Review by Stephen Morris. I first encountered Bax when I was 14 years old. Bored rigid by the pop music of the early 1980s, I started pulling records (vinyl, naturally) at random from Wrexham Library – 10p per record per week – until I found out what I really liked. Stumbling upon the Fifth Symphony and then seeking out the others, I never looked back and must have listened to the whole cycle hundreds of times since then.
Continue reading →was fortunate to attend Ashley Wass’s Naxos recording of Sir Arnold Bax’s Symphonic Variations with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra at Lighthouse Poole in 2008 and I recall the extraordinary efforts made by the musicians to read their parts from an indecipherable hand-written manuscript that had been partially damaged during a WWII London blitz attack. Ashley Wass told me he’d love to program the Symphonic Variations for concert performances, but he said no orchestra would schedule the work due to the extra rehearsal time required for the musicians to read their parts.
Continue reading →
