Orchestral Works, Volume 7 (Winter Legends & Symphonic Variations)

Chandos has long been an advocate of the work of Sir Arnold Bax, as the company's huge Bax discography demonstrates. Last year's Bax celebrations generated an enormous amount of new interest in this underrated British composer, as was evident from the great success of Chandos' box set of Bax's complete symphonies.

This is the seventh release in Chandos' repackages of Bax's orchestral works, which are still deemed to be the finest versions available.

This is the only available recording of Winter Legends, one of Bax's most successful works for piano and orchestra, and there is only one other recording of the Symphonic Variations. For both these pieces, the original manuscripts have been consulted and later cuts in performing materials restored, presenting the works as Bax had originally intended.

This release comprises two discs which sell for the price of one.

Sir Arnold Bax produced some of his most celebrated tone poems during the First World War, including Tintagel, The Garden of Fand, and the Symphonic Variations which appear in this set. The war years also saw a remarkable change in Bax's personal circumstances, the result of a passionate love affair with the pianist Harriet Cohen. By the end of the War he had deserted his children and his respectable married life to live in rented rooms in Hampstead. Thereafter he was always to be associated with Harriet Cohen, though his initial passion eventually cooled. But it was for her that the work Symphonic Variations was written (the score is inscribed 'To darling Tania with love from Arnold' - Tania was the name by which Miss Cohen's friends knew her) and the work undoubtedly owes much of its content to their relationship at the time. The score brought Bax wide recognition as a composer.

Winter Legends is in a form which Bax evolved for his symphonies - three movements with epilogue. Although Bax agreed it might well be regarded as another symphony, he remarked that 'in the first movement the form is free', and in the last analysis he felt that movement to be 'too rhapsodic for symphonic structure'. What legends exactly Bax had in mind when he wrote the piece, we do not know. There is obviously an underlying programme, but whether it is something as clearly delineated as an Icelandic Saga or, rather less precisely, it is a more subconscious drama of Bax himself, we cannot tell.