Bax: Piano Works, Vol. 4-Music for 2 Pianos

"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."
(MusicWeb Nov 2007)

In the 1970s the pianist Vivian Langrish helped me with information for my biography of Bax. Purely by chance I once met him on the tube and he showed me this two-piano version of the Festival Overture, which he just happened to have in his music case. There were two manuscript copies and he thrust one of them into my hand: 'You'd better borrow this' he said - 'it's quite safe, I have the other copy'. Soon after Langrish died and his copy of the Festival Overture was never found, and mine was used for the BBC première of the piece in August 1983 broadcast in December that year for the Bax centenary.

Bax evokes the festival spirit in a riotous mood. It is 'somewhat akin', said Bax, 'to that of a Continental carnival'. He went on: 'there is no "realism" in the piece, however, the composer being content to suggest the atmosphere of Bohemian revel in terms of purely absolute music.' In the middle section Bax introduces a third theme which in his note for the first performance he described as 'of a more serious and sustained character' and it reappears towards the end, as Bax said 'in still broader and more triumphant guise'. The critic Edward J. Dent rather superciliously remarked 'Bax is a clever brat; but what has a born Cockney to do with Celtic Twilights? … His Bohemian overture was like Hampstead people in a Soho restaurant.' Shorn of its orchestral colouring, to this writer it exhibits an unexpected resemblance to Percy Grainger at his most energetic.

The Poisoned Fountain was another of the works Bax wrote for Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson in the 1920s. It was first performed by them in June 1928. A composer who often evoked the sea in his music, Bax was good at watery textures, in such works as Winter Waters (Naxos 8.557592), Nereid (Naxos 8.557439) and a host of sea-pieces. At the outset Bax instructs his pianos to play quite independently of each other and the very quiet endless flow of repeated piano figuration is evocative of flowing water. The second piano has a dramatic motif which becomes menacing at a big climax. Something is happening but Bax gives us no idea of the programmatic basis of the music. Graham Parlett has convincingly suggested the fountain is the Secret Well of Segais, the source of knowledge in Irish mythology.

Bax subtitles the evocative Moy Mell (The Happy Plain) 'An Irish Tone-Poem'. The subtitle is also given as 'the pleasant plain' and the title as the Irish 'Magh Mell'. In an autobiographical radio talk Bax summarised his programmatic sources for this piece. 'The poetry and prose of Yeats introduced me to the Irish Faery hierarchy … there were three different earthly paradises as conceived by the ancient Gael … the Hollow Hill …Hy-Brazil or the land of eternal youth … and Moy Mell - the happy plain. I wrote tone poems about all these three pagan places of bliss.' It opens with a typical Baxian Celtic melodic line and Bax's impressionistic accompanying textures which are soon heard are very much orchestral manqué. The music builds to an evocative climax and then fades into a long sunset.

The Sonata for Two Pianos was the biggest piece Bax produced for the Bartlett-Robertson duo. It was written between Winter Legends for piano and orchestra and the Third Symphony (Naxos 8.553608), and was first heard in London on 10 December 1929. Chosen as one of the British works for the 1930 ISCM Festival in Liège its 'très prudent modernisme' was noted by a French critic, but audiences across American responded warmly when Bax's pianists took it there.

At the beginning of the first movement Bax has written 'In a languorous sunstained mood'. Queries have been raised as to whether this is but a misprint for 'sustained', but surprisingly this seems to be what Bax intended. When pressed by Rae Robertson for some programmatic background for the American tour Bax told him that the first movement 'reflects the coming of spring' and 'the sea in its many varieties of mood'. The slow movement is formally similar to some of the orchestral tone poems, and evokes an ancient Celtic world in a striking parallel with Bax's orchestral The Garden of Fand (Naxos 8.557599). 'From some distant faery heaven across the sea', said Robertson, 'a faint sound of unearthly music, hardly distinguishable from the sea-murmur which accompanies it … the sea becomes more turbulent … till at last it seems to break into a great wave, then once again comes the faery melody, which slowly dies away into silence'. The finale is a wild dance and at the end the opening of the first movement reappears in a triumphant climax: spring has indeed arrived in all its glory.

The Devil That Tempted St Anthony is another of the works Bax arranged for the Robertsons in the late 1920s, and it was first performed by them in June 1928. The piano solo original does not survive but from contemporary catalogues we guess it was probably written just after the First World War. Within a few years several works appeared on this theme, notably Hindemith's Mathis der Maler symphony, a musical evocation of Matthias Grünewald's altar-piece at Colmar in Alsace. Bax's friend Cecil Gray also wrote an opera The Temptation of St Anthony, after Flaubert. Graham Parlett reminds us that the subject was 'St Anthony the Abbot, whom the Devil's temptations failed to deflect from the path of righteousness'.

We also need to remember that Bax was also obsessed with landscape. A number of later orchestral scores seem to have originated in titles sketched in piano score during the couple of years before the First World War. These include his orchestral tone poems Nympholept (Naxos 8.555343), November Woods (8.557599) and The Garden of Fand. Another was Red Autumn, which Bax eventually arranged for two pianos under pressure to produce another piece for Bartlett and Robertson, but he might well have laid it out for orchestra, and the recent idiomatic scoring by Graham Parlett has made clear its essential character as another nature evocation in the style of November Woods. The red leaves were seen in the Chilterns, possibly near Amersham.

Most of Bax's two piano music was written in the late 1920s for the husband and wife piano duet team of Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson. Dated May 1927, Hardanger, a short encore piece, was first performed by them in February 1929. Bax writes 'with acknowledgements to Grieg' on the score, and in one letter refers to it as his piece of Grieg. In it Bax emulates the style of Grieg's folk-style piano music, the title referring to the area around Bergen where Grieg had lived, and the wild country of the Hardanger-Vidde.