Bax: String Quartets Nos. 1 And 2

Description

Sir Arnold Bax (1883-1953)String Quartets Nos. 1 and 2Arnold Baxwas the eldest son of a well-off non-conformist family from south London, whose early talentwas encouraged by his mother, as was that of his brother, the writer andplaywright Clifford Bax. Bax was born in Streatham, then still Surrey, but his most impressionable years were spent inHampstead, then semi-rural, where in 1896 his father bought an imposingmansion, set in three and a half acres.Bax studiedfrom 1900 to 1905 at the Royal Academy of Music with the composer Frederick Corderand the piano teacher Tobias Matthay. Leaving in the summer of 1905, he wasable, thanks to a private income, to develop his musical career as he pleased. Escapingthe constraints of parental influence, he adopted a semi-bohemian lifestyle,travelling widely, to Dresden, and subsequently Russia, and, best of all, tothe west coast of Ireland, where, 'lorded by the Atlantic', as he put it, andunder the influence of the early poetry of Yeats, he discovered the village of Glencolumcillein Donegal, to which, until the First World War, he constantly returned.Imbibingall things Irish, Bax wrote poetry, short stories and Synge-like plays,published under the pseudonym of Dermot O'Byrne. Married in 1911, he set uphouse in a Dublin suburb, and moved in Dublin literary andnationalist circles; his friends and acquaintances included the poet and writerPadraic Colum, founder of the IrishReview, and Padraig Pearse, champion of the Irish language, who was executedafter the Easter Rising in 1916.It is forhis orchestral music that Bax is now more widely known, in particular hisatmospheric tone-poems, the most famous of which is Tintagel, written in 1917 and orchestrated by 1919. Between thewars came seven symphonies, which enhanced his reputation at the time, andthere was also much piano music, as well as instrumental sonatas and manysongs. There is, however, also a large corpus of chamber music and he publishedthree string quartets, a piano trio, a piano quartet, a piano quintet and manyworks for larger ensemble including a nonet.Two earlystring quartets survive from Bax's student years at the Royal Academy,followed soon after by a piano trio, though with viola replacing the usualcello, and then an extended string quintet. All these early chamber works herepudiated, although they remain worthy of revival. His first major work in themedium was his large-scale Piano Quintet,completed early in 1915, followed in 1916 by his Elegiac Trio for flute, viola and harp.When Baxcame to write his first mature string quartet the war was in its last year,though curiously the quartet is a serene work and bears few overt influence ofthe times in which it was written. It is dated 1918 and was first performed bythe Philharmonic Quartet at London'sAeolian Hall on 7th June 1918. The published score is dedicated to Sir EdwardElgar who, in response to Bax's letter of 3rd March 1921 offering thededication, replied that he 'liked the look of it'. Bax ha