The very first time I accessed the internet was in the summer of 1995 while I was visiting a friend in Boston. Her parents had a computer, and her father gave me a brief demonstration before inviting me to try my first internet search. I typed in “Sir Arnold Bax,” curious to see if anything would come up—and not surprised when nothing did.
Continue reading →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 →The Bax Website is proud to offer the following article to commemorate the 70th anniversary this month (October 2023) of Sir Arnold Bax’s death by Dr. Claire Colebourn FRCP. This article is based on a scientific article being published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Dr. Colebourn is a Consultant Critical Care Physician at University Hospitals Oxford and the current President of the British Society of Echocardiography.
Continue reading →Sheffield in South Yorkshire is a city I have never previously visited and was known to me only as the home of the annual World Snooker championship. But on Saturday 10 June, it proved the unlikely venue for an even more unlikely concert devoted entirely to English music with Bax’s Third Symphony the pièce de résistance. I can’t remember when I last attended a live performance of it, though I do remember it was at Bax’s alma mater the Royal Academy of Music.
Continue reading →Arnold Bax’s Concerto, later the Phantasy, for viola and orchestra, was written for, and dedicated to, the violist Lionel Tertis. It was premiered by him during a Philharmonic Society concert on 17 November 1921. The Phantasy was played several times in the ensuing years but was then largely forgotten until its revival in 1989 by Vernon Handley and Rivka Golani. This essay will examine the context, provide a non-technical description of the music, and examine the reaction to the premiere performance. It will conclude with an assessment of modern responses to the Phantasy seen through Bax’s biographers. The paper concludes with a bibliography and discography.
Continue reading →Almost 20 years have passed since the 50th anniversary commemoration of the death of Sir Arnold Bax and the concurrent release of Vernon Handley’s complete set of Bax symphonies on Chandos. That set received enormous amounts of media attention and became the ‘go-to’ set for the Bax symphonies.
Continue reading →If you are reading this, it’s probably fair to say you are experienced in unrequited love. Carrying a torch for a composer bypassed by history is like that, rendered all the more intense by one’s sense of injustice at the neglect.
Continue reading →Superlative liner notes from Graham Parlett, added to full texts and a loving presentation from EM Records, make ‘From the Hills of Dream’ an attractive prospect. But does the music of Bax’s forgotten songs justify such quality treatment? Christopher Webber asks the question …
Continue reading →First written in 1910 and revised for publication ten years later, Bax’s First Piano Sonata was inspired by a romantic love affair and a trip to Russia and the Ukraine. In this comparative analysis of all ten available recordings, Christopher Webber asks whether its biographical content is important.
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