and musicianship of Vernon Handley’s conducting.’
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